The Wind God

We have had more rain everyday and some hail again yesterday afternoon. It cleared for a while but about 9:30 PM it started raining hard again and rained......until sometime after I was asleep. Of course we also had some wind with the rain but that wasn't the wind that makes me think of the Wind God.

Sometimes on a perfectly still day a ferocious wind will whip into our tree and down into the patio. It isn't the wind preceding a storm, it isn't a wind from the street, it is sudden intense and localized. Every time I'm in that phenomenon I can't help but think of Mixtli, the main character in Gary Jenning's book Aztec. At times in his life he was enveloped by a sudden wind from no where and was given guidance by a wise old man in the wind.

I've looked to see if I could find information about a "Wind God" in pre-hispanic Mexico but the closest I came was Quetzalcoatl.

QUETZALCOATL - God of Civilization and Learning
Quetzalcoatl is called The Feathered Serpent and is often portrayed in this form. He is also said to appear as a wise old man with a black beard. He is one of the greatest gods and is viewed as the most kindly disposed toward man. He is said to have taught men the secrets of the calendar and science. Many credit him with the discovery of poetry, corn, and irrigation. Those who seek enlightenment, truth, and knowledge say prayers to him. He commands the wind and the rising of the evening star Venus. Quetzalcoatl teaches men to act with kindness and understanding toward others. He seeks the end of strife. His priests hold life in high regard and refrain from practicing the sacrifice rituals.

Whenever this wind envelops our patio it always feels so strange and ominous. I've listened but so far Quetzalcoatl has not spoken to me.

Hail in San Miguel

The storm came out of nowhere. Usually we see it coming from the hills around us moving in a mass of dark clouds with shafts of dark blue reaching to the earth with rain. Not yesterday. The sky wasn't that dark but dark enough to make you think we might get some rain this afternoon. Almost as soon as the thought passed through my mind, the temperature dropped and big splats started hitting the windows. The rain came in sheets from the North and East. As usual with hard driving rains, we had some rain under the windows on the wind side. As I got a few towels, I heard the first few pings.....hail on the skylight. But then the pings become thunder. Pea size hail was gathering on patio and on the terraces. In the corners it looked a little like snow.....well as much as anything can look like snow in San Miguel. The hail lasted about 10 minutes but the hard rain continued for maybe 45 minutes. Refugio Norte looked like a river with rapids as the water rushed down the hill.

The rain stopped. The sky cleared. The air was cool and crystal clear. It was another beautiful night in San Miguel.

An Everyday Saturday Night

Date night? Seems kind of silly for a couple who have been married for 50 years but we still like to go out, just the two of us, for dinner about once a week. Last Saturday night it was into the Centro and dinner at El Correo Cafe. We had a nice dinner and good conversation.....now don't ask me what someone who has been married so long has to talk about but we do have things to talk about.

After dinner we weren't quite ready to head for home so we walked through the Jardin. On the far side of the Jardin, there was a Mariachi band playing so we headed for the music....but there was also singing and dancing. We became part of the circle that was enjoying watching people having a great time. Lots of the Mexicans in the watching circle were recording the fun with camera and video. The people dancing were in their golden years but they were laughing and clowning for the cameras. It was great fun. One of the women from the group came up and started talking to us in Spanish. She said that when she was a girl she lived in San Miguel and her father was an official in the Presidencia that was across the street. Now she lived in Monterrey and that this group of people were all in their 70's. You might have guessed that from the gray in their hair but you couldn't tell that from their energetic dancing. A charter bus pulled up on the street and they made their way down the steps to the music of the Mariachis and on to the bus. Our new found friend told us that they were on their way to San Luis Potosi.

After the bus pulled away, we headed over by the Parroquia and noticed that on the side steps fireworks were being set up. We weren't sure what the occasion was but Ned asked the fireworks guys when would the fireworks start. They said at 9:00 PM. It wasn't too far off. We talked to another couple on the street and found out that they were from College Station, Texas and were visiting San Miguel.

