Seeing Small

The Wisdom of Uncle Alex

2012-03-01T10:59:00.012-08:00

This felt like a good week to spend some time in the pasture with Pumpkin the Goat and Smokey the Sheep. I needed me some Critter Peace.

The radio had been telling me about the latest of many attack ads that one Republican presidential candidate was airing about another (all those ads cost a lot of money)...and there was a story too that comedian Bill Maher had donated a million dollars to the Obama campaign. Meanwhile, here in my state, the legislature is struggling to find the money to fund basic education.

“Be-gone!” I said to the demons of negative juju that were pressing in on my tender soul. I turned off the radio, put on my work boots, and wandered out to the pasture.

Pumpkin greeted me, breathing sweet goat-breath in my face. I went to work, gathering sticks and branches that had blown down during winter’s wind and rain storms. The sun came out. Pumpkin and Smokey found themselves comfortable spots, Pumpkin contentedly chewing her cud in the sun, Smokey the black sheep napping the shadows under a leaning tree.

I hung out with the critters, taking a few pictures, but mostly just being. I was thankful for the fine day, the good critter-company, and the time I had to enjoy them.

I remembered something I read recently, part of a commencement address that Kurt Vonnegut gave at Rice University in 1998. Vonnegut talked about his uncle Alex, saying:

"A Harvard graduate, Alex Vonnegut was locally useful in Indianapolis as an honest insurance agent. He was also well-read and wise.

"One thing which Uncle Alex found objectionable about human beings was that they seldom took time out to notice when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and he would interrupt the conversation to say, 'If this isn't nice, what is?' "

No Celebrations

2012-02-24T09:41:00.008-08:00

Wednesday was Losar, Tibetan New Year, and I spent the day with my friends from the Seattle-area Tibetan community. It’s been over four years now that I’ve been hanging out with and photographing the local Tibetans, so one might suspect that I'd go into the day with some what-we-did-in-the-past preconceptions of how my friends would celebrate the New Year. There would be morning prayers at the Tibetan monastery, followed by singing, dancing, and eating, eating, and more eating that would last into the night.

For months now I’ve been looking forward to Losar, if only because it is one Tibetan event when, though I do take photographs, I also kind of force myself to put down my cameras and participate. Losar to me has come to feel like a day when my community-minded friends celebrate the simple joy of being together, and I honor that spirit by talking and laughing more, and perhaps photographing less.

As Losar approached, however, it became clear to me that my friends were in no mood to party, because, with each passing day, the news out of Tibet has become more and more grim. Over 20 monks and nuns have died in the past year by setting themselves on fire in protest of Chinese repression and crackdowns, and, in the end, Tibetans-in-exile throughout the world decided that this New Year would be marked, not by celebration, but by prayers and peaceful protest.

I made the two pictures posted above on Wednesday at the Tibetan monastery in Seattle. One of the images below was shot recently at a candlelight vigil in downtown Seattle, and the other at a rally and protest held outside the Chinese embassy in Vancouver, BC.

If you are interested in more information on current events inside Tibet, here is a link to an NPR story that aired Tuesday:

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/21/147170229/protests-self-immolation-signs-of-a-desperate-tibet

Rascals

2012-02-16T09:03:00.001-08:00

Leah’s conversations with her dad, whether in person or over the telephone, often began with gentle, back-and-forth teasing that went something like this:

Leah: “Hey there, Pop!”
Bill: “Hey there, you Rascal!”
Leah: “You’re the RASCAL!”

Their talk would then ramble on, Leah filling her dad in on what was growing in our garden, or what produce she was canning, or the bread she’d just baked. Bill would talk about his golf game, or a trip that he and Leah’s mom had recently made with the senior citizens' group, or what he and the other members of the church choir were going to sing on Sunday.

In the 38 years that Leah and I have been married, I have been the fortunate eavesdropper, observing or listening in on the loving conversations Leah has had with both her parents. But it was her talks with her dad that gave me, as a male, reason to smile...to notice the way my father-in-law, a strong, tough guy, former Navy man, turned to Mister Softy when talking with one of his little girls.

Bill’s health has not been good for the past year or more, and two weeks ago the 83-year-old husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather passed away. Leah immediately caught a flight to be with her mom, and I joined them this past weekend.

Family and friends filled the church in our small, Ohio hometown where Bill had sung in the choir, and where his memorial service was held Saturday. Many pictures of my father-in-law’s life were on display: His high school days as a strapping and handsome young athlete; his Navy days; his days with a growing family.

Also on display was a funny picture that I took years ago of Bill, grinning impishly while posing with several Seattle Seahawks “Sea Gal” cheerleaders. Bill had come along with me on the field as I photographed a Seahawks game for Seattle’s morning newspaper. I remember that it took very little prodding on my part to get my father-in-law to pose with the cheerleaders.

Such a Rascal!

Sad News

2012-02-10T05:58:00.000-08:00

Leah’s father passed away last Thursday, and Leah immediately flew to Ohio to be with her mother. I stayed behind to take care of our small farm and critters, but will join the family tomorrow for a memorial service.

I’m posting the above image today, not because it somehow visually says something about passing seasons -- though it might...I leave the interpretation to you -- but because the scene is one I happened to encounter this week.

Please keep Leah’s family in your thoughts and prayers.

Seeing Winter

2012-02-02T07:39:00.000-08:00

I’ve visited a lot of parts of this country -- the East Coast, the Midwest, the South, the Plains States -- where I have heard folks make pretty much the same joke about their local weather: “Hell, if you don’t like it, just wait five minutes.”

Here in the mountainous Pacific Northwest, we might offer a slightly different wisecrack: “If you don’t like the weather, just go up a ways.”

The elevation of the small harbor town where I live on Puget Sound is only 69 feet above sea level, but my neighbors and I can look west, crane our necks up a bit toward the Olympic Mountains, and see a range of peaks that reach nearly eight thousand feet into the sky. Or we can turn southeast and take in the view of Mt. Rainier, a massive volcano 14, 411 feet in elevation and the highest summit in the Cascades.

As a photographer, I can report that all this up-and-down topography is appealing to the eye, though the differences in altitude make for climatic conditions that are boggling to the mind. Consider the photographs I’m posting today, for example. They are from my two most recent, winter-season hiking outings, and yet the look and feel of the scenes is so very different. The above image is a reflecting pond in a forest near sea level, where, even in winter, the air temperature was in the mid-40’s and the plants growing in the pond were as happy as little green clams. Below is a picture of ice on a decidedly chilly creek in the Olympic Mountains, elevation about 4500 feet. The temperature was 14-degrees.

Like other areas of the country, the five-minute-rule applies here in Washington too, and a clear, sunny day can turn stormy and foul in no time. I have explored amazing places, low and high, for 35 years now. Each unpredictable trail has taken me, not to Lake-This, or Mount-That, but rather to a place of humility.

The more I experience, the less I “know.”

Life Lessons

2012-01-25T09:40:00.000-08:00

This was a week when life quietly stepped up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder, and, in words that felt filled with grace and compassion, whispered: “Excuse me, but I think you might sometimes forget that I don’t go on forever.”

It was a week, you see, when I heard that two people I know, one a young man, the other an older, much-loved grandpa, had died. And news came too from Mt. Rainier -- as a hiker and climber I have spent many happy days there -- that four people are missing after last week’s winter storm that in two days dropped four to six feet of snow in the high country. An air and ground search was mounted, but was called off yesterday when another storm moved in.

Such a week.

But there was also this:

A couple from the local Tibetan community called during the big snowstorm, wondering what the roads were like where I live. My friends needed to make a trip to a town about 20 miles away to pick up a visiting Tibetan lama who would be their house guest for several days, and their route would take them through my snowy neck of the woods.

I told my friends that I hadn’t even tried to drive since the big storm, but had made a trip to town that morning on cross country skis and had seen that a few folks were out and about in cars. I was a bit worried about my friends’ plans to drive on the snowy roads, and it occurred to me that I might be more experienced at navigating than they are. I offered to join them on their trip.

My friends have a vehicle with four wheel drive, so driving wasn’t too bad. We took it slow and easy, and I joked with my friends, saying that once we had the lama in the car, we’d have his good Karma with us and could drive a little less cautiously.

We picked up the lama, and I liked him immediately because he had a smile that brightened even that stormy day. My friends and I decided to take a more major highway home, so driving was in fact a breeze.

The next day my friends invited a small group of people to their home and the lama offered Tibetan Buddhist prayers for world peace, and that beings would not suffer but find contentment.

Yes, it was quite a week.

Sacrament of Snow

2012-01-18T09:13:00.000-08:00

I don’t think I’d be overstating things too terribly if I say that, in the American West, snow is something of a sacrament.

To be more accurate, water is the real sacrament here. But since a lot of our water falls first as snow in our mountains where it naps peacefully till summer and then melts, it is plainly logical that one should pay some pretty heavy homage to the miraculous snowflake.

Rivers and streams are Mother Nature’s transport system, bringing the mountain snowmelt down to nourish her valleys, and those water courses are then tapped into by farmers who irrigate thirsty fruit trees, hops fields, grapes, and more. If you additionally consider the hydroelectric power that we Westerners generate from water that began as snow, you’ll appreciate that cold, white stuff for us is more than something on which we ski and snowboard. Snow is darned near as essential to us as air.

It felt good, then -- very good -- to wake up to a fresh snowfall yesterday in the Pacific Northwest, since our winter weather the past couple of months has been unusually warm and dry and un-winter-like. The mountain snowpack has been looking a bit anemic, and when I heard a radio report that said that Mt. Rainier might get as much as 47” of snow in the next day or two, I believe a lot of us thought: Well this is more like it!

I took a camera in hand and hiked around the area where I live. A neighbor’s horse was exploring his suddenly-white pasture, and it seemed to me that photographic possibilities were falling from the sky along with snowflakes. The iconic Northwest fir trees were stunningly beautiful, and the witch hazel plant near my back door (it always blooms right in the middle of winter...what’s up with that?) looked spring-like, even in the chill.

Lastly, I photographed the snow-covered prayer flags that Tibetan friends gave us when they came over for a picnic last summer.

This canvas of white will last only a few days here in the lowlands. Up in the high country, however, the sacrament of snow will remain, sustaining us through even the warmest of days of summer.

A Gift, Shared

2012-01-11T07:26:00.000-08:00

I bought you a gift for Christmas...though no, you didn’t find it wrapped under your tree, and I must apologize too that I haven’t even told you about the gift until now, three weeks after the holiday.

The gift is a superlight, 1-man tent, which I realize is not something you asked for. And what’s even weirder about my gift is that I’m not actually going to present it to you, but rather I’m going to use it myself, kind of sharing it with you. But trust me, I bought the gift with you in mind, and I think you will like it that I/we have the tent.

I guess I need to explain myself?

You see, I’ve been making a list of amazing mountain locations where I’ve camped in past years, places that I think beg a revisit. I thought maybe you too would like to see those places, and that (here’s the cool thing about the tent I bought) I could do the hikes by myself (the tent is, after all, a one-man shelter) and I will take photographs for you, then post the images here on this online journal where you and I meet. You won’t need to toil your way up a steep trail, or get blisters or bug bites, or even sleep on the ground. My hope is that you will get to enjoy the visual benefits of me using your/our gift, but that you can stay home and can read a book or nap while I schlep my backpack and cameras in the mountains.

How cool is that for you?

This gift-sharing scheme of mine will be swell, too, in that I’ll get to make pictures on my hikes that you will know were done with you in mind (photographs are only fun for me if I get to show them to others.) So the Christmas tent I got for you/me will have a life that will go on and on, all year long.

***

The two pictures I’m posting today were shot in the past week or so on ferry trips across Puget Sound. The top image presented itself during an on-and-off rain squall, while the scene below was one I photographed at sunset.

The photo trips I’ll take us on in the coming months will be a bit different because they’ll primarily be done on foot. I hope you’ll enjoy the visual gifts I find and bring back for you.

Auspicious Beginning

2012-01-04T09:25:00.000-08:00

Two days before the New Year I was driving to a wedding I’d been hired to photograph in the sweet little town of Sequim at the foot of the Olympic Mountains. Passing a blustery and choppy Sequim Bay, I saw the wonderful rainbow you see above. A U-turn and a quick hop out of the car later, the rainbow was recorded as the beginning of my wedding day documentation.

Rainbows are said to be a sign of good luck for a wedding couple, and the wedding guests were all abuzz later with talk about the band of color they too had seen in the sky. "Did you see the rainbow?"..."Did you see the rainbow?" I heard folks asking one another again and again.

For two happy newlyweds that day, the amazing rainbow was an auspicious beginning of a marriage. For the rest of us, it offered hopeful possibilities for the New Year.

Creature Circus

2011-12-29T10:07:00.001-08:00

Human beings are in the minority here in my neck of the woods of the Pacific Northwest, outnumbered by domestic animals like chickens, horses, goats and sheep, and wild creatures like birds, beaver, deer and coyotes. The role that we humans play in the theater of daily dramas is a “bit part” at best, and often humans get no on-stage time at all. When the spot lights come on, my neighbors and I tend to retreat into the shadows, find ourselves a comfortable seat in the audience, and settle-in to watch the creature circus.

Popcorn, anyone?

***

It’s possible that you might wonder whether I could be overstating the attention my neighbors and I give the animals who live around us, so I offer two photographs today.

The scene above presented itself one recent chilly morning when I was cycling the four miles to town to get the mail. Some folks down the road had dressed their cute-as-heck pygmy goats in sweaters, and, when I stopped to shoot the picture, I had to be careful about camera shake because I was giggling so much.

Another day I was also riding toward town when I saw, off in the distance, a woman exercise-walking down the road. She seemed to be dodging passing cars and stopping here and there to pick things off the road (bits of litter, I assumed.) As I got closer I realized she was rescuing tiny frogs that had hopped out onto the pavement from a nearby pond, saving the frogs from being squished by the cars.

I thought her effort was a worthy thing to photograph.

The New Girl

2011-12-22T14:19:00.001-08:00

A friend recently introduced me to a trail in the Olympic Mountains I’d never hiked before, and I can tell you right now it will be one of my future favorite destinations for ambling, rambling, and photography. Only about an hour from my house, the trail follows the course of a wonderful creek, through an equally wonderful forest, and up, up, up into a land of mountain vistas that are (you guessed it) wonderfullest of all.

I’ve made three pilgrimages already to this new area, and I feel like a junior high school boy who has fallen in love with a new girl in school. I know I’ll be posting lots of pictures of this sweet girl/place in the coming year, and I promise to tell you all about her...except for her name, that is, because I don’t want other boys reading my love notes and seeking her out.

My new love is quiet, and I think shy, and too much attention might change her.

But...isn’t she just the prettiest thing?

I have some money I’ve saved from my paper route, and I think I might buy myself a new tent. Then, this summer when school is out, I’ll camp in the new girl’s yard because I know I’ll just want to be close to her.

Oh man, she’s just the best girl ever!

Seeing Childhood

2011-12-15T13:37:00.001-08:00

It is said that the real spirit of the holiday season is best seen through the eyes of a child, and I think that is probably true.

I can remember, for example, the awe and wonder I felt when I was about four or five-years-old -- that was some 50 years ago now -- and my parents took me to have my picture taken with a department store Santa...and I visited also with a “Talking Christmas Tree.”

For some reason, meeting Santa, as special as that must have been for me, pales in my memory to my visit with the Talking Tree. Today I can vividly picture, in my mind’s eye, the huge, living tree...and how it was filled with multicolored lights and decorations 100 times larger than my incredible feeling of wonder... and the tree was surrounded by what I must have understood were plaster reindeer figures and foam snowmen, and yet I believed the tree was really talking to me. My memory is so clear, in fact, that right now, as I type these words, I might as well be standing at the little wooden booth at a shopping center in Northern Ohio in the late 1950’s, in my kid snow boots up on kid tiptoes, talking into a speaker to converse with the tree.