Just when we were settling down to wait for the fireworks to start, because surely they really wouldn't start on time, they started at 9:00 PM on the dot. It wasn't a huge display but from standing almost directly under the exploding stars against a midnight colored sky it seemed most magical. Magical except when a few of the smaller rockets came blasting into the crowd where we were standing. With shrieks and giggles we all dashed out of the line of fire....yes, Ned and I DASHED...and yes, we still know how to dash especially when fiery missiles are coming at you.

After it was over, we walked back home still trying to figure out what the occasion was for the fireworks.

Richard Renaldi: Figure and Ground

Last year when I read in Conscientious, Joerg Colberg's blog, an interview with Richard Renaldi about his book, Figure and Ground, I added that book to my ever expanding Amazon wish list. I brought it back with me in May and I'm just getting around to studying it. In fact, I brought back several photography books of portraiture. Not sure why that seems to be my interest now but I guess time will reveal the "why." And portraiture seems to be a "headline" in the photographic community now with lots on the web about a new gallery exhibition titled A New American Portrait at Jan Bekman's Gallery in New York City.

I hope that you'll read Colberg's interview with Renaldi. But basically Renaldi works with an 8x10 view camera. You don't just "grab" a shot with any view camera. You have to have a relationship and cooperation of the subject. I almost got off on the wrong foot in looking at these portraits because of a sentence on the front jacket:

If there is a truly a new center to the American social landscape, it can be found here, in Renaldi's precisely and beautifully rendered portraits.

This set up an expectation for what I was going to see and what I saw was passengers in bus stations, people in tattoo parlours, workers in fast food restaurants, dying small towns, a transgender girl, a woman in a burqa. Are these images really the new center of the American social landscape? Has our center shifted that much? Where have I been? At any rate that one sentence affected how I initially looked at the images.

And I started thinking about some other photographer's books and it seems that the photography projects most likely to be published are not about the center but are about the edges of culture. Take Avedon's, The American West.....the types and features of people pushed to the edge. Dave Anderson's and O. Rufus Lovett's recent books, Rough Beauty and Weeping Mary, both around communities on the edge. Daniela Rossell's book, Rica Y Famosas about the life styles of Mexico's ultra wealthy. I could name some others but I think you get the idea.

It is always good when you have to analyze your reactions to images. It means that you've learned something from them and something about yourself. I don't believe that Figure and Ground is the new center of the American social landscape....at least not yet but my reaction sent me back to Colberg's interview with Renaldi and it sent me back to look at the images several more times. Renaldi's portraits are in my opinion about people on the edge, lost, changing, searching. But it is a powerful book of portraits and environments.

Hidden in Plain Sight

A friend wrote a private email to me about my last blog entry on Playing, "What an eye! I would never think of taking a playground photo like that." And then I read in the New York Times an article about a new photography exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hidden in Plain Sight.

When artists talk about “training the eye,” they generally don’t mean doing exercises to maintain 20/20 vision. They mean honing a set of instincts, learning to see relationships among colors or objects or spaces. The title of this small but potent collection of contemporary photographs from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection describes this kind of vision another way: seeing what is “Hidden in Plain Sight.” The show focuses mostly on versions of street, rather than studio, photography.

The article also quotes Henry David Thoreau diary entry in August 1851:

The question is not what you look at but what you see.

This idea of training the eye and really looking was also brought home this week when I watched the movie Fur which is loosely based on the life of photographer, Diane Arbus, not so much about her photography but about her demons and breaking out of the life that she was expected to live. All through the movie you see her looking, looking closely, really seeing. At one point in the movie at a party there are short segments of her looking closely at people....a chin jutted upward, lips pursed and a shaft of smoke emerging. Not a flattering tidbit about the person. And you knew that she would be looking for these moments when she finally broke out and started photographing on her own.

And then this week on Paul Butzi's blog, Musings on Photography, Paul has been writing about the difference in seeing and taking photographs. He says that we can only photograph what we see and what we see is limited by our personalities. Maybe that is why I could never, ever, make any photographs that are similar to Diane Arbus' photographs because I don't see and maybe don't even want to see that part of life.