Geez, memories are amazing.

***

Anyway, clients and friends have been asking me lately to do pictures of their kids, and several of the resulting images are posted here. (I'm particularly tickled by the photograph above of the little girl who initially was less-than-excited about having her picture taken. She later warmed up to the idea.) Some of the pictures will be used on holiday cards, others will be printed and framed and given as gifts to grandmas and grandpas.

One day, these pictures will be the stuff of memories.

In the Woods

2011-12-08T06:20:00.000-08:00

It was 40-some years ago that my grandfather first introduced me to the exhilarating freedom of long, rambling tramps through the woods near his farm in Eastern Ohio. I was about 10-years-old and grandpa would let his two dogs -- a beagle and a collie mix -- run loose and the dogs would kick up rabbits while my grandfather, a retired greenhouse owner, would teach me the names of wildflowers we’d see. Or we’d dig sassafras roots and later my grandpa would make tea that to me smelled like hot root beer.

Years later, when I was in college and already crazy about photography, I’d head to my grandparents’ farm on breaks from school and grandpa and I would continue to explore those fields and woods. I would take pictures then, hoping to preserve what I knew were precious times.

Today, when I pull out the photographs I did of my grandfather on our walks, I am humbled by the limitations of my photographic craft. I realize that I best remember those times-long-ago, not through my two-dimensional prints, but rather when I encounter the aroma of root beer or sassafras tea.

***

I thought I’d post pictures today from some recent walks in the forests where I live now in the Pacific Northwest.

The two images above were shot in the damp, ultra-green lowlands, where moss often covers the trees, and -- if one is attentive and fortunate -- chanterelle mushrooms can be harvested from the forest floor.

The images below are from a hike I did last weekend when I trekked up-up-up into the high country woods of the Olympic Mountains on a photographic hunt for ice formations on a wild, rushing creek.

Magical Mystery Tour

2011-12-01T12:59:00.000-08:00

I’m interested in the Creative Process: The weird, quirky magic that happens when a writer takes a pen in hand and begins to scribble words on a blank piece of paper or type on a computer keyboard; or a composer has a few notes in his/her head, and senses those fledgeling sounds might be the beginning of a symphony; or four women sit down with random squares of fabric and begin to sew together what eventually becomes a beautiful quilt.

I make photographs almost daily, and have done so for nearly 40 years. And yet, where those photographs come from -- do they fall like snowflakes from the sky, or do I unknowingly harvest them from some kind of unseen image garden? -- is often a mystery to me.

Take the four photographs I am posting here today, for example. I thought I was heading out for an early-morning run. I was dressed in running clothes; I was wearing running shoes; I had done a few pre-run stretches. But I also had a small camera in my hand, the little camera I always take with me when I run or bicycle. And as I stepped out the front door and began to jog down the driveway, I noticed that there was frost everywhere: Frost crystals in the sky had made a rainbow, reflecting the light of the rising sun; there was frost on the windows of my car parked in the driveway; and there was frost on the autumn-colored leaves on the ground.

I realized that, before I could go for a run, I had some photographs to take. What I had thought would be exercise time for my body would, in fact, begin with exercises in seeing.

Where did those images come from? Were they gifts from Photo Fairies that had visited my house overnight?

It’s all a wonderful mystery to me.

Simple Gifts

2011-11-23T11:51:00.000-08:00

I suppose it might sound a little surprising when I say that I admire the craftsmanship and art that can be created by someone who is skilled in fine woodwork, since my own abilities are pretty much limited to what I learned in Shop Class way back in seventh grade. Yes, I can handle a power saw and most basic hand tools. I can usually fix stuff that breaks around our house. But fine woodworking? No way.

Mostly, I have to admit that I just don’t seem to have the patience to shape, sand and finish a piece of wood to make it a thing of beauty, something that one could call “art.” Yes, I can and do work for hours or days or weeks on a photograph -- no problem for me in showing patience there. But could I ever make a piece of furniture or construct even the most rustic of dwellings? Nope. ‘Fraid not.

I made a trip to Ohio last week to visit my mother, and one of the things I proposed she and I do was to take a road trip to Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, because for some time I’ve wanted to photograph the furniture and clean-lined dwellings of the Shakers. Mom loves “Early American” furniture, and is always up for anything that sounds like an Adventure. So off we went, leaving Mom’s home in Northeast Ohio and driving in the general direction of Lexington, six hours away. We listened to CDs of the music of Aaron Copland on the car stereo, since that composer incorporated a number of Shaker tunes (like the hymn “Simple Gifts”) in his works.

" 'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come 'round right."

When we arrived at Pleasant Hill, Mom and I wandered around the village and were gently, visually transported back into the 1800’s. Though the Shaker community of Kentucky died-out in the early 1900’s and for a while Pleasant Hill fell into disrepair, the village has been restored by hardworking locals. There are tours of the Shaker village buildings and demonstrations of craft-work like handmade brooms and classic Shaker bentwood boxes.

After making that long road trip, it seemed that Mom and I did indeed “find ourselves in the place just right.”

Batting Practice

2011-11-18T08:23:00.000-08:00

I bought a new camera this week...which, to be honest, is a happening about as unusual as Lindsay Lohan getting arrested. I mean, truth be told, it seems to me like I purchase a lot of cameras. I have Work cameras and Play cameras; cameras that help me earn income; but other cameras that, unfortunately, prove to be mere indulgences -- image-making tools that seemed promising in camera review scouting reports, but struck out when life started throwing fastballs my way.

The camera I bought this week -- a Fuji X10 -- is HOT. Only recently released in the US, it is already sold-out and on backorder at most camera stores and on photographic retail web sites. I placed an order for my X10 months ago when I first read about it...and I’ve been waiting and waiting for delivery.

When the camera arrived this week, I charged the battery, skimmed a few pages in the Owner’s Manual (no pro photographer that I know would be caught dead actually reading a camera instruction book -- only geeks do that.) Then I headed out to the pasture and barn to hang out with Pumpkin the Goat (she is always a willing model.)

I don’t intend for the X10 to be a Work camera. It will be a tool I’ll use for my just-for-fun shooting. Nevertheless, I think my heart was beating a little extra-fast as I began to work with the much-anticipated camera. Without getting too technical or too inside-baseball here, there is a coming-together of several features in the new X10 that previously has been available in one camera or another, but not really in one package.

My verdict? Well, like a baseball player tinkering with a new hitting stance, X10 and I need more batting practice before we perform up to our full potential. I have a feeling, though, that soon we’ll be swinging for the fences.

A Picnic & a Prayer Service

2011-11-11T16:13:00.001-08:00

About a year ago Leah and I invited some of our friends from the Seattle Tibetan community out to our place for a picnic. Our adult guests that day came bearing gifts of Himalayan-grown tea, traditional Tibetan sweets, and prayer flags. The Tibetan children brought exuberant energy and curiosity for exploring the woods around our house, and playing in the pastures with Pumpkin the goat and Smokey the sheep. The kids’ centuries-old culture might be that of herders and traders, but these Tibetan children live in Seattle and live city kid lives.

“Eeewww, POOP!” they screeched when they saw the raisin-like droppings that Pumpkin leaves in the pasture.

When I consider the volunteer photography I’ve done at now-countless Tibetan events over the last three years, I know I’ve gotten much more than I’ve given. Last week one of my Tibetan friends whose young wife has just passed away called to invite me to a prayer service in her honor. My photographic work has led me to an ever-widening circle of human beings, and my life is richer because of them.

As I guess happens for all of us when we experience the death of a loved one or friend, the prayer service last week got me thinking about how quickly time passes and things change. Just a month ago I made the photograph at the top of this post, and this morning I shot the image below. Same tree, same string of prayer flags, but see how much has changed.

One of the lamas at the prayer service reminded us that each day of life is a gift. I hope you don’t mind that I’m using today’s post to pass his teaching along.

Pumpkin Place -- NOT!

2011-11-03T15:03:00.000-07:00

There are six families with homes or small farms on the primitive, country lane where Leah and I live. The lane is gravel, maybe 3/4 of a mile long, and maintained, quite informally, by the folks who live out here.

The lane is humble -- so humble that, for the 15 years we have lived here, it has had no name.

Recently, however, the county sent a letter to everyone who lives on our lane, stating that this no-name situation needs to be rectified. The letter said that the neighbors could get together and propose a name (subject to county approval.) Or the county would choose a name for us, and we’d be stuck with it.

We wondered: Would some county landuse/planner-type come out, look around at the six homes, and decide to name our lane “Poverty Hollow”? Or maybe “Recluse Road”? We neighbors decided that we’d better take on the naming responsibilities ourselves.

And so one evening a couple of weeks ago four families came together to brainstorm monikers for our lane (two families couldn’t make it, but said that anything we came up with would be fine with them.) We chatted about the character, the feeling of where we live. We made lists of the trees that tower over our houses (words like Fir, Evergreen, and Maple were suggested.) We also talked about animals, both domestic and wild, that live around us, so coyote was added to our list; and we wrote down the names of the horse called Wildfire, and the neighborhood dog, Yogi...though we doubted the county would approve of “Yogi Lane.”

In the end, we all agreed that the spring peepers that serenade us on mild evenings are a wonderful part of life where we live, so we settled on the name “Frog Song Lane.”

Leah and I came home from the neighborhood meeting and I stood outside the barn, looking through the barn doors at the sweet-faced goat, Pumpkin. It was my job now to explain to Pumpkin that, though she is without a doubt queen of both barn and pasture at our place, the neighbors had nevertheless given a polite thumbs-down to my suggestion that we name the neighborhood lane “Pumpkin Place.”

Close to Home

2011-10-27T10:43:00.000-07:00

An alluring temptress named Wanderlust began visiting me in my dreams last week, whispering in my ear (she has a very sexy voice) that she and I should go on a road trip together, maybe to Eastern Washington, where Wanderlust said there would be amazing things to see and photographs I might make. Even when I woke, Wanderlust's beckonings remained in my brain, but so far I have resisted the urge to pack my camera and sleeping bag and hit the road with a babe I know could be Trouble.

Trees ablaze in the colors of autumn -- that’s what Wanderlust promised I’d find if only I’d go away with her. You see, where I live here in Western Washington, the trees are primarily conifers, everlastingly green. The trees are beautiful, though the green-green-green gets a bit boring after a while. But east of the Cascades there are aspens and maples and larch, and mid-to-late October is their time to shine.

Wanderlust whispers that I need a change of scenery, and experience tells me that she might be right. The truth is that Wanderlust has popped into my dreams about this time in past years, and I admit that I have followed her (the images above are of aspens that I saw one October in the mountains near Leavenworth, WA.) This year, however, gas is expensive and I am resisting Wanderlust's siren call for a road trip, hoping to stand my ground and find images closer to home.

Two evenings ago the photographs below presented themselves, just outside my front door. There was a fern -- green of course -- but there were also deciduous leaves in fall color, and the scene was bathed in the most amazing end-of-day light. “See?” I said to Wanderlust, “there are fall pictures to be found right here at home. We don’t need to go someplace else.”

The temptress pouted, and last night she did not visit my dreams...but I know that one night she will be back. Wanderlust always comes back.

A Simple Monk

2011-10-21T08:08:00.000-07:00

Palden Gyatso is an 81-year-old Tibetan Buddhist monk with a smile that can light up a room, and even a brief encounter with him warms one’s soul. Children and adults alike seem to have a spontaneous urge to hug or express respect for him. I know this because I spent several days this week with Paldenla as he visited the Seattle area, a guest of my friend, Rigdzin, and his family.

We traveled by ferry to beautiful San Juan Island where Paldenla spoke to 60 island residents at the public library. Another day we drove to Olympia, the state capital, and Paldenla presented a letter at the Governor’s office. That same evening we attended a public rally held by the Tibetan Association of Washington. The venerable monk’s message at all the events had several common themes: Human Rights for Tibetans living in China; that China should engage in talks with representatives of the Tibetan people; and that China should recognize the Dalai Lama as the spiritual leader of Tibetans.

Paldenla probably would have chosen to live life as a simple Buddhist monk, but events conspired to thrust him into the public arena. When the Chinese invaded Tibet in the 1950’s and Mao Zedong and the communist party insisted that “religion is poison,” Palden Gyatso refused to renounce the Dalai Lama. When he was 28 years old, the Chinese authorities imprisoned Paldenla, stating that he needed to be “reeducated.” He says he was abused and tortured.

Palden Gyatso served more than 30 years in Chinese prisons and labor camps, and was 60 years old when he was finally released. He lives today in Dharamsala, India, and is the subject of the powerful documentary film “Fire Under the Snow.” Here’s a link to the trailer for the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcpg4yX22K0

Creature Pictures

2011-10-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

Everywhere I go these days there seem to be creatures...big ones, but tiny ones too.

The creatures eye me quizzically: “Wazzup?” they seem to be wondering.

Something pops into my head -- a bumper sticker I remember seeing:

“I’m trying to be the person my dog thinks I am.”

I believe these creatures I happen upon sense that I’m a human being who means them no harm. The dog, horse and goat do seem to prefer, however, that I spend more time petting them or offering treats and less time taking their pictures.

The newt is pretty a mellow fellow, no matter what I do.

Nevermind

2011-10-05T10:13:00.000-07:00

It’s raining nostalgia in Seattle these days and many of us who live in or near the city are having conversations that begin: “Do you remember where you were when?...”

You see, it was exactly 20 years ago that a then only-locally-known group called “Nirvana” released its “Nevermind” album, a recording that some now call “historic” in the world of rock and roll. And it was on Halloween night, 1991, that Nirvana -- singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl -- performed in Seattle’s Paramount Theater, as “Nevermind” was about to go viral.

That was the first time I had seen the band, the first time I heard the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a song that in the 20 years since has become an iconic anthem of rock and roll. I was a photographer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the paper assigned me to cover the concert. Thus, when my friends and neighbors now remember back to 1991, trading stories about those days and about first hearing that music, I can say: “I was there. In front of the stage, wedged in between Kurt Cobain and the fans flopping into the mosh pit. I was there.”

As a newspaper photographer, one of the incredible side-benefits of my job was that I was often paid to be places where I’d witness amazing things...and that concert was certainly An Experience. I remember that it made me crazy, trying to photograph Cobain as he sang, because his hair was in his face and I wanted to get an image of his expressiveness, but there was all that hair...and I remember too that I really liked the music I was hearing, which surprised me because I had assumed “grunge” wouldn’t be my thing.

The day after I photographed that concert at the Paramount, I went to Tower Records (remember back when we bought recordings in stores?) and bought the “Nevermind” CD. My musical tastes are eclectic, ranging from classical to rock -- I have, for example, a CD of Bizet’s opera “Pearl Fishers, ” and also a recording of a live concert by Pearl Jam.

Nirvana went on to sell 30 million copies of “Nevermind,” and about a year after the Paramount performance, I photographed Nirvana in concert again (photo below.) That assignment also was fun, but in my mind there was no doubt that it was that first show in the Paramount that was history-in-the-making.

Here's a link to a video of the Paramount performance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtx3hw-kISQ&feature=related

Both photos above copyright Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Travels with Minnie

2011-09-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

Minnie the Australian Shepherd is laying kind of low today, resting her old girl bones because I took her on a hike yesterday that, in hindsight, was probably a bit too much for our aging pup-no-more.

Minnie is 13, has cataracts, and seems to be hard of hearing (it’s a bit difficult for us to judge what Minnie hears and what she does not, as she has always pretty much ignored any “commands” we might give her.) But she, like yours truly, is the sort who is always up for an adventure, and so I cooked up a plan that would be reasonable for man and dog.

What I thought Minnie and I would do was this: Just a simple one-day road trip to the Mt. Baker ski area, where I’d photograph Mt. Shuksan, first from Picture Lake (every camera buff in the state has visited that lake, hence its name. ) From there I'd drive on up to my serious destination, Artist Point (elevation approx. 5200 feet,) where there is also a wonderful view of Shuksan, plus a number of ponds and secluded spots that are not known to the masses.

It turned out, however, that the heavy snow we had in the mountains last winter hasn’t melted off the Artist Point road, and if one wants to go high, one must hike. Uphill. Gaining about a thousand feet in elevation in a little more than mile. The trail is steep.

My plan had been to be at Artist Point for the sweet, end-of-day light on the mountain, and, even after doing our unexpected hike, Minnie and I actually arrived there an hour early, giving Minnie a chance to rest and me time to scout out the perfect snow-melt reflecting pool. I set up my tripod, waited for the good light, and then made the image I had had in my mind’s eye for months. The light was amazing!

Minnie and I hiked back down to the car in the growing darkness. On the drive home, Minnie snuggled up close to me; I patted her on the head, and she licked my hand. I sensed that it was a dog’s way of communicating: “Thanks for bringing me.”

Nobody's Perfect

2011-09-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking this week about the word “practice.”

Practice was something that I guess first entered my life 40-some years ago when I was in high school. I played the trumpet, and every afternoon my friends and I assembled in the school’s music room for band practice. I was also a distance runner, and the end of the school day meant it was time for track or cross country practice.

Music and sports both required repetition -- practice. I played scales and exercises and musical pieces, again and again. I ran mile after mile. The idea of all this practice, of course, was that when it was Show Time -- whether it was a concert or a cross country meet -- I could perform.

Looking back now, I realize that there were days when practice wasn’t much fun...repetition sometimes morphed into drudgery.

It was also back in high school, however, that I got my first camera and took my first photograph and -- Holy INSPIRATION, Batman! -- what a light went on! I shot roll upon roll of film, a kid in a candy store (it seemed like there were pictures everywhere!) I made thousands of bad pictures and a very few good ones. Without realizing it, I began to practice photography daily. And drudgery? Why no way could this practice ever be anything but the most positive kind of kick in the pants ever.

So today, 40 years after high school, I’m still traveling the photographic path, and I laugh when I think about that old adage “Practice Makes Perfect” -- as if there’s some end-point I should strive for -- some concert well-played, or track meet victory, or even a perfect photograph I might make. What fun would that be? Where would I go from perfection?

I’m having too much fun everyday, simply practicing.

Bad Reputation

2011-09-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

Wild blackberry vines have a PR problem here in the Pacific Northwest.

Brought here back in the day from Europe to produce fruit, blackberry plants quickly spread, here, there and everywhere, to the point that modern gardeners now regard the thorny vines critically, using words like “non-native,” and “invasive,” or even “weeds.” Folks attack blackberries with loppers and shovels; they dump gasoline on the plants and burn them; farmers in rural areas bring in goats, hoping the four-legged eating machines will destroy the vines by munching them to the ground.

Blackberry plants are tough buggers, though. Pick a fight with them and they'll rope-a-dope 'ya and wear 'ya down with their tenacity.

Only during a few weeks in August and September when blackberries fruit and ripen do the plants get any respect. And this year, perhaps partly due to the recession, I’m seeing people out foraging for berries, picking huge buckets-full. Last week I walked down our gravel lane to do barn chores and I heard voices just outside our gate, where lots of berries grow. Two women I didn’t know were picking, and I politely requested that they also leave some berries for my neighbors and me.

A half-pint of blackberries purchased from the grocery store or the local farmers’ market will cost you $5-$8, so it’s no wonder folks are out foraging. I picked six half pints and took them with me one day when I went to Seattle to do errands, giving the berries to friends. But first, of course, I made a picture of the fruit, simply because it looked oh-so-tasty.

I guess I feel a little sorry for a feisty, misunderstood plant that has such a bad reputation.

A Hike to Muir

2011-09-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

In the 34 years that I have lived in Washington state, I have probably done the hike from Paradise to Camp Muir on Mt. Rainier at least 50 times. With an elevation gain of nearly five thousand vertical feet, it’s my go-to hike if I want to challenge my body and test my fitness level, or if I’ve had it up-to-here with busy Seattle and I want to go someplace quiet and unbelievably beautiful.

I’ve done the hike in all seasons of the year, and I’ve encountered every weather surprise Mother Nature has in her bag of tricks: Can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face-fog; freezing rain; blowing snow; and even oven-like heat. Some days I’ve experienced several or all of these weather variables within the space of a few minutes.

Yes, I’ve even experienced nice weather, though, at an elevation of 10,000 feet, Camp Muir is rarely a day at the beach. This past weekend, however, some friends and I did the Paradise-to-Muir trek, and oh did we hit it right.

Check out the photograph above to get a sense of what my friends and I beheld last Saturday: In the foreground of the picture there’s the lush green meadow country of the Paradise-area slopes of Rainier (a snow patch still remains from last winter.) In the middle distance are the lovely little peaks of the Tatoosh range. And in the far distance is Mt. Adams, a volcano some two thousand feet lower than Rainier, but beautiful in her own right.

Below is a self-portrait I shot with my phone...a picture of a hiker as contented and blissed-out as anyone you’ll ever meet.

Oh YES! It was a FINE day to be on Mt. Rainier!

A Season for the Senses

2011-09-01T09:44:00.001-07:00

This is a wonderful time of year for those of us who tend to be sensual -- and I’m not talking "sensual" in the pop-culture, Cosmo magazine use of the word. What I am saying is this:

The garden is kind of winding down. A lot of the summer’s salad greens have been eaten and the produce has been picked, but you wander past the raspberry bushes and you find one, single berry still remaining. You pop that berry into your mouth and you think: This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Or...

You sometimes go for walks in quiet, peaceful places, and you are the sort who gets it that the sounds and smell of dry leaves, crunching under foot, are part of the essential experience the season. Or...

You are appreciative of the gift of sight -- you use your eyes to sometimes look around and really see -- and experience from past years tells you that the curtain is about to go up for the best light show on Earth.

Everywhere I go these days, there are things to photograph...but better still, there are tastes and sounds and smells unique to this season.

Each day offers something to savor.

Adopting Wally

2011-08-25T09:42:00.000-07:00

Years ago my mother was an elementary school vocal music teacher, and this week I got to thinking about the songs she taught me as a child. It occurred to me that a couple of the songs I remember now, 50-some years later, happened to be about dogs:

There was a farmer had a dog,
And Bingo was his name-o.
B-I-N-G-O
B-I-N-G-O
B-I-N-G-O
And Bingo was his name-o

And there was this:

How much is that doggie in the window?
The one with the waggly tail?
How much is that doggie in the window?
I do hope that doggie’s for sale

These songs came to mind, I guess, because two weeks ago Leah and I adopted a shelter dog named Wally. On the day we moved him from the shelter to his new home, Leah looked after Wally at the house while I went to the pet store in town to buy him a collar, leash, and dog food...but what else do you suppose I saw there?
Why, a doggie in a window of course!

Wally is a sweet but timid one-year-old who the shelter workers said was neglected in his birth home (seeing his extreme timidity, I think he must also have been abused.) He’s lived in the shelter about half of his life, and Leah and I are beginning what we know will be a long (perhaps very long) process of patiently helping Wally understand that he has nothing to fear here. He spent much of the time his first day or two cowering under a table, and Leah and I considered it a sign of great progress when Wally got up on our couch to nap -- though he kept a wary eye on me.

Quite honestly, it was our intention to adopt a "needy" dog that other humans might consider too problematic, but even for us -- knowing that we've taken on a challenge -- there are days we wonder what we’ve gotten ourselves into. We’re learning that patience is an easy word to say, but a more difficult quality to practice. Yesterday Wally peed on the floor in our dining room (the shelter folks told us he is “mostly” housebroken.)

Yes, this will be a long learning process, for Wally, and for his humans.

Printing for the Show

2011-08-17T10:22:00.001-07:00

I’m madly working away in my office this week, getting my “Tibetans in Seattle” images edited, printed and matted. Three years ago when I began taking pictures for my Tibetan friends at their various community events, I had no plan to make The Work into A Project (nor did I consider the making of the photographs work, I might add.) It is simply a matter of happenstance that, after shooting for all this time, I can look back through my archives and realize that I have in fact amassed a pretty comprehensive collection of pictures that please me.

Thus, when the Tibetan Community asked if I would show my pictures in a gallery near where they’ll hold Tibet Fest this weekend, I said: "Sure, I can do that." And so I’m living, mole-like, in my office this week, staring for hours into my computer display screen, revisiting images and memories.

This process is quite enjoyable, actually.

Last weekend -- before I took on my mole identity -- I was still out and about in the world...shooting a number of things for my business, but also doing (as has become quite a pleasant habit) a volunteer shoot for the Tibetans and their monastery. A very important Tibetan Buddhist Lama, His Holiness Sakya Trisin, was in town, and I spent the better part of three days hanging out with the Tibetans.

It’s possible one or two of these new images might wind up in my show.

Language and Cultural Class

2011-08-09T12:53:00.000-07:00

Two weeks from now my friends from Seattle-area Tibetan community will hold their annual cultural celebration, Tibet Fest, in a huge city-owned building in the shadow of the Space Needle near downtown Seattle. There will be Tibetan singing and dancing and traders will sell Tibetan jewelry, woven carpets, and the like. Many of the local Tibetans will wear traditional costumes -- dressed-to-the-nines, as Americans would say. Long strings of prayer flags will hang from the rafters of the Seattle Center House which hosts the event.

It will be quite a scene then, the Center House a visual feast of color, the Tibetan community happy and in full-on Party Mood. I have been asked to hang a small showing of some of the photographs I’ve shot over the past three years at the community’s events, and I have a lot of work to do to edit, print, and frame my images.

But while my preparation for my Tibet Fest show will keep me fairly busy for just two weeks, my Tibetan friends’ work at sustaining their culture goes on in a myriad of ways all year long. For example: Every Sunday parents and community elders hold language and culture classes for Tibetan youth, where kids learn to read and write in Tibetan (I can tell you from personal and frustrating experience that Tibetan is not an easy language to learn.) And there are other lessons in art and dance.

The parents and teachers are patient and kind with their young students. And the kids? Well they are kids. The little ones are sometimes shy, the older students usually interested and engaged but occasionally a little tired-looking (the kids, after all, attend American school five days a week, then have Tibet Class on Sunday.)

It is an impressive thing to see, this community’s work to keep its culture alive.

I’m looking forward to displaying photographs that I hope reflect my respect for the Tibetans of Seattle.

Dude Ranch

2011-08-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve been revisiting lately some of Mark Twain’s books that I first read when I was in high school, and I’m tempted to steal a scam from Tom Sawyer's bag of tricks. Remember how his Aunt Polly wanted Tom to whitewash the fence surrounding her house, and Tom convinced some of his schoolmates to do the job for him? (plus pay Tom for the privilege.)

Leah and I have been joking that we might do the same kind of ruse here, because we’ve been feeling a wee bit overwhelmed with all the summertime chores we have on our to-do list: There was firewood that I split and stacked (summer has barely arrived here in the Pacific Northwest, but I’m already having to think ahead to winter;) and there’s an amazing crop of moss on the roof I’ve been scraping off, shingle-by-shingle. And the garden and orchard are beginning to yield produce, thus Leah has been busy in the kitchen, canning and preserving.

So our joke went like this: There must be folks on the other side of Puget Sound in Seattle -- city-types, you know? -- who would love to come out here to our small farm and do some back-to-the-land work. We’d have a dude ranch of sorts where stressed-out urbanites could pick apples and blackberries, then slave away in a hot kitchen, making jam that Leah and I can eat this winter. Maybe those city folks would even pay us for the soul-healing tonic of doing Good Honest Work.

Just as Tom Sawyer was able to go fishing once the gullible kids took over his painting responsibilities, Leah and I too would have free time that presently is so hard to come by. We could go for leisurely walks. We could pet the neighbor’s horses.

I asked the horses the other day what they thought of my plan, and they nodded approvingly.

Playing with Food

2011-07-27T06:03:00.000-07:00

I’m sure my parents did their best to teach me as a child not to play with my food, so I guess I must begin here by saying publicly: Sorry, Mom. Playing with food is exactly what I did this week.

Working in the garden, harvesting the bounty that Leah would take to the kitchen to can and preserve for us to eat this winter, my cameras and I eventually got waylaid. I mean, a man can only pick peas and strawberries for so long when distractions get the best of him. I made off with some of the peas and found a spot where the camera and I did a photo exercise in light and composition. Another day as I picked strawberries, I took a break from my labor and enticed the always-willing model, Pumpkin, to be part of a snapshot.

You gotta feel sorry for the two long-suffering women in my life. My Mom tried to teach me proper table manners, but her efforts apparently went for naught. And my wife would dearly appreciate it if I spent more time picking produce than I do photographing it.

What can I say? I’m a male and a photographer, so visual distractions are what I do best.

The Dalai Lama in DC

2011-07-18T21:19:00.001-07:00

The Dalai Lama is in the U.S. this week, giving a 10-day Tibetan Buddhist teaching in Washington DC. Several friends of mine from the Seattle Tibetan community have made the trip across the country to take part in the event (it’s called “Kalachakra for World Peace,”) and even those who could not attend and remained here at home in the Pacific Northwest are nevertheless excited that the teaching is taking place.

Yesterday morning I was thinking about my friends who are in DC. I stepped out my front door -- I was headed toward our barn to feed the sheep and goat and chickens -- and took only three or four steps when the picture you see here presented itself.

Simple. Peaceful. Tranquil. These are qualities the image suggests to me...and everything I’ve read and heard about the Dalai Lama gives me the sense that he is a humble, compassionate man, whose mission is to spread loving kindness among all members of the human family.

“Re-order your habits and attitudes so that you think less about your own narrow concerns and more of others,” he says. “In doing so, you will find that you enjoy peace and happiness yourself.

“Relinquish your envy, let go your desire to triumph over others. Instead, try to benefit them. With kindness, with courage and confident that in doing so you are sure to meet with success, welcome others with a smile. Be straightforward. And try to be impartial. Treat everyone as if they were a close friend. I say this neither as Dalai Lama nor as someone who has special powers or ability. Of these I have none. I speak as a human being, one who like yourself wishes to be happy and not to suffer. If you cannot for whatever reason be of help to others, at least don’t harm them.”

Happy Fair!

2011-07-12T17:45:00.000-07:00

I was a bit too young to appreciate the ‘60’s.
I was only 16 in 1969 when 500,000 folks headed to Max Yasgur’s 600-acre farm in upstate New York for the Woodstock concert, an event that Rolling Stone has since labeled as one of the Fifty Moments that Changed the History of Rock and Roll.

Yes, I was young, but I read a lot and was aware enough of what was going on in my world to be outraged by the war in Vietnam, and was sympathetic with the peace movement. But I was, after all, just 16, and I remember now (with some chagrin) that a centerpiece of my young life was something pretty lame: Anticipation of the date I’d finish my driver’s training class and be able to test to get my license.

Not that I would have gone to Woodstock, even if I had been able to drive.
I was just a kid.

***

Leah and I made a five-hour drive south this past weekend to attend the three-day Oregon Country Fair, a time-honored Pacific Northwest happening that’s now been going on each summer for 42 years. Held in a rural area outside Eugene, “Fair” -- it’s simply known by that one word by the many who attend regularly -- might appear to be a 1960’s-throwback kind of event. But I went to Fair for a day last year, and for two days this year, and I’m reluctant to pigeonhole the experience, or make generalizations.

An incredible 46 thousand people attended Fair in three days this year, and how can you generalize about that many individuals? I suspect that some Fairgoers were there primarily to attend the awesome concerts (there are by my count 18 venues and stages on the grounds, all with performances going on all day long.) Others were there to wander around and look at the accomplished art and crafts that vendors had for sale. Personally, I just enjoy people-watching, checking out (and being amazed by) the colorful rainbow of folks: Adult human beings in costumes and masks, little girls dressed as butterflies or fairy princesses.