I like the title, Hidden in Plain Sight. I like the fact that sometimes as photographers we can show someone something that they have looked at many times before but that they have not seen before.

Playing Around

I don't know what it is about empty playgrounds but I like to photograph them. I don't think playgrounds are one of photography's recurring themes that Geoff Dyer writes about in his book, The Ongoing Moment but I've just realized that it is a recurring theme for me.
Yesterday I worked with several images from the playground at Parque Juarez and started wondering about this. Is it a longing for childhood? A symbol for the loneliness? Are just a response to the forms, light and shadow?

Photographing playgrounds has been a kind of unconscious response but maybe I should move them up to a higher level of awareness as to what is going on here.

One note about these images, they were made with a Holga lens cap on a digital camera. Most Holga color-negative images are low contrast, off color balance and more blurry. But once I get them into Photoshop, I just can't help myself, I gotta try and "fix' them. I think I'm finding that I get more of what I want if I start with regular digital images and work in the other direction. But I'm not sure about that yet either.

You know, when you get to be my age, you should have more answers and less questions.....just isn't working that way for me.

Stuff from Last Week

Lots of good feelings from last week so I'll roll them up in this one post. This is the stuff that makes me so happy and contented in San Miguel.

Over a week ago, Deb brought me yellow roses. Not all roses have a smell these days. These roses had a sweet light fragrance when she brought them to me, like a light cologne. They are still on my dining room table. Wilted and getting drier each day but the fragrance has intensified so that when I walk into the room I smell it. Musky, heavy. Not just a smell but almost like a substance. Gone is their beauty. What remains and intensifies is the essence of a rose. I guess I'll throw them out today but they have been a joy.

Dinner at Brasserie brought surprises. They have been closed for vacation and we have been gone so it was hugs and kisses with the owners when we walked in. Before we ordered Joseph walked by and saw us. He came in and joined us for dinner. And before dinner was over in came another couple that we all knew. They had just arrived back in San Miguel an hour before. I love these casual encounters with friends that end up being a time to sit and talk as if it had been planned for days.

A first meeting and comida with the owners of a house that we rented several times in the past. It is almost like it was inevitable that we would be friends we have so many connections including finding out that they are friends of some Houston friends. The conversation at the table was exciting as we heard about some of the places they have traveled and we shared information about Mexico.

A dinner table at the window of the San Francisco Cafe. I love that place in spite of mediocre food and slow service. Somehow there, the slow service doesn't bother me too much because I'm always so intrigued with the street life. Beautifully dressed people walking down toward the Monjas church for a wedding, cars cruising the streets, young girls flirting with the boys in the park, mariachis looking for a gig, Mexican tourist pushing baby strollers, families with digital cameras posing for each other in the Jardin, a trio playing in the restaurant, church bells calling time for Mass. And I feel incredibly content because here we sit with a front row seat to something that we could never experience in the USA.

The San Antonio church festival awakened us Sunday morning with booming fireworks. Others complain and want them stopped. Sometimes we grumble that they woke us up but something so Mexican would be lost if they were ever stopped. The annual festival is huge and has a carnival atmosphere. It is so strange at the outdoor Mass to see all of these costumed figures. Soon they will be dancing into town behind many, many blaring trucks carrying sound equipment. Some of the speakers are bigger than a dresser. After the parade they come back to the church to dance all afternoon. Food booths are everywhere. After we came home about 9:00 PM, there was live music. Loud live music. It could be heard anywhere in the Colonia. And of course, more fireworks. We sat on the terrace and listened and watched. Even Taylor sat between us and watched the sky light up with the fireworks. He is getting to be quite Mexican.

The Funeral Procession

I was at the Cemetery this week shooting some film in the Holga. And while I was there a funeral procession came in under the foyer and the arches to the path that leads further into the cemetery. First came a young man carrying a small coffin covered in white satin with tufts of tulle to decorate it. It wasn't a very big coffin, bigger than for an infant but maybe for a one or two year old child. What had happened to this child? Disease? Accident?

Following behind him were children. All of them looked to be younger than school age. Some were holding another child's hand and a few had small bouquets of flowers. Then came the women, some young, some old, with their aprons and wearing rebozos wrapped around their head and shoulders. After the first two or three rows of women, there were men, mostly old men, and women walking with bouquets and empty buckets to leave the flowers in. The men wore jeans and a shirt and some had cowboy boots.

They walked along expressionless. There wasn't any weeping or wailing. As they drew nearer to me I scanned the faces, who was the Mother of this child but I couldn't tell. No one was supporting or consoling anyone except for a few of the older people that needed an arm to steady them. The older people walked with a side to side shifting of weight probably from aching joints from age and hard physical work. There was silence except for the sliding of shoes on the stone path. Even the children were silent..no giggles or running ahead. It wasn't the first time that these children had been to a funeral. They understood how they should behave.

So different than the way we treat death in the USA. We hire all the services for cremating or burying the body. We accept condolences on-line or at the funeral home. And children? No, you don't see many children at funerals. It is as if we want to protect them from knowing about death. It wasn't always that way.

I remember when my grandfather died and I was about four years old. The body was in the home. I can still see the front room clearly. The coffin was on one side of the room and my uncles and the sons-in-law were lined up in chairs along the opposite wall. Every time I came in from outside, one of them would ask me if I wanted to see Grandpa and he would lift me up to peer into the coffin. And I have other stories of deaths of friends and family while I was a child and I was taken to the funerals. And like these children, I learned how to behave.

Did I take pictures? No, except for one long distance shot. I was so touched at the sight of the tiny coffin and the humble circumstances that I couldn't raise my camera and intrude.

Remembering Our Fathers

Edward (Ned) Bernerd Mercer, Jr

Alfred (Bill) Williams

Ned's Dad and mine. Probably made around 1933. They were handsome young men.

Looking at these pictures brings back many memories of these two men....far beyond the event that was photographed. In fact, neither of us was born when these images were made and yet because we have seen these images all our lives they are part of our collective family history. Steve Edwards in his book Photography, a very short introduction writes:

Photographs provoke acts of memory recalling us to things, places, and people. They establish connections across time and space, inducing chains of association. What will be dredged up in memory's driftnet cannot be predicted in advance; an item of clothing or decor in a picture can spark connections and associations. This may be why discussions of family photographs rarely dwell on the images themselves.

Happy Birthday, Doug

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Doug. He was four years old and his Mother forced him to get "dressed-up" to have a studio portrait made. He survived the ordeal and now he is a grown man with a wife and two sons. His birthday falls on Father's Day this year and he and the family are going camping. So here is an early Happy Birthday wish.

Bubble or Box

Several weeks ago La Gringa in San Miguel wrote in her blog "Life in a Bubble" about ex-pats who move to Mexico to live in the concept of Mexico but they don't live in the reality of Mexico. They come to Mexico and bring their lifestyle, live in gated communities, have pools, and they don't learn Spanish. She compared that to the Mexicans who live conservatively with water and electricity and have modest homes that house extended families.

At first, after I read that, I was a bit indignant. That certainly wasn't us. We're living in a Mexican neighborhood, Ned speaks Spanish and I keep trying to learn Spanish. We don't have a big house.....well it isn't big for the USA but compared to some of our Mexican neighbors it might seem big. We try to live modestly. We walk everywhere and shop in the same markets that they do. We wave and speak with our neighbors.

But you know when it gets right down to it, the neighbors know we are different and we know we are different. We have a car. Only about 1/3 of them have a car. We have a computer and Internet. I would guess that only about 1/10 of them have a computer and Internet although all of them seem to use the Internet shops all around us. We have passports and can travel back and forth to the USA or almost anywhere in the world. I only know one couple around us who has a Mexican passport and can travel out of the country but I don't know that they have a visa to enter the USA. We have an automatic washing machine and dryer. They wash clothes by hand or with a wringer washing machine and hang them out to dry. We have a maid three mornings a week. I don't think any of them have a maid. We have college degrees but for most of them the educational level is probably about the 9th grade. The list could go on and on but I think you get the idea.