I'm told that those who attend Fair every year get a bit mystical about the experience. You’ll sometimes hear the veterans refer to the Fairgrounds as a kind of “Home,” and their fellow, regular-attendees are “Family.” I can tell you that most people I met at Fair were incredibly friendly. “Happy Fair!,” is the greeting I heard most often.

I know this for certain: For a visual fellow like me, Oregon Country Fair is really something to see.

Star-Spangled Sunshine

2011-07-04T19:54:00.001-07:00

So...first off, let me admit that, as I write this, I am a Man Under the Influence.

No, I’m not under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or anything hip like that. I’m under the influence of SUNSHINE...plain, old, bright-shiny-orb-hanging-in-a-clear-blue-sky sunshine. After months and months of just the wettest, chilliest, I-can’t-stand-this-crap-anymore-est weather, the sun came out today...and our dear, sweet little town, not to mention our entire, deserving Puget Sound region SMILED. We grinned ear-to-ear. On a beautiful Fourth of July day, finally, we got SUMMER.

Oh how we smiled! We were, to a person, obnoxiously, deliriously, ridiculously high on life.

“Happy Fourth!!!” high school kids happily exclaimed to passersby (and you know how moody and sullen teenagers can be) as we adults walked to the parade. We wore our goofiest, star-spangled-banner-est outfits. We decorated our cars, ourselves, our pets. We strutted. We paraded. We celebrated Independence -- from the British, but particularly from the rainy monsoon season.

Our entire town, every giddy one of us, basked, raised our faces to the sun, and shouted “HEY MAN, GIVE ME SOME OF THAT BURN!!!”

We were ALL under the influence.

A Community of Food

2011-06-28T17:51:00.000-07:00

Every time I sit down to a meal, I realize that I married well.

You see, my mate is a foodie.

She pays attention to the tastes of different kinds of salt.
She mixes preserved lemon into our pasta, and thinks goat cheese is one of the finest things on the planet Earth.
She buys a particular bottle of wine for its qualities, not (like me) because the grocer has it on special for $3.
And though she is not at all snooty, my mate is a woman of taste and culinary culture...married to a man who, left on his own in the choosing of foods, would happily dine on beer and peanuts all three meals a day.

Leah puts creativity, mindfulness, and her good soul into the making of a meal, elevating food to High Art.

I am a most fortunate fellow.

***

I heard recently that a neighbor who lives down the lane from us also is making food into art, and I thought I might use my cameras (and this blog) as an excuse to investigate. Word was that the neighbor has teamed up with a couple of friends, and that the three women are turning out baked goods that are All The Rage at the nearby Saturday Farmers’ Market in Poulsbo, WA.

My neighbor and her friends call their business The Food Shed, and, ohmygoodness, what an amazing Food Find I wandered into!

I learned (in my nosy, quasi-journalistic search for The Story) that the three women started with a business ethic that stresses ingredients that are as local and in-season as possible; and I saw that each baker seems to add a high-energy, creative flare all her own. I hung out with the women in the wee hours on a recent Saturday morning as they worked in a commercial kitchen. I watched the making of asparagus bread twists, and strawberry and rhubarb hand pies (the women also make savory hand pies using herbs, potatoes, and spring onions.) There is more that they made, a LOT more, but I need to stop typing soon, as I’m about to salivate into my computer keyboard.

After pulling a college-style all-nighter, the three bakers barely had time to get their still-warm-from-the-oven goodies displayed at their stand before market-goers began lining up. It was a typically rainy Pacific Northwest day, but I sensed the weather only made sweets more appealing, and that Saturdays in our part of the world are a GREAT day for eating.

Home and Away

2011-06-23T09:15:00.000-07:00

The last big, Bilbo-Baggins-esque adventure Leah and I had was in the fall of 2007 when we went trekking in the Himalaya of Nepal. For three weeks we hiked and struggled for breath as our guide led us along the trails up into the thin air of the highest mountain range on Earth -- a trip that for me at least was a dream 30 years in the making. As one who has spent his adult life climbing to the mountain summits of the Pacific Northwest, I’d fantasized about what it would be like to one day climb Mt. Everest...but, as the years advanced, the idea of just being in the Himalaya seemed like it’d be pretty damned cool.

And so we went, and the trip was both more difficult than we’d ever imagined it could be, but also way more rewarding. For nearly the entire three weeks of the trek, one or both of us was miserably and even frightfully sick with one malady or another, and, if you read the journals we kept, we spent a lot of time wanting only to be back home. Still, we realize now, through the clear vision of hindsight, how much those difficult days taught us, how rich the experience was, and we’re talking about what we might do for our Next Big Trip.

“The world is big, and life is short,” a friend of ours says, and Leah and I have settled on India as our likely next destination, with a side trip back to Nepal (to revisit friends we made in 2007.) We know India will challenge us and probably give us a hard push out of our comfort zones.

Here at home yesterday, I photographed our son’s dog as he enjoyed a morning in the sunshine, watching bugs. Another day I got down on the ground and did up-close pictures of one of my favorite wildflowers, bleeding hearts.

Each day, wherever it is that we find ourselves, there is something to see...but, for most of us, sometimes a trip away offers a needed reminder to keep our eyes open.

Munchkin Chronicles

2011-06-17T09:42:00.000-07:00

Do you ever wonder why some stuff sticks in your brain, while other stuff does not?

For example: I “organized” our garage a couple of months ago and I put an old, now-seldom-worn pair of hiking boots in what seemed at the time like a logical place. When I looked for the boots last week, I had no idea where I’d put them...yet I can remember, rock-by-rock and vista-by-vista, many of the hundreds of trail miles I walked in those boots.

And there’s this: When I was in high school, I took a geometry class and the teacher was a sweet, gray-haired woman, kind of grandmotherly, and I liked her and really studied for her (my inclination at the time would have been to give only minor effort to anything that even smelled like math.) Yet today I couldn’t solve the simplest of geometry problems.

I do remember, however, that when I was only about three my parents went to visit friends of theirs named Rockwell, and today, I can clearly recall that visit, and that the Rockwells had no kids but they did have the coolest toy box in their dining room...and I can remember the layout of that dining room and how the toy box was next to their walnut china cabinet, and what a great time I had in that house where people had no kids but there was a toy box.

So what's the deal with this memory of mine?

Now that I’m an adult, I’m of the belief that, when kids come to our house to visit, we’d better have some toys on hand. And if the kids tire of the toys and decide they’d rather play our piano, we let them do that. Even better, we have kid-friendly farm animals outside, a veritable petting-zoo.

Our niece from Montana and her husband and two children stayed here for a couple of days this week. We played inside for hours, and we also made countless trips out to our barn to gather eggs. One of my neighbors said we could come over to his place to see his turkeys and ducks and pigs, and another neighbor said we could give his horses treats.

I can’t speak for the kids, but I know that, as unpredictable as my weird brain might sometimes be, I’ll always remember what a great visit we had.

Seeing with Heart

2011-06-07T09:37:00.000-07:00

Not long ago I was photographing an event at a Buddhist monastery for my friends in the Seattle-area Tibetan community. One of the monastery's lamas, a Tibetan who is quite learned -- and I think wise, and who I’m coming to respect greatly -- said something to me that was wonderful:

“Your photos,” he said...
(and then he touched his forehead)...
..."like a monk.”

Now, I must admit that the lama’s English is sometimes a bit difficult for me to understand. And, though I’m making an effort to learn Tibetan, I so far only know a few words and basic phrases. Still, I sensed by his words and body language that the lama was telling me that he’d seen the work I’ve been doing for the Tibetans and that he could see monk-like qualities in the images. I don’t believe the lama was telling me that my pictures are “good” or “bad” (a lama generally would not see things that way,) but that the images are made with compassion and empathy, bedrock qualities of mind practiced by monks.

It was a conversation I will remember always.

***

My personal photo diary this week -- the moments that presented themselves to me -- could be titled “Critters in my World.”

--A small tree frog seems to have taken up residence inside an old blue golf umbrella that we keep on our front porch.

--The neighbor’s horse has been grazing in a pasture filled with buttercups.

--The goat Pumpkin cozied up to a visitor.

In the big world-at-large, these everyday moments might be non-events, but to me they’re examples of what agrarian writer Wendell Berry calls “The Art of the Commonplace.”

I will continue to practice seeing small.

Tour de Ohio

2011-05-31T04:40:00.000-07:00

I spent the Memorial Day weekend in Ohio with my Mom. I did a few fixit jobs in Mom’s house, planted flowers in her yard, and Mom and I took mini-roadtrips together through the Ohio countryside.

Mom no longer drives, yet she loves getting out and going places. Whenever I visit, I get into what I think of as my “Driving Miss Daisy” frame of mind, taking Mom wherever she wants to go: The town where she grew up; the cemetery where my grandparents are buried; the small town where Mom and Dad lived when they were first married; an Amish village where Mom and I enjoy stopping for lunch. This past weekend we also took in a Memorial Day parade.

These are nostalgic trips, and sweet.

I know I'm fortunate to have such a swell traveling companion.

Green Stuff

2011-05-24T08:26:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year when my To-Do list of outdoor jobs grows as fast as the weeds that we’re struggling to keep out of our garden...and believe me, that’s FAST!

The weather is slowly -- painfully slowly if you ask me -- beginning to warm up. We’ll have several days of cool-ish, wet weather, followed by a day or two of sunshine and mild temperatures. This weather cycle seems to be just what plants like the strawberries and lettuce in our garden (and the grasses in the pasture of Pumpkin the goat) need to go into mega-overdrive growing mode. I go outside thinking I’ll spend an hour picking weeds from the vegetable garden, only to find that the herb garden too needs work. Then I notice that nettles are out of control near the wood pile and I’d better do something about that. And so the tasks just go on and on...

It’s hard for me to grasp, but stuff in our garden -- and in the gardens of our friends who sell produce at our town’s Saturday Farmers Market -- is growing so fast that we’ve already begun the process of harvesting and canning (“harvest” feels to me like a word that should be used in October, not in June.) Leah spent a day last weekend canning asparagus, and life had a decidedly green feel to it.

Though I’d promised weeks ago that I’d pitch in and help with the canning this year, it turned out that Leah did the asparagus herself...while I worked outside, trying to stay ahead of weeds and nettles and other plant life that’s so out-of-control pumped-up on the growth hormones of spring.

Seeing Climbers

2011-05-17T10:21:00.001-07:00

In the 35 years I’ve been working as a photographer, many of the events I’ve photographed are things I can’t personally do.

--I’ve shot more major league baseball games than I can count, yet I can’t throw a hardball, laser-beam straight and without a hop, from right field to second base; and I can’t hit a 95-mile-per-hour fastball (both are impressive enough skills when you watch a game on television, but they are freakish -- and also poetic -- when you see them, as they say in sports, up close and personal.)

--I’ve covered political campaigns, though (thank gawd) I’m not a politician. I've seen the passion that human beings bring to the free exchange of ideas.

--I’ve even photographed food, beautifully prepared and artfully arranged for the pages of gourmet magazines, yet my own cooking abilities in the kitchen don’t extend much beyond scrambled eggs.

Empathy is what matters in photography.
If you can feel it, you can photograph it.

Several days ago, however, I did pictures of something I have actually experienced firsthand, something I know and personally enjoy doing, and I could barely contain myself and stay on my side of the camera. Kids from the Seattle-area Tibetan community were taking a rock climbing class, and I photographed the event (on a volunteer basis) for the community’s web site, as well as for my own long-term documentary project.

Watching the movements and faces of the novice climbers, I could see moments of grace and exhilaration, but also expressions of anxiety and even fear. I took pictures reflecting the range of emotions that I myself have experienced when tied onto a rope and moving up a rock.

Yes, it might have been fun for me to join the kids in the class and do a little climbing, but the truth is that over the years I’ve learned to “participate” by watching and seeing. Antsy though I might be sometimes, my best role most days is to be the man behind the camera, not up on the rock.

Buying a Phone

2011-05-11T10:02:00.000-07:00

Though it seems that every one of my friends has an iPhone or an Android or some other breed of hipster Smart Phone, I have been a holdout, limping through life with a beat-up, 10-year-old dumb phone that doesn’t connect to the Internet, play music, or mix margaritas. Even folks I know who rail against consumerism and reject better-living-through-technology got swept away by the cultural/consumer tidal wave that is the Smart Phone. And still I resisted...to the point that I was beginning to expect that Steve Jobs might personally show up on my doorstep and ask how it could be that I could live without an item that has become a perceived essential of human existence in the developed world.

I can be contrary that way: The more a thing becomes accepted, the more I sometimes reject it.

Thus, if you felt the earth quiver a bit under your feet this week or experienced some other disturbance in The Force, it might have been the result of a trip I made to the Apple store to purchase, at long last, an iPhone. Now, finally, I am one of the Cool Kids. The $300 I spent on my phone means I’m doing my part to support the American economic recovery. And I won’t have to explain to clients or potential clients that I’m late returning their email because I was away from my office computer.

Now I can, if I chose, always be connected...though don’t count on that to happen, as I suspect I’ll leave my phone behind as often as I carry it with me. I am, after all, a contrarian.

The pictures I’m sharing today, shot in our kitchen, are examples of things that matter to me much more than even the most wondrous of gadgets: Vision. Imagery. Exercising my way of seeing.

The marbles are among the items --found objects, mostly, like shells and empty bird nests and drying flowers -- that we collect and keep on our kitchen window sill.

I might add (with apologies to Mr. Jobs) that I did not use the camera in my new phone to take these pictures.

In the Garden

2011-05-03T10:38:00.001-07:00

I’ve got Big Plans for growing and foraging for food this summer, and Leah has said she’ll allow me to assist her in what we both know will be a huge job: The eventual canning and preserving of everything we hope to put aside to eat next winter.

It is a shift of mega proportions in the way things are done here that permission has been granted for me to be Leah’s sous-chef, because, in the 30-plus years we’ve been married, Leah has always been Empress of all things Kitchen.

Yours truly, the Knight of No Cooking Skills, has known better than to trespass in Her Highness’s domain in this particular castle.

We have three gardens outside -- separate plots for vegetables, strawberries, and herbs -- and, despite a cool and wet spring, all three spaces are already off to a promising-looking start. I dug out winter’s weeds and debris, turned over the soil, and we put up new fencing to keep the chickens from nibbling away at our foodstuffs. The strawberry plants are lush and will be blooming in no time. Leah has so far planted peas, spinach, salad greens, and onions in the veggie garden. The herb garden has parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (we are, of course, gardeners who came of age under the influence of Simon and Garfunkel.) And there are other, less lyrical herbs as well.

Beyond the confines of the three produce gardens, fruit trees -- apple and plum, mostly -- are in full-out bloom, a profusion of spring’s exuberant excess. Ornamentals like the magnolia are a visual temptation, luring me away from my work in the gardens (I always keep a camera nearby for these kinds of welcome distractions.) And there are visitors too, mostly little green ones, like the fellow I photographed on a tulip petal.

Spring is a pretty swell time of year, and I’m jazzed too about a summer and fall when I’m finally allowed to learn the secrets of what goes on in the kitchen.

Bittersweet

2011-04-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

My friends from the Seattle-area Tibetan community gathered at their Buddhist Monastery last night to honor the 22nd birthday of Tibet’s Panchen Lama, Gedun Chokyi Nyima. There was a huge birthday cake, Tibetan tea, sweets, and the other trappings of a Tibetan party.

The only thing missing was the guest of honor, the Panchen Lama. He and his family disappeared in 1995 when the young lama was just six-years-old and haven’t been heard from since. Tibetans say that the Panchen Lama was kidnapped by the Chinese authorities, who have since named their own “puppet” Panchen Lama.

It’s not known whether the real Panchen Lama is even still alive.

One of the most important figures (along with the Dalai Lama) in Tibetan culture, the Panchen Lama’s birthday is celebrated each year by Tibetans...and though I've photographed quite a number of events in the monastery the past several years, there was something about the quality of the light last night that made me feel like I was experiencing that interior space for the first time. My friends placed ceremonial “khata” scarves near a photograph of the young lama and chanted prayers. Once the somber ceremony was finished in the monastery shrine room, everyone moved to the downstairs social hall where the atmosphere was lighter. Little ones giggled and enjoyed birthday cake, and adults drank the salty butter tea that is a cultural mainstay.

What a bittersweet evening.

Earth Day 2011

2011-04-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

As someone who for 25 years has hiked the trails and climbed the peaks of the Pacific Northwest, I have seen way more than my fair share of picture postcard beauty.

At sea level I’ve trekked down the wild Pacific Ocean beaches of Washington’s coast, hanging out near distant sea stacks for photographs at sunset, then hiking in the moonlight back toward my car.

Four thousand feet higher up, I have happily wandered, in the pink alpenglow of evening, through the high, heathered meadows of Mt. Rainier National Park -- Mother Nature’s stunning gardens of wildflowers, far superior to anything created by man.

And I’ve climbed to the tops of the state’s great volcanoes, sometimes standing on summits feeling confident and strong -- but more often humble and insignificant -- looking off at views that have gone on forever.

The places I’ve visited on outdoor adventures are the kinds of spots described in travel magazines and guide books, and draw visitors from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Believe me, I know how fortunate I am to live where I do...and yet I feel obliged to point out something I suspect we all know but might occasionally overlook:

Nature’s beauty might be seen in a flower pot on our kitchen window sill, or just outside our door.

The picture above was taken several evenings ago near a park and ride three miles from my house as I waited for Leah to get off a bus. The two photographs below (of a hummingbird and a wild yellow violet) are recent images from our yard.

As I’ve become aware of the impact my car’s emissions have on the environment and on the health of those around me, I find that I drive less and less. I tend to stick closer to home, and tomorrow, I, for one, plan to honor Earth Day by leaving my car parked in my driveway.

Morning Rounds

2011-04-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

Nearly every day I take our two dogs, Minnie and Buddha, for a morning walk along the southern border of our property. In the 15 years we’ve lived here, I’d guess hundreds of thousands of footsteps, both human and canine, have been taken on that route, so that a path now exists, worn through soil and woodland.

The four-leggeds and I poke around on our trail -- the dogs use noses, I use my eyes and sometimes a camera -- to take note of what might have changed from one day to the next.

This being spring, there is a lot going on.

Coyotes live and hunt in the wild areas near our place. When I’ve gone out to our front porch for firewood the past few evenings, I’ve noticed an uptick in the nighttime chorus of yipping and yapping out in the spooky darkness. Thus, on morning patrol, Minnie and Buddha keep sniffers close to the ground to determine whether their country cousins have strayed onto our turf. If coyote scent is detected, much peeing and barking is required on the part of my domesticated canine friends.

My personal hunt is more along the lines of a vision quest. Several mornings ago a single raindrop, pooled on the tips of cedar greenery, caught my eye. And this morning I photographed something that, for us, is a yearly rite of spring: The first trillium of the season.

My dog friends and I are happy campers, being out each morning to see what the day has to offer.

The Barn

2011-04-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

Our barn isn’t much to look at. It’s mostly white corrugated metal, and the gutters are old and pulling away from rotting parts of the roof. I’ll need to do some repair work out there this this summer.

There was a time -- to be honest it was back in the days when the economy was good, which now feels like long, long ago -- that we must have had a few extra dollars on hand and we considered replacing the barn altogether. But we realized that the structure is basically good. Our critters are snug and dry in there. We decided that we kind of like the ratty old thing, so we left it as-is.

One morning this week I headed out to feed the barn animals and I saw that the light was really wonderful. We have prayer flags (gifts brought by our Tibetan friends when they came out for a picnic last summer) strung from fruit trees near our garden up to the rafters of the barn. Something about the scene -- like our not-perfect-but-good-enough barn -- just felt right...maybe a little ramshackle and rickety, but right.

I went into the barn and saw Pumpkin lounging in the sun near the critter door. She was quite content, and I found myself a comfortable bale of straw and just sat for a while.

It was a swell beginning to the day.

Seeing Green

2011-04-04T11:07:00.000-07:00

In the 31 years I have lived in Western Washington, my eyes have become accustomed to the color green, though I can tell you that this way of seeing was not always the case.

In 1977 we left Ohio and moved to the Pacific Northwest, settling and working first in Central Washington, in Yakima, just East of the Cascades. We lived in the rain shadow of the mountains then, a landscape of sagebrush and dry, generally brownish hills that had an Old West kind of feel. As a photographer, I would have told you back then that I knew colors, but the truth is that I really didn’t know green, at least not the way I know it now. It wasn’t until we’d lived for several months in Yakima and made our first drive west, over the Cascades, to spend a day in rainy Seattle, that I had my first Green Epiphany. I remember being slack-jawed, taken-aback, thrown off-balance by the ridiculous intensity of Western Washington's green.

We moved to the Seattle area in 1980, and today, as I sit in the second floor office I have in our home and type these words, I can look out the window to my left and the only thing my eyes take in is a rectangle of green, a huge cedar tree filling the frame...and the same is true of the view from the window to my right. I can hear that rain is falling outside -- which has been the case most days here since mid-September. I’m no botanist, but I’m pretty sure that, when it comes to trees and grass and the other plants that live outside my window:

4 months of rain
+ 3 more months of rain
= green

Anyway, we went hiking in the green yesterday, walking a path in the Olympic National Forest, about 30 minutes from our home. Our trail took us through a valley in the temperate lowlands and the day felt like spring, but all around and above us were mountains, high places still covered in winter’s snow, though now beginning its melt, so that the slopes dripped and seeped with runoff.

Drip, drip, drip. Every plant was soaking up the moisture, the creeks swelling. We came to a spot where a tree had fallen across a stream and the tree has become a "nurse log," a fertile host now for moss and ferns and baby trees. We could practically watch things grow.

1 drip
+ 2 drips
= life

An April Fool

2011-04-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

I told a friend this morning that I was going to try to stop being one of those embarrassing-to-be-around 50-some-year-old males who too often makes off-color remarks about sex; that I should instead try to -- maybe, finally -- be a grown-up, find other topics for my humor...

Then I showed my friend today’s date on the calendar, grinned, and said: “APRIL FOOLS!!!”

Yes, I’m a political progressive. I listen to NPR, and I even get email from Mother Jones. These traits mean, I guess, that I’m supposed to be what the smart, feminist women I know refer to as an “evolved” male. But, as my man friends know, I’m sometimes not evolved, not above enjoying the occasional, slightly titillating (oh my, that word makes me smile) double entendre or slightly naughty play on words. Why, just yesterday I was poking (see what I mean?) around in my yard with my camera, photographing spring’s blossoms, the season’s over-the-top display of fecundity. Off in the distance I could hear a chorus of thousands of frogs, loudly singing their spring mating songs.

The whole scene seemed to be about fertility, about sex-sex-sex. Yes, there was beauty -- an overabundance of it actually. But, looking at nature through my camera yesterday, my yard seemed to be full of the energy of sex.

I’m not a shy fellow, but I felt I should avert (or should I say pervert?) my eyes.

Spring Chores

2011-03-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

Spring is a time for honest, old-fashioned hard work at our place. Winter’s wind and rain storms knocked down a ton of wood from the big trees in our pastures, and, now that the weather is getting nicer, I’ve spent the last several days, carting windfall out of the critters’ grazing areas. Our ruminants -- the sheep, Smokey, and the goat, Pumpkin -- hang out with me and keep me company, though I doubt they’re aware that it’s the cheapskate in me that motivates my work: The more downed wood I get cleared out of the pastures, the better the grass will grow this summer, and the less hay we’ll need to buy to feed Mr. S and Miss P.

But this is pleasant work I’m doing, and I feel good, not only about money not spent on $20-a-bale orchard grass hay, but for the exercise I get. My body and my photographic eyes benefit from jobs like this. I always have a camera at hand to use as my visual note-taking device, ready for moments when I’m in the barn and, though a hole in the wall, I see Smokey outside, curious about what I’m up to; or times when Pumpkin comes begging for a chin-scratch; or, most heart-warming of all, I find Pumpkin napping and goat-purring in the spring sunshine.

Spring Break

2011-03-25T09:25:00.001-07:00

The temperature was 62 in the urban, Seattle-Tacoma lowlands. Trees were all busted-out in blossoms, and we drove past a number of cars with convertible tops down so drivers could enjoy the spring day. My friend Shelley and I were headed to Mt. Rainier, up-up-up into a high, still-snowy landscape, around 5,000 feet in elevation. Knowing that the warmer weather will, in the coming months, eventually make its way even into the mountain high country, our plan was to get out for a good hike, celebrating spring by saying good-bye to winter. Our car was packed with warm hiking boots, snowshoes and ski poles, and the day packs we’d carry that day held numerous combinations of gloves, stocking caps, and layers of outerwear.

Shelley, on spring break from her teaching job at a university back East, had come out to spend several days with us. A go-go-go human being some 20 years younger than Leah and me, Shelley seems to think of me as Hiking Trip Leader-Man. When I pointed out the irony that she and I would spend a beautiful, sunny day up in the snow -- while many of the students Shelley teaches were probably lying, nearly naked, on a beach in Florida or Mexico -- Shelley said: “Well at least we’ll all be wearing sun screen.”

And the day we had at Rainier was, in fact, as good as any day at the beach. The beautiful little peaks of the Tatoosh Range -- we’ve hiked and climbed up into those peaks on previous outings -- made us feel like we were Back Home. Another gift that day was that we happened upon a wild fox, napping lazily in the snow, seemingly unconcerned about our presence. I had time to make several photographs of the fox before he/she yawned, then got up and wandered off, perhaps looking for a more private nap spot.

Moonrise

2011-03-21T06:16:00.000-07:00

In all honesty, I can’t really say whether it was the moon that drew us...or the lure of ice cream. But when Leah and I heard that the moonrise Saturday night would be something fairly unique -- a “Perigee Moon," meaning the astronomical conditions would make the full moon appear 14% bigger and 30% brighter than usual -- I suggested we go to nearby Bainbridge Island. There is a picturesque cove that I’ve seen when I’ve ridden my bike on the island, and I had it in my head that the cove might be a cool place for me to photograph the moonrise.

Plus there’s a shop on the island that sells the most wonderful ice cream.

So we hopped into the car and we went. A 20-minute drive down the peninsula where we live took us to the bridge at Agate Passage, where we crossed onto the island.

The photograph I’m posting today will give you a vague idea of how the moon looked...though trying to describe how the moonrise felt leaves me grasping, lamely, for words. “Otherworldly” and “spooky” come to mind...but mostly I remember having a big, empty feeling deep in the pit of my stomach, a sense that I am very small and insignificant.

That feeling of emptiness stayed with me, and, later, not even brownie cheesecake ice cream filled it.

Magic Chickens

2011-03-14T12:09:00.000-07:00

Just looking casually at our six chickens, you probably wouldn’t think there is anything special about them. They cluck-cluck like other chickens you might have encountered. They mill about aimlessly, pecking at the floor inside the barn, looking for kernels of corn I’ve thrown out for them; outside they do the same kind of wandering, hunting for worms.

If you’ve ever spent any time at all around chickens, you might, honestly, have the opinion that they’re not the smartest beasts on the block, and unless you’ve gotten to know my own chickens, you’d likely say that they, too, are fairly dim of wit. But I beg to differ. My chickens are artistic and inspired, and I’m the lucky beneficiary of their creativity.

You see, the hens in my barn are Magic Chickens. They lay Magic Eggs...or, more specifically they lay Magic Photographic Eggs. I go out each evening and gather the eggs -- an outsider might look at the eggs and say that there’s nothing unusual about them --but of course I am a photographer and it's my job to notice things, and the amazing discovery I've made is that, no matter how casually or thoughtlessly I place the eggs in a spot, a Photograph happens!

To me that is BIG Magic.

A couple of evenings ago I went out to do barn chores. I gathered eggs from the hen house, and then, when I stopped to throw hay in for the goat, I absentmindedly put the eggs on our wheelbarrow. Abracadabra! A picture presented itself! The next night I brought an egg into the house from the barn. I put the egg on the kitchen table to take off my barn coat (we’d just finished supper and a candle was burning.) Presto-Change-o! The egg became a Photograph!

So I’m convinced that mine are Magic Chickens.
I’m even thinking of having a bumper sticker made that says “My chickens are more creative than your honor student.”

Auspicious

2011-03-07T20:58:00.000-08:00

I guess I must have been kind of overeager for the day’s events to begin because I arrived at the monastery early last Saturday, way before my Tibetan friends. It was Losar, Tibetan New Year, and the first thing I noticed was that the prayer wheels in the empty monastery courtyard looked amazing in the sunlight, though a little lonely.

Later, the monks would say that having good weather on Losar was an “auspicious” way to begin a new year.

As my friends began to arrive, I was happy, not only for their good company, but pleased that I had decided to wear some reasonably nice American clothes because the Tibetans were dressed in their holiday best. I’ve been attending and photographing Seattle-area Tibetan community events for several years now, but Saturday it seemed like folks were looking particularly stylish.

The day began with the Buddhist monks offering prayers and blessings outside the monastery. Eventually everyone went inside, where there were more prayers and offerings of ceremonial mandalas and scarves.

Later that evening we all gathered at a neighborhood community center where there was a potluck dinner, a long table covered with dish after dish of just the most incredible Tibetan and Asian food (another table held a framed portrait of the Dalai Lama, as well as a ceremonial food offering.) Leah, who had spent the morning and early afternoon back at home, baking for the potluck, arrived with our contribution for the dinner (a vegetarian pot pie...not exactly Tibetan fare, but, hey, we do what we can.) The Tibetan kids supplied the entertainment for the evening, performing a Tibetan-language play, followed by music.

Though many of the Seattle Tibetans are as Americanized and Western as Leah and I are, they also make a great effort to keep their cultural heritage alive. Thus, late in the evening when Leah and I needed to leave to catch a ferry home, we made sure we toured the room saying ka-lee shu (good-bye) to our friends, who smiled appreciatively that we were beginning the new year with a show of respect for their language.

Losar warm-up

2011-02-28T12:59:00.000-08:00

There might come a time (though I seriously doubt it) when I’m no longer treated like a “guest” when I hang out with my Tibetan friends. Maybe too there will be a point in our relationship when my friends stop handing me plates of Tibetan food and insisting I eat, as if I’m about to wither and blow away from lack of nourishment. I’m not holding my breath that this will happen either.

There just seems to be something basic, perhaps innate, and certainly wonderful in their culture that leads Tibetans to show warmth and generosity toward those around them, and that they also share what they have with others. One of my Tibetan friends who grew up in a refugee settlement in India once told me that when he and his brother were young, they had very little to eat and often were hungry. My friend remembers that if one brother did a job for someone and earned an orange, he would share it with the other. I guess there are life lessons that a child learns under those circumstances that stick with one long into adulthood.

Anyway, the Tibetan New Year holiday, Losar, will be celebrated next weekend, and my friends gathered yesterday for a party, a kind of pre-Losar warm-up. The children practiced a play they will perform next weekend, and adults and children worked together making khapse, a Tibetan cookie. My contribution, as always, was to take pictures...but also to eat all the food that my dear friends so generously shared with me.

Property

2011-02-24T06:09:00.001-08:00

Leah and I have words we use with one another to communicate about goings-on in particular areas of our property, but our words would be meaningless or even confusing to anyone but us.

There is a spot of ground, a small, grassy, pastoral place, open to the sky but bordered by big trees, and we call that the Picnic Grove, though we’ve never eaten a meal there.

We also talk about our Upper and Lower Pastures (Upper being closest to our house,) areas surrounded by electric fence where the barn critters graze. I would suspect most folks think of “pastures” as vast, open, maybe even flat land. Together, our pastures are perhaps only the size of one football field, and both are on a very steep hillside where there are tall trees but very little pasture grass because the trees there make too much shade.

Even the words “our property” might suggest ownership of a sizable piece of land, though our place is a relatively small 2.5 acres, and in some ways we don’t consider ourselves “owners,” but rather caretakers. We choose to keep most of this ground natural, and the descriptions we use for those wild areas are phrases like “the woods west of the house,” or whatever. This is habitat for the plants and animals that were here before us, and we hope will still be here after we’re gone.

A couple of nights ago I was walking near the bottom of the hill in the Lower Pasture and looked up at the black sheep Smokey, who was standing in the trees, waiting patiently for his evening hay. Some folks would suggest we cut those trees, grow more grass on that ground, buy less hay.

We'll choose to leave it as is.

Changing Light

2011-02-21T11:30:00.000-08:00

This is an incredible time of year for photographic light, and, thought I'm not completely sure why the light is so amazing, I do have a theory or two. Whether it was the sweeping, vast, outdoor landscape I saw on a ferry trip across Puget Sound, or a small, luminous scene at home in our kitchen, the light this week had a kind of a glow to it, a radiance.

It didn’t seem to matter much either, whether I made images in black and white, or in color, that special quality of the light was there. Something pretty cool was up, and I felt like I’d better pay attention.

I noticed that there was a spring-like breeze blowing off the Olympic Mountains, clouds were skittering across the sky, and trees were waving back and forth. The clouds and trees took turns, filtering the light, bouncing it around, reflecting it. Things got really freaky then, because the light seemed to be moving, pulsing, even, with a presence like a beating heart, thump-thump-thumping in a science fiction movie. It was a little weird, actually.

But I said I have a theory, and here is what I think is happening: The sun is still fairly low in the sky at this time of year, so there is an angularity to the light. The calendar says the season is still winter, but spring is knocking at the door. The weather forecasters are using words like “unsettled” to describe climactic conditions...one minute we get a little of this, the next we get a little of that, weather-wise, and one senses that there’s a whole-lotta-shakin-goin-on.

I plan to stay tuned.

Normalcy

2011-02-16T09:22:00.000-08:00

Two weeks and a day after Leah’s hip replacement surgery, she has already tossed aside her crutches, doesn’t need pain meds, and has released her nurse (me) from indentured servitude. She started back to work yesterday via her laptop at home, and last evening we poured over a map of India, talking about our next big Adventure of a Lifetime, hopefully this fall.

Life is getting back to normal here, except that “normal” now for Leah is minus the nagging pain she’d had in her right hip and leg for the past several years.

We had stayed three days at the hospital in Seattle for the surgery, and while we were away a friend came out to our place twice a day to feed the barn animals. The two dogs stayed in Seattle with our son, whose apartment is in a tres hip, trendy neighborhood. Thus, we were pleased when the dogs came back to our place without any new piercings or tattoos, and seem content here, down on the farm, after seeing Par-ee.

The Hunt

2011-02-11T11:05:00.000-08:00

If it’s true -- that old folk-wisdom notion that claims that “Sometimes you bite the dog, sometimes the dog bites you,” then I have found that a similar, ain’t-it-weird? dictum influences my life as a photographer:

Sometimes you find the photograph. Sometimes the photograph finds you.

I was on a ferry the other night, crossing Puget Sound right about the time of sunset, headed to a client meeting. I had my wedding portfolio in a case in one hand, and a daypack on my back that was filled with even more work samples, a camera, and a couple of lenses. I also had a small point-and-shoot camera in my pocket. A challenging voice in the back of my brain taunted me, asking: “Hey Dude, with all these trappings of an “image-maker” on you, do you suppose you can find a picture, right here on this ferry boat, right now?”

I'm tempted to jokingly say I hate that voice, introducing as it does two very different creative possibilities: That I will find a photograph that pleases me, and thus feel the Sweet Rush of Success (good;) or I'll fail to find a worthy image and drag my sorry, caveman self home from the hunt with no art to put on the cave wall to impress the cave-wife and cave-kiddies. But the truth is that "the voice" is really one of my best teachers, encouraging me to accept whatever comes my way.

So I walked around the passenger area of the ferry on a vision quest for a picture. I looked at the patterns in the water in the wake of the ferry, and considered the color that was added by the warm, end-of-day light. I then sized-up the visual possibilities of the Olympic mountains off to the west, but the mountains were mostly hidden in clouds. Nothing really seemed to “be” a photograph...until the boat docked in Edmonds and I walked into the ferry terminal, where I happened on a window, crazily and wildly cracked.

There was an image possibility that was worthy of investigation, and I spent several minutes by that window, shooting one kind of picture, then another.

Oh, Sweet Productivity! The caveman could, with gratitude and humility, take something home from his hunt.

A Surgery

2011-02-05T09:07:00.000-08:00

The surgeon gave Leah a book titled “Joint Journey,” which I thought sounded like the spring break road trip diaries of some of the folks I went to college with in the early 1970’s. In actuality, the book outlined what Leah could expect when she had hip replacement surgery, which, after months of consideration and some admitted nervousness, she did Tuesday.

It does seem like Leah and I have been on a long road, a journey even, accompanied every step of the way by Leah’s ever-present, pain-in-the-butt friend, her right hip. Whether it was due to too many hard weightlifting workouts in the gym over the years, or falls she took skiing, or who-knows-what ramification of an active lifestyle, the hip had gotten to the point where Leah couldn’t even sleep comfortably, much less walk without pain.

After he performed the hip replacement this week, the surgeon said that Leah had been living with the hip of an 80-year-old. Now, as she learns to move around on crutches and does her rehab exercises with great dedication, Leah is on the road to recovery.

I stayed with Leah in her hospital room in Seattle, and the pictures I’m posting today are of the sunrise we watched illuminate Mt. Rainier Wednesday, the first day Leah woke with a new hip. We’re beginning a new chapter in the Joint Journey, and we expect it will be far-out, man.

Common Moments

2011-02-02T00:47:00.001-08:00

Maybe it’s because I have a lot of friends who are climbing bums, and many other friends who are journalists -- in other words, I know a lot of people who are ne’er-do-wells, vagabonds, and dreamers -- that I have been on the listening end of more than a few conversations that began: “If I was rich and didn’t have to work for living...” The climbers then rhapsodize about peaks they’d summit, while the journalists go on at length about bar stools they’d occupy in some out-of-the-way, south sea island village until a Big Story came along that needed covering.

I guess I personally tend to be a fellow with pretty lame fantasies about what I’d do if I was independently wealthy. As a former photojournalist who now shoots weddings for a living, if I quit working, I’d pack my cameras, go someplace where people don't speak my language, and then...I’d...shoot...(wait for it...) WEDDINGS!

Or at least I’d shoot events a lot like weddings.

You see, I am passionate about photography, but I’m even more passionate about the magic way the camera allows me to plug into the lives of people around me. For me, weddings -- and cultural celebrations, religious holidays, and festivals of all kinds -- are great opportunities to see and document the coolness of everyday Life.

A week ago, for example, I photographed a wedding, and wonderfulness was happening here, there, and everywhere. The pictures I’m sharing here today of a young flower girl, caught in three very girlish moments, are the kinds of somewhat non-wedding wedding pictures that I love.

I suspect I could go to a wedding in Mexico, or Brazil, or China, and find similar moments...Or at least that’s my theory.

If I was independently wealthy, I’d head to Brazil, bum around a bit, then shoot a wedding and hope to find pictures like these, just to prove my point.

There’s a little ne'er-do-well in all of us.

A Visitor

2011-01-29T05:43:00.000-08:00

I was about to step into the shower the other day when the Photo Fairy tapped me on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, you-who-always-has-a-camera-in-his-pocket, but I notice that you’re not wearing any, uh, pockets right now...” (she giggled.) “I thought you might want to look toward the bathroom window. There’s light there that you might like, and a pretty scene. I just thought I’d let you know...”

And then she was gone. The Photo Fairy vanished. Damn, she was pretty, too.

I found my pants, and my camera. I took the picture the fairy had shown me, then went on with my shower. I had a stupid, love-struck smile on my face.

I hope that fairy comes back soon. What a vision she was!

Boutique?

2011-01-24T09:43:00.001-08:00

I once heard an agribusiness expert sarcastically refer to the kind of place where Leah and I live as a “boutique farm.” Others sometimes call acreage like ours a “hobby farm.” And, while I must admit that we don’t earn a living off our land, we do have quite a peaceful life here.

We have good, healthy food from last summer’s garden in our pantry, and our chickens give us eggs that we can offer up for breakfast. I humbly invite the professional cynics to come out for a meal and sit a while in our small, chemical-free pasture...maybe give their preconceptions a rest.

The goat Pumpkin welcomes all visitors.

Flirt

2011-01-18T08:37:00.001-08:00

There are nice girls and there are naughty girls. Hazel is a bit of a tease, so I guess one would have to conclude that her ways tend toward the naughty.

Some men around here even go so far as to say that Hazel is a witch. Certainly she’s got me under some kind of spell. I think she might even be stalking me.

I look out the doors of our dining room these days and Hazel is out there, and she’s a sight to behold. It’s January -- the middle of winter, fer gawd’s sake -- yet Hazel is outside, dressed in the sexy, flirtatious colors of spring.

Yes, it’ true that our temps have been in the 50’s the past few days, unseasonably mild, and if I let my guard down, Hazel will tempt me to come out and romp around in the yard with her. But I’m a logical fellow and I know that, as quick as you can say “frostbite,” the weather can change, and temperatures more appropriate for winter season will return.

What will Hazel do if and when it gets cold again? Why she’ll freeze her bloomers off, that’s fer sure.

Resolution

2011-01-11T09:39:00.000-08:00

A friend told me yesterday that she’s made a New Year’s promise to herself not to fret about things she can’t change, and her resolution sounded like something I should take to heart. I’ve been in a funk the past week or two about the dark and dreary and wet Seattle winter weather...and of all the things that we can’t change in life, well, the weather has to be close to #1 on the list, yes?

To be honest, the weather where I live isn’t all that bad. I was talking to my Mom on the phone last night and she told me it was something like 6 degrees (F) in Ohio yesterday, while it was around 40 here. As tiresome as it is to experience day after day of rain in the wet Pacific Northwest, bone-chilling cold, to me at least, would be way worse.

The thing about the weather is that, somewhere, somebody’s got it better, somebody's got it worse than you do.

I need to hope that, come August 15th, 2011, perhaps from 1-2 PM, the sun will come out here and Seattle will have it's rightful one hour of sunny, perfect weather. If it rains that day too, well, as my friend would point out, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.

No Nap

2011-01-05T12:20:00.000-08:00

When we last met here in the Seeing Small clubhouse, I was telling you that several people I know had gone off to cool, adventurous-sounding places (Baja, for example) for the New Year’s weekend, but that Leah and I were feeling kind of lazy and decided we’d stay home, close to the wood stove. My Mom had been here visiting Christmas week and I’d been on the go-go-go entertaining her. The weather’s been clear and chilly out. A nap near the warm fire sounded good.

Then the phone rang. A photographer friend wondered whether I wanted to do a day trip out to the Washington Coast.

I went.

Our day was as varied as the landscape we passed through. I shot panoramas of frosty trees in the cool, shaded lowlands. Later we photographed mist on beautiful Lake Crescent. And we ended our day with a hike to Second Beach, where we watched the sun set into the Pacific. It was a fine day to be out and about.

Maybe I’ll nap next weekend.

Close to Home

2010-12-31T15:31:00.001-08:00

It seems like a lot of people use the Christmas and New Year’s holiday weeks to Go Someplace Cool. I was talking to a friend this morning and she told me her boyfriend has gone to Baja, and some other folks I know are off cross country skiing in a high valley I really love in Central Washington.

Leah and I also talked about taking some kind of a trip, but it seems like we’ve both been hyper-busy lately, so we decided to stay home. The weather is clear and chilly out, and sticking close the wood stove seemed like a good plan.

I did go for a walk this morning, however, taking my cameras and exploring places I could visit on foot. I took pictures of wintry frost and ice on some Scotch Broom plants -- not as exotic as Baja, but I guess it’ll do.

Seeing Plants

2010-12-28T14:23:00.000-08:00

Mom grew up in a world of plants. Her father and uncle owned a greenhouse in Ohio, and while other kids her age were jumping rope or riding bikes, my Mom was accompanying my grandfather on flower delivery trips to weddings, funerals and flower shops. When other kids could barely do one-plus-one arithmetic, my Mom was keeping the books for the family business.

It was entirely to be expected, then, that when Mom visited here this week for the Christmas holiday, she and I made a trip to a place we've enjoyed when Mom has been here in the past, the Volunteer Park Conservatory in Seattle. In this wet and drippy time of year in the Pacific Northwest, the fern greenhouse in particular caught our eyes. One plant, Calathea lancifolia (Rattlesnake plant) had foliage that looked like it has been stenciled with the patterns of a stereotypical leaf design -- as if the plant was mocking itself and its brethren, in a self-deprecating kind of way.

Another day, as I was walking around the property surrounding my house, I photographed yet another fern (I've since learned that it is our native fern, Polystichum munitum) growing near the strikingly red bark of a madrona tree. Since green and red are, I guess, the unofficial colors of the Christmas holiday, the picture seems like a fitting image to share today.

Christmas Chicken

2010-12-24T12:55:00.001-08:00

Several days ago I had it on my To-Do list to go into the photo archives on my computer and choose a landscape picture for this, my holiday blog post. Stereo-typically, I was thinking the image would be a Winter Wonderland kind of scene: A beautiful, snow-covered mountain, or a towering evergreen, also blanketed in snow.

It was that day too that our hen, Goldie, hiked from her home in our barn, waddling and toddling her way up to our house. She stood near our front door, posing, and it was such a comical moment that I pulled out my pocket camera and obliged the preening chicken.

These are the kinds of “events” we appreciate about our lives these days...small things, but we wouldn’t trade these moments for anything. The days are good, and we feel very lucky.

Happy Holidays!

Classic View

2010-12-21T12:58:00.001-08:00

Mom is here for the holidays and we played tourist in Seattle last night, driving around the city, looking at holiday lights. The image you see here is the classic view of the skyline from Queen Anne hill (as is fitting here in the Evergreen State, Seattle decorates the top of the Space Needle with a tree-shape of lights for the season.) So that I could get as much detail as possible in the scene, I actually shot two, side-by-side, horizontal panoramic exposures, then pieced them together on the computer...easy to do with today’s software.

Click on the image to see it at a more impressive size.

Sometime it'd be fun to do a similar picture, except I'd shoot maybe eight side-by-side vertical frames and piece them together. The image quality would be amazing...My only concern then would be that the Photo Police could arrest me and charge me with Overuse of Megapixels.

Now...please pardon my brevity, but Yours Truly must go. My Tour Guide duties continue.

Unruly

2010-12-19T04:30:00.000-08:00

My computer desktop looks like a crazy person is in charge.

There must be fifty image files, photographs I shot yesterday as workout pictures, visual exercises, play.

There are pictures of our goat, Pumpkin. And pictures of a fern I saw on our property. And pictures of a pomegranate that Leah put in the salad we had for dinner last night.

The pictures of the goat and the fern, well maybe I’ll post those another time, maybe I won’t. I kind of follow my gut with this journal... and you, dear reader, and I...well, we're at the mercy of that unruly brat, my inner child.

Heck, even just looking at the pomegranate pictures, I’m not at all sure which variation-on-a-theme I like best, so I’ll post three: The image as I shot it (I had about 10 seconds to shoot, as the cook was breathing down my neck, antsy to make her salad...) Then a version where I made the background black and white; and another one, cropped.

Please! Someone come and take control of this computer! There’s an inner child acting out.

Pot-Luck Dinner

2010-12-14T11:05:00.000-08:00

Whenever Leah and I get together with our friends in the Seattle-area Tibetan/American community, I feel -- though it seems that neither of these things can be possible -- that the children have become even cuter than they were when we last saw them, and the adults even more welcoming of us.

I’m getting the impression that our Tibetan friends love an excuse to get together and socialize, but even more than that they enjoy sharing good food and celebrating their culture. Last weekend our friends invited Leah and me to a potluck dinner celebrating the 21st anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize. We’d barely walked in the door for the event when cups of sweet tea and plates of snacks were placed in our hands, and the welcoming hugs and good-to-see-you greetings began.

Leah had baked Western-style holiday cookies, and the Tibetan women accepted those with smiles and warmth, placing the cookies on a long table already filled with Tibetan, Indian, and other Asian dishes. Because I’m not much of a cook, my contribution to the evening, as usual, was to make photographs for the community’s web site.

The children, dressed in traditional, celebratory costumes, sang and danced. Everyone ate a lot, and we all enjoyed being together.

Now we need to come up with an excuse for the next get-together.

Worthy of the Moment

2010-12-10T11:37:00.000-08:00

A week or two ago I was out working in the barn, noticed our sheep Smokey standing in the critter door, and what I saw caused the PICTURE!!! light to flash on in my head. Smokey was chewing his cud and looked quite contented, the barn wall near him had interesting shapes, and there was beautiful light. I pulled out my pocket camera, made a number of photographs of the moment, and felt good about the images I’d gotten.

Later, at my computer, I realized, sadly, that my normally reliable little camera had missed focus and Smokey was a blur. And though I know that there’s always tomorrow and other worthy photographs will present themselves, I was bummed that I’d missed that picture. I did like what I’d seen, and I wanted an image to honor what I thought was a fairly special, lots-of-unique-elements-coming-together moment.

Diary pictures are like that: They’re about preserving a memory. Sure, a moment is still in my heart, picture or no. But there's no denying that a photograph helps me remember.

But this story has a happy ending. Yesterday I was out near the barn again. I realized Smokey was standing, maybe not in the same spot as before, but at least near it. And he was contentedly burping and chewing. The light was good. I had a camera over my shoulder, a real, pro-level camera. I entered the barn, fearing that there was no way Smokey would continue to stand there.
Our goat Pumpkin, ever the friendly (though also distracting) girl, chewed on my ear and breathed goat breath in my face as I picked a spot where I could shoot. Smokey did move a bit...exactly to where he’d stood for my earlier, missed-attempt.

Success!

Finally, a picture worthy of the experience!

An App for That

2010-12-08T10:41:00.000-08:00

Leah and I went to see the new Harry Potter movie one evening last week at a small theater in our equally small town. The movie is two-and-a-half hours long so the theater owner announced that he wouldn’t prolong his patrons’ seat time by showing previews of coming films.

Many people had arrived early to get a seat for the film, since it was only recently released and I guess many of us reasoned that there would be a big crowd. Folks were still trickling in as those of us who already had seats fidgeted and waited the few minutes before the movie would begin.

And then a funny thing happened. A man seated in front of me got out his cell phone and began playing a video game. A woman behind us used her phone to make a call, and the people to our left and right pulled out their phones too. I was a bit taken-aback that, even in these days when everyone has phones and many of us are hooked on playing with them, here were folks, about to sit and view over two hours of cinematic escapism, using their phones to fill (escape from?) the maybe two minutes of “free time.”

Geez we human beings are something.

***

The day after the movie, Leah and I were on a ferry crossing Puget Sound, headed to Seattle for an evening out with friends. The ferry trip takes about 30 minutes and I decided to take advantage of the time and call my Mom. As we chatted -- I love my mother dearly and my mind was on our conversation, not on whatever was going on around me -- I happened to glance out the window of the ferry. An incredible sunset was going on and, preoccupied as I was with the call, I nevertheless knew I had a picture to take. Mom understood when I explained about the sunset and asked if I could call her back.

Click on the picture to see it at a size that does justice to the scene. Meanwhile, I’m gonna go invent a cell phone app that helps us know when we should be using the phone...and when we should maybe put it away.

Drive-by Beauty

2010-12-03T10:04:00.001-08:00

There’s a waterfall I often photograph when I'm on my way out to the Washington coast. The waterfall isn’t terribly large and it’s right beside a busy road. Cars woosh past the waterfall and I suspect many drivers don’t even see it.

I've stopped at the spot dozens of times, however. There’s a wide shoulder beside the road a short walk away from the falls. I park my car, shoulder my camera bag and tripod, and go visit my little friend, the waterfall.

It’s really quite something, that drippy, verdant wall. Huge gobs of moss cling to the rocky hillside, and ferns grow like crazy there.

It’s kind of too bad that the road is so close to the falls, and that, if they see the falls at all, most people only look at it from a car window. It’s a place that can’t be appreciated at 50 miles an hour.

House Guests

2010-11-30T20:19:00.000-08:00

We had a fair number of house guests this summer, friends and family who came here and stayed at our place for a day, a week, or two. Leah and I honestly enjoy sharing our home with those we’re close to, so we were fine with the revolving door of visitors, the constantly changing cast of characters who were sharing meals with us by day and sleeping in our guest room by night.

Having visitors who want to come hang out with you is pretty much part of the deal when you live in a place as wonderful as the Pacific Northwest. This is a vacation destination, what with the recreational possibilities to be had in our nearby mountains and at the Pacific Ocean beaches...and then there is also the lure of all there is to do in the uber-cool city of Seattle.

The funny thing is, however, that when folks visit Leah and me, they often don’t actually make it to the mountains or the ocean, or even to Seattle, though the city is less than an hour from our door. They hang out in our yard, napping on the hammock, or they sit under a tree reading. They spend time in the pasture, watching -- I’m absolutely not joking here -- our goat Pumpkin chew her cud.

The honest truth is that there’s not much “cool” to do at my house. We don’t have a big-screen TV, or video games, and thankfully, that seems fine with our guests. Watching Pumpkin chew her cud is what passes for Big Entertainment here.

And that’s the way we -- and our visitors -- like it.

Seeing Art

2010-11-26T10:49:00.000-08:00

When I was a freshman at Ohio State and was taking one of my first photography classes -- the time was the hippie-dippy early 70’s, the class was in the School of Art, and weirdness was very cool, as will be obvious in a moment -- I remember the day one of my fellow students, a beautiful young hippie chick (a descriptive term she would have been more than fine with) brought to class a print she had made. It was a black and white image, archivally processed, matted, and signed.

It was Art. And it was a picture of a penis.

Yes, the hippie chick had turned in (for academic credit, mind you) a really close-up, every-detail-in-sharp-focus photograph of a penis. And even in those free-and-easy, antiestablishment days, in that anything-goes classroom, everyone in class (including the professor, a bearded, blue-jeaned, sandal-wearing type not much older than the students) was taken-aback.

“What are you trying to say with your photograph,?” the professor asked, hoping I suppose to, um, stimulate artistic dialog.

“Oh, I dunno,” the young woman said, “I just kinda felt like being weird.” To which I’m sure we all replied: “Far Out.”

***

The above story came to mind this morning, as I guess I was feeling weird about an image I had made, a photograph not normally my style. I was out for a walk down a country lane near our house and I came upon a scene: A yoga ball, for some reason left by someone near an abandoned, fallen-down building. I took the picture, thinking that later I'd do some funky stuff to the image color saturation in Photoshop...and, you know what? I kind of like the picture. (There are even a couple of patches of melting snow, remnants from our recent storm...melting snow that's normally kind of dead-snow-ugly, but I like it that those are in the scene too.) The image is not my typical thing, but I like it anyway.

Far out.

Regional Fib

2010-11-23T08:32:00.000-08:00

The wind is howling outside, the snow is blowing sideways, the lights are flickering, and there’s no telling how long my electricity-dependent Internet connection will last. I had better post these pictures before my link with the cyber-world gets cut.

Snow: It’s Big News in Seattle. When we moved here from Ohio 30 years ago, people we first met admitted that winters here are too rainy, dark, and depressing, but the locals added, a bit defensively, that at least it doesn’t snow very often. In fact I remember being told that the city only had a couple of snow plows.

I’m embarrassed to say that Leah and I bought into the regional weather fib. “It never snows here,” is what I think we told our family members back in Ohio, where winter can be brutal. We didn’t say “rarely,” or “seldom,” when talking about instances of snowfall, though that would been at least a tiny bit more accurate. We said “never.”

And so -- because Mother Nature is nothing if not a woman with a sense of wry humor -- our family lore is full of stories, instance upon instance, when Ohio relatives have traveled here to visit us, only to experience a record-setting Puget Sound snowstorm. My Mom came out last Christmas and it snowed a ton; this week Leah’s parents were here and the pictures I’m posting today are my chagrined chronicle of what we saw as we looked out our windows.

That first day, the snow fell gently and silently and everything was so very peaceful. Day number two brought nasty wind, ice on the roadways, trees falling on power lines. Friends of ours have been without power for two days now and they've had quite enough of life lived in down coats, down sleeping bags, and "winter camping."

Okay, I guess it does snow here.

Seeing Prayers

2010-11-19T08:24:00.000-08:00

My Tibetan friends gathered last weekend at their monastery in Seattle to offer prayers for long life and good health for the Dalai Lama. I was there to honor the event, and to make photographs for my ongoing personal project on Tibetans in Seattle.

There was seriousness and solemnity in the air as the monk, Khenpo Jampa, began chanting prayers in Tibetan and the 75 or so people in attendance joined in. I worked quietly and respectfully from a distant corner of the room, my camera and a long lens on a tripod. Though my camera was set to “silent” mode, I nevertheless took only a limited number of photographs...and then only when I was sure the moment was right. I did not want to intrude.

Tibetan families are close-knit, and parents often bring their little ones to prayers. A young boy (I’m sure he was not old enough to read) followed the example set by adults and held up a prayer book, but, in the end, it was a sucker that got his full attention.

Pleasant Distractions

2010-11-16T09:17:00.000-08:00

I go to our kitchen sink, thinking I’ll get water to make tea. I reach for the faucet but see something out of the corner of my eye.

There’s Light! Or Composition! The Christmas cactus is blooming and looks Amazing, or sun is shining through some wild bird feathers that Leah picked up outside and placed on the kitchen window sill.

A photograph has presented itself.

Making tea will have to wait till later.

Right now I have pictures to take.

Coming Together

2010-11-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

I’ve written here before about my growing involvement with the Seattle area Tibetan community, but something that should have been obvious dawned on me only recently: By no means is every individual in that “community” Tibetan.

It’s funny how circumstances bring human beings together.

Several years ago, two friends of mine who live in Seattle, one man an American, the other born in Tibet, got to talking. The American asked the Tibetan what he remembered of his boyhood in his home village. As the Tibetan reminisced, he eventually admitted that one day he’d like to go back to the village to visit his sister who still lives there, but that the airfare was very expensive. The American had always wanted to see Tibet, and so he offered to pay the airfare so that the two, together, could go to that village high on the Tibetan plateau, above 15,000 feet.

They went, and some of the pictures of what they experienced on their trip are posted here.

Though sanitation and hot water are “realities” we take for granted in the developed world, the village my friends visited does without. The two travelers decided to do what they could to bring clean, hot water to the village in that high, cold land.

And so, back in Seattle, my two friends organized a fundraiser. Last weekend members of the “Tibetan community” here came together for the benefit of a village half a world away. My two friends sold prints of their Tibetan pictures (I helped with some Photoshop work on the pictures, and also donated images of my own for sale.) Other people donated food, while those with musical talents contributed entertainment.

We shared an evening of singing and dancing, all in the hope that one community, ours, can help another.

Yes, it’s funny how circumstances bring human beings together.

Life with Pumpkin

2010-11-09T09:32:00.001-08:00

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I shot the picture you see above, but already, with the coming of autumn, the picture is beginning to feel like ancient history. Many of the leaves have fallen from the trees, and the goat, Pumpkin, has subsequently ambled along and gobbled them up, keeping her pasture neat and tidy, her tummy full.

Pumpkin loves to eat leaves, though I must add that there isn’t much that a goat won’t eat. Yesterday I was in our chicken house, emptying a 40-pound paper sack of corn into the feeder bin. Walking through Pumpkin’s part of our barn a few minutes later with the empty bag under my arm, the goat stole a mouthful of the brown paper and then stood munching her sack snack, a look of great contentment on her goofy, lovable face.

Postcards

2010-11-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

Leah, our friend Jimi, and I have gotten into sending what we call “email postcards” to one-another. We take pictures of everyday happenings in our lives (Leah and Jimi tend to use the cameras in their phones to do these pictures, while I use a conventional digital camera) and then we email the resulting images to one-another.

Yesterday I took some friends for a walk on a beach in Port Townsend and I shot the photograph you see above. Earlier this week Leah was on a ferry headed to work in Seattle and she made the email postcard photo you see below of water drops on the ferry window at sunrise.

"It's a nice day here. Love to you," we'll write. The email postcards are a way we three good buds can stay in close contact and let one-another know that we’re thinking about them.

Kinda fun.

Driving Miss Daisy

2010-11-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

Because she’s experienced vision problems in the past few years and my mother can no longer drive her car, a visit back home for me now means I do my “Driving Miss Daisy” thing, taking Mom to some of the places she enjoys but can no longer visit on her own.

I was in Ohio last week and my agenda for the trip was to rake leaves in Mom’s yard and do other fall/pre-winter home maintenance jobs, but Mom had other plans in mind. She’d allow me to rake for an hour or so, then she’d stand in front of me in the yard and say: “I don’t want you to work all the time you’re here. Let’s go someplace fun.”

So, as we nearly always do when I’m back home, we got in the car and drove to Holmes County, Ohio’s “Amish Country.” We poked around in a store that caters to the Amish -- the store is full of candles, oil lamps, wood stoves, and other non-electrical items the Amish use -- and we had lunch at our usual spot, a little country diner that serves big, working-person plates of food for small, middle-America prices (check total for two lunches: $5.)

Another day we visited Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music, one of the schools where Mom studied. I took photographs of amazing fall colors outside the Conservatory building, and, as students strolled by, I joked with Mom that I could remember a time when I was in high school and Oberlin students seemed mature, sophisticated, and artist-fringe-intellectual to me. All the students I saw last week, however, looked so very young... my joke’s unstated punch line being that either I’ve gotten much older and my perceptions have changed, or Oberlin College now has a student body comprised of 13-year-olds.

Frightful Art

2010-10-29T08:19:00.000-07:00

One of the things I enjoy most about writing these blog posts is that, as a photographer, words are not my first language. I’m a visual guy, and if I have any communicative fluency at all, it’s through imagery, not the written word.

Yes, people who read my blog posts sometimes tell me they think I write well. But the truth is that putting words together so that they blend in a pleasing manner is enjoyable for me because I’m a glutton for punishment and I seem to relish doing things that are difficult. Heck, I’ve climbed Mt. Rainier eight times and I’ve ridden the annual Seattle-to-Portland bike epic more years than I can count. Thus my credentials as a masochist and a fellow who loves a challenge are well-established. And writing, for me, is certainly a challenge.

None of the above really has anything to do with the photo I’m posting today of fall colors in Port Townsend, except that I'm always thinking about the creative process that goes into the making of many kinds of art, and often that means I look in awe at the work done by writers. As an avid reader, I can't help but admire the courage it must take for a real writer to look at a blank piece of paper or computer screen, pull words out of the imagination and assemble them in a way that gives life to a story, or brings literature into my brain like notes of sweet music.

To readers like me, the writing process is wonderfully, weirdly mysterious, even spooky. Maybe it's because Halloween is right around the corner, but today I'm thinking it's a good idea to look right in the face of things that scare us.

To writing, I say: "BOO!"

Panoramas

2010-10-26T06:11:00.001-07:00

It was exactly three years ago that we trekked in Nepal and I made the photographs you see here.

Leah and I had walked and walked and walked in the Himalaya (more often than not up-up-up) for most of October, 2007. There were a number of things we’d hoped to see and experience on the trek -- the amazing and famous Buddhist festival, Mani Rimdu at the Tengboche Monastery, for one -- but, as a photographer and a once-upon-a-time mountain climber, I must admit that I had been trekking with my sights set on the highest peak on our planet. My research told me that there was a spot known as Kala Pattar (Black Peak) that would give me a great view of Mt. Everest. My plan was to be at Kala Pattar for sunset; if I was lucky, I’d be able to photograph Lady Everest bathed in the last, golden light of the day.

As you can see above, I was fortunate that October evening. Everest did look beautiful, but I must say it was her neighboring little sister, Nuptse, who stole my heart. Everest was a trifle too-clear, a bit too-perfect, while Nuptse flirted with beautiful, dramatic clouds.

Now, three years later, my heart still belongs to Nuptse.

I made a number of individual, left-to-right, panorama photographs that evening, and this week I decided it was time to piece them together. You can click on the panoramas to see them at a more impressive size.

Oh, I do miss Nepal.

Community

2010-10-23T10:48:00.001-07:00

This felt like a good week to unplug.

Radio, TV, my email inbox, all are filled with political ads urging me to join this fight, ward off an attack by that group. I’m sick of it, this partisanship, this battling and negativism. I’m absolutely OD’d with each side portraying the other as evil or some kind of enemy.

So I said “Enough, already!” Leah and I had a friend coming to town for several days and her visit put us in Tour Guide mode. We took our guest on short day trips to show her the sights, which happily also got us away from all media. We literally walked away from our connected lives.

One of our outings found us on a ferry, crossing Puget Sound, and I photographed a young mother joyously playing with her baby (after taking the pictures I told the woman how to reach me for a free photo.) Another day we went to Bainbridge Island and took a long, chatty hike, wandering several miles with dry leaves crunching under our boots and, eventually, stopping near the shore at sunset as a kayaker paddled past. We waved and shouted greetings, and again I offered a gift photo.

Being out of touch, removed from the noise and divisiveness of the week, put us in touch with the people we happened to encounter.

There is a commonality and a community out there that isn’t getting much air time, but is worth seeking out.

Growin Up

2010-10-19T03:51:00.001-07:00

Can you remember the time in your life when you dreamed about what you might be when you grew up?

Well, I turned 57 yesterday and, though that sounds like a lot of years that are behind me, I caught myself feeling like I’m still on my way toward growing up. I spent my birthday eating WAY too many chocolate chip cookies and understanding that, contrary to what I assumed when I was five years old, it’s turned out that “growing up” has been a journey that’s had no end point. The path just goes on, and on, and on.

Quite humbling, exciting, and downright amazing, really.

For many years, what I’ve wanted to be, of course, is a photographer. But each day I see new things and I grow a bit as a human being, so that the thing that is “me” one day, as well as the images that are “my work,” are an ever-changing work-in-progress.

I was in Seattle last week and I stopped at the REI store to look for a pair of shoes. Walking from the parking garage toward REI’s front door, I passed a small, decorative pond, and the late afternoon fall light was reflected in the water and I pulled the camera out of my pocket.

You just never know: You think you are going shopping for shoes when up pops an unexpected little surprise.

You just never know.

Waking Up

2010-10-15T15:20:00.001-07:00

I admit that I think I am younger than I am. I mean, my 57th birthday will roll around next week but because I’m a hiker and a cyclist and a sometimes-runner, I feel fit and healthy and, yes, young.

I recently admitted to my mother-in-law, however, that I’ve been young for very long time.

Several days this week I had early-morning commitments that had my yawning, sleepy-eyed, soon-to-be-a-year-older self out of bed, dressed, and driving through nearby small towns and headed toward Seattle as dawn broke. I realized that my cameras and I have been watching places wake up for more than 30 years.

In my newspaper days in Ohio, I’d work on picture stories about small towns and I often felt I'd get my best sense of the community by being there early, watching it wake up. I’d be at Suzy-Q’s Breakfast Bar or the Sit-n-Sip or the Chatterbox, and the working men would come wandering in for a cup-a-joe and they’d gripe about the weather or the boss, and off in the corner of the restaurant a TV would be tuned to the Today Show but nobody would be watching because the men were sick of hearing about the Watergate tapes or Nixon’s problems with the Special Prosecutor.

(Oh my, I am going on, eh? Sounding, I suppose, like a man with a touch of Birthday Melancholy?)

Anyway... the mornings I witnessed this week were particularly beautiful, and I made time to stop and take landscape pictures before I continued on toward my commitments in the city.

If you click on the pictures, you can see them at a larger size.

Imagine

2010-10-13T07:33:00.001-07:00

I guess that over the years he’ll mature and perhaps by the time he’s an adult he’ll have learned to see things less imaginatively, but right now my nephew Killian is three years old and he believes some horses are blue.

Not all horses are blue, of course. Killian knows that even now. Just some horses are blue...very special horses are blue.

Killian, his baby sister and mom and dad, live in Montana but came here for a visit several weeks ago, and that’s when Killian met the horse, Rusty, who is pastured near our place. Rusty is not a blue horse, but he does have blue eyes. Killian and Uncle Kurt made many visits to the pasture to give Rusty apples, and the big horse was noticeably gentle as he took the apples from the child’s hand.

Now Killian and his family are back home in Montana, and I’m told that Killian talks pretty much nonstop about horses, and about the very rare, blue horse he insists is out there, somewhere.

Here at my place -- and without a three-year-old to keep me company -- I wander down to Rusty’s pasture to give the horse an apple. I’m finding that if my visit is done in the evening (and my camera is set so that the color balance is a bit on the blue side,) Rusty seems, magically, to become blue.

Imagine: A Blue Horse. Right next door! How cool is that?

Anemone

2010-10-09T06:03:00.000-07:00

I shot this photograph three days ago and I've been thinking ever since about what I might write about the picture.

I haven't come up with a single idea that works for me.

So: Either I am a writer utterly lacking in imagination, or a photographer who has managed to make an image that needs no words.

Or something...

Puppy High

2010-10-05T14:37:00.000-07:00

Call me a busybody, but when I found out that one of our neighbors has five new puppies at her place, I put the word out around here that a mass visitation was in order, and several of us dropped by, Welcome Wagon-style, to say howdy to the newcomers.

Oh man! there’s nothing better than PUPPIES to improve one’s day! I’ve been spending most of my time this week indoors, chained to my computer, not getting much fresh air...and I’ve certainly not had an opportunity to take in the sweetest air to be found on this planet: Puppy Breath!

Throughout our visit, my neighbors and I were nose-smudged and licked to the n’th degree, and today we’re all High on Life. As I sit here typing, there are not enough exclamation points or computer-generated smiley-faces in this world for me convey what a warm and fuzzy time we had, lovin’ up them PUPPIES.

Puppies, you ROCK!!!

Tell-All

2010-10-03T17:12:00.001-07:00

Maybe it’s a consequence of all the Bridezilla, Weddings-From-Hell shows on TV or something, but whenever someone asks me what I do for a living and I say I photograph weddings, the reaction I hear is invariably something like:

“Oh, you must have stories to tell...” Or
“I bet you have to deal with some really crazy people.” Or
“You should write a book about your wacky wedding experiences”... (I sense the person I’m talking with is picturing me on “Oprah,” telling ALL.)

Call me Pollyanna (not to mention not Oprah-worthy) but my personal feeling about weddings is that they’re usually sweet and wonderful. I look for good intentions or humor in whatever people do or say. For instance:

About a month ago I was shooting a wedding and I noticed a young female guest (she was perhaps in her 20’s) who was also taking pictures. I saw that she was using a high-end snapshot camera, a Canon S95, the same camera I carry in my pocket when I’m not working. My S95 is often what I pull out for everyday, at-home snapshots (including the picture you see above of our cat, Basil, and the self-portrait below of me with my cat friend.)

“That’s a wonderful camera you have,” I told the young woman. “I own one too. I like how small it is.”

Then, trying to be funny (in my 56-year-old guy way) I added: “The camera is so small, I can have it in my pants pocket, even when I’m wearing tight jeans.”

I could tell immediately by the look on her face that the young woman did not get my joke. With utterly innocent empathy and compassion in her words, she replied in a way that reminded me why men my age should not try to have even brief conversations with women half our age.

“That’s so cool that you can still wear tight jeans,” she said.

And I thought: “Maybe I do need to write a book about my wedding experiences.”

Little Things

2010-09-28T12:25:00.001-07:00

I remember being in kindergarten and working on an art project where my classmates and I made imprints of our hands in clay. I remember that art project like I created it yesterday.

I glazed my hand-imprint-clay-glob a boyish, dark blue color, and then my teacher sent it off to be fired in a kiln. My classmates and I later wrapped our hand imprints in tissue paper and proudly presented them to our moms on Mother’s Day...a gift-giving of such import that today, some 50 years later, my Mom still has my blue clay glob in her house.

I recall how eager-for-approval I was when I gave my mother the art project, and I can picture quite vividly that my mother opened the gift and gushed about what an amazing artist I was. I’ll never forget how proud I felt to have made her happy on her special day.

This week I had a flashback to that experience of creating something and then hearing, happily, that someone enjoyed my art. I shot the picture you see above on a recent hike on the Washington Coast. Leah saw the photograph later and enthused that it’s one of her favorite ocean pictures of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, that I’ve shot over the years.

Leah loaded the picture onto the new, “smart” cell phone she bought recently (Leah is not one to make a big deal about possessions, but she really loves that phone.) She made the ocean picture the background to her phone’s main page, and I felt like I was five-years-old all over again.

To be honest, the picture to me seemed like a bit of a snapshot...but Leah liked it. That's all that mattered.

Here I am, a photographer in his mid-50’s, but if, during my career, I’d had FIFTY of my pictures published on the cover of National Geographic (in reality I’ve had just one,) I wouldn’t have felt the rush of acceptance as completely as I did this week when Leah put the ocean picture on her phone.

Maybe it’s just a human trait that little things can mean a lot to us.

Fall Getaway

2010-09-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

This is the time in the seasons when Leah and I feel like we are in need of a change in scenery. I can’t really say why this is so...why this desire to go someplace, this antsy-ness, seems to be autumnal in nature, but it is.

Maybe we sense the winter season is not too far off, and we know the rains will soon saturate the lowlands of the Puget Sound region and snows will blanket the mountains that surround us...all this meaning we’ll be spending more time than usual indoors.

Leah and I have found that the antidote to our itchy, fall wanderlust isn’t necessarily a long trip, just a trip: A three hour drive to the Washington coast will be fine, or, better yet, a road trip east to the rain shadowed, sunny side of the Cascades.

Earlier this week three travelers -- Leah, our friend Jim, and I -- drove east over the North Cascades Highway and into the Methow Valley, a place of incredible, high desert beauty. We rented a cabin that served as our base camp for exploration and good times.

We hiked picturesque trails and took in views that stretched from here to infinity; we stood in an open field one night and beheld a harvest moon that turned darkness into near-daylight.

We did this trip, intending perhaps to get away from it all, but finding, I think, great appreciation of the here and now.

Painting with Light

2010-09-21T14:53:00.000-07:00

I remember the first day of the first photography class I took in college.
I can picture very clearly in my mind’s eye -- now 35 years removed from that classroom -- the professor sanding before my classmates and me, looking us over, sizing us up. I remember too the first thing the professor did. He asked us: “Does anyone here know the definition of Photography”?

I remember that question very well because...none of the students, myself included, had an answer. There was a sense in the air that we students had failed our First Big Test in a class that had barely begun.

“Photography means: “Painting with Light,” the professor said, casting a chilling scowl toward a hopeless lot of pathetic wretches.

That little 35-year-old scene popped into my head early last evening as my friend Jim and I hiked down a Pacific Ocean beach in the Olympic National Park. Jim is a fellow photographer I’ve known my entire professional career. There were other hikers out on that beach last night, but they were finishing their day’s outings and were headed back toward the trailhead and their cars, as Jim and I were just getting started.

Jim and I had a plan, you see. We wanted to be on the beach when the light was good. We wanted to paint with that good light.

We hiked for about 45 minutes. The sun was beginning to sink toward the western horizon when my friend and I arrived at some ocean sea stacks we’ve visited and photographed before. We set up our camera gear and then we waited. The light got better and better. We used our cameras to play with the visual elements of the stark rock formations, and we reveled in that beautiful sunset light.

Even after the sun slipped below the horizon, the light show went on. Warm reds and oranges were replaced by cool blues.

Some time later we repacked our gear and retraced the route we had walked earlier, down the now dusky beach. Eventually the full moon rose to light the way for us, back to the trailhead and our car.

It was a perfect evening to be out.

In the Service

2010-09-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

I have a young friend who is in the US Army and is serving in Afghanistan. I heard the other day that my friend’s tour will end at Christmas, which is of course good news for his family and others who are close to him.

The friend worked with me at weddings for a while, back a number of years ago when he was a college student with a growing interest in photography. He had a wonderful eye and talent for making images, and he went on to shoot for newspapers for several years. I guess photography wasn’t difficult enough for him because he decided to join the Army, where he trained as a paratrooper.

I’ve climbed many mountains here in the Northwest, and being up in airy places doesn’t scare me. I can’t imagine, however, jumping out of an airplane. My young friend has courage that impresses me beyond words.

A couple of weeks ago I photographed a wedding where the groom is a Navy pilot. He wore his dress whites for the ceremony, as did members of his squadron. After the ceremony, when the bride and groom were formally introduced to the wedding guests at the reception, the men from the squadron formed an archway with swords, through which the newly married couple passed. It was a very cool thing to see.

I later learned that the groom and his squadron recently returned from deployment in Afghanistan.

All these folks who are now or have been serving in Afghanistan got me to mulling over the idea of “service,” ... a word that could be spelled serve-us. I got to thinking about all the people I know who, in one way on another, serve others: Family members who volunteer at church; a friend who runs a nonprofit foundation for families who have a child with a life-threatening illness; neighbors who donate produce to the local food bank. I could go on and on. I was kind of amazed to realize that I couldn’t think of one person I know who does not do something to be of service...

To serve-us.

Leaving Notes

2010-09-15T12:16:00.001-07:00

One of the things I hear fairly often when I’m shooting a wedding ceremony is Relationship Advice. Though the advice is not directed at me per se -- as a Priest or a Rabbi or some other learned official stands in front of the couple being married and talks to them, publicly, about challenges they’ll face in their coming years together -- the wedding guests (and I) certainly benefit by the lecture nevertheless.

I remember one minister who addressed the guests, telling them: “If a year or 10 years from now, you guys are out with the groom, or you ladies are out with the bride, and he or she begins to gripe about something their mate has done, your responsibility is to be a friend of the marriage, not of the bride or groom. Tell the bride or groom you don’t want to hear their griping; encourage them to go home and communicate with their mate, to fix things."

It’s interesting how we human beings communicate with one another. Just this morning, for example, as I did chores out at our barn, I saw a feather that I realized Leah had found and tucked under a fence post wire. I took Leah’s impromptu, feather-on-the-post art installation to be a kind of note to me, which I interpreted to read: “Hey, check this out! Pretty cool, huh?”

I’m fairly sure I’m correct in what my mate meant to communicate to me through that feather, though I also suspect that, had she been there in person, she would have gently added: “While you are in the barn, could you please give the sheep fresh water, and feed the chickens, and...”

Playing the Cute Card

2010-09-10T18:54:00.000-07:00

I don’t know about you as the audience, dear reader, but earlier this week your obedient photographic thespian (that would be me) so enjoyed doing a post of newborn baby pictures that I’m going to go for an encore.

Wassup with all these babies in my life these days? Could it be that there is something in the water around here? It seems like a lot of babies are being born...or at least babies are being born to couples whose weddings I shot in recent years.

Whatever it is that's bringing all these babies into my photographic life, I'm fine with it. There are worse things I might be asked to photograph than cute.

Cute is a good thing...though it might be said that babies are also wondrous, and precious, and...