Could we change and live in a smaller house with a dirt floor, wash our clothes by hand, and cook in an outdoor kitchen. Maybe, but it would be incredible hard. Much harder than it is for them to move forward if they could obtain the economic resources and get a wringer washing machine and have a concrete floor.

So as I thought about La Gringa's article I finally had to admit that I did live in a bubble in San Miguel. And that started me thinking about how we lived in the USA. How much interaction did we have in our own neighborhood. We spoke and waved to neighbors but they were not necessarily the friends who came to dinner. Our house, our car, our friends and our family made up a world within the city. We lived in a box. The car was the worst box of all. With Air Conditioning, the windows rolled up and at 40 mph (or more on the freeways) you moved through space so quickly that there was just a smear of buildings and no connection to people. So many things went on in the city that we simply closed out. Ignored.

A bubble is transparent. You can see out. But a box? Box or bubble? I'll take the bubble and do my best to treat my Mexican neighbors with respect and kindness, conserve resources and learn more about the Mexican culture.

Quiet Days and Cool Nights

Parque Benito Juarez has always been a favorite place of mine in San Miguel. I keep going there to make photographs. I have several I really like from my garden series shot with a Holga camera and film but on this day I was in the Parque with a Holga Lens Cap on my digital camera. I like intersections with people coming in and out of the intersection and in and out of the image.

We have had some rain in the afternoons in the last 10 days and the weather has cooled off a bit in San Miguel. We are back to sleeping under the ceiling fan covered with a sheet and sometimes during the early morning hours I pull a cotton blanket up to block the chill. Mmmm....very nice.

Right now it is quiet in San Miguel but soon the hordes from the North will arrive looking to escape the heat. The traffic is down. Many of the benches in the Jardin in the Centro are empty. The sidewalk cafes have tables available. That will probably start to change in the next week or so. Then we may have to wait for tables at a restaurant, look for a place to sit in the Jardin and have the rumble of traffic all around us when we walk in the centro. However, if the numbers of people who are taking the House and Garden tour are any indication of the number of tourist in town this year , then tourism is down a little more than 15% from 2006. I like this quiet but the business people are looking forward to the tourist season.

A Feature I Don't Like in Adobe Lightroom

Today I've been using Scott Kelby's book The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book to set up and learn more about using Lightroom. All was going well. I had set up the preferences and then decided to import a few images and see how it would work especially with my existing 3 year filing system for digital image files. Okay, so Lightroom uses dashes instead of underscores in dates....I can live with that but one of the features that I thought would be so great, isn't. At least not as it exists now.

You can set up preferences so that when you import images to your hard drive it will also put them on another drive like my external HD where I only store RAW files. The download, or maybe I should call it an "importation" while in Lightroom, was fast and smooth. I checked my internal HD and there the files were and then I checked the external HD and there they were BUT the folder was labeled "Imported on Tuesday, June 12, 2007."

"Imported on Tuesday, June 12, 2007" relates to nothing that is useful to me. I've always kept my images on the internal and external HD labeled the same. I could have been traveling for three days and have made the images on June 9, 10 and 11 but apparently when I import them and backup to the external HD they all get dumped into a folder based on the day they were imported. What would I have to do if I lost my internal HD and wanted to use my backup? I'd have a bunch of file names that really would not mean much to me.

I've checked the Adobe Lightroom forums to see if maybe I'm missing something but haven't found a way to change the name of the backup file. The only suggestion I found on the forums was to not use this feature. That does not make for a smooth workflow. Am I missing something? Has anyone found a solution? Could there be a fix coming in Version 1.1?

Foundation Garments

Remember in the first chapter or so of the book Gone With the Wind when Mammy is helping Scarlett dress for a party and Scarlett is holding on to the bedpost while Mammy pulls the strings of her corset until her waist was 17 inches? No wonder women had the vapors. That is the scene that came to mind when I saw this textile exhibition at the De Young Museum while we were in San Francisco.

Oh the crazy things we women do. Even as I look back at my lifetime I have to laugh at some of changes I've seen in undergarments. Do young girls still wear training bras? It certainly wasn't about participating in sports. What were we training?

Tell me what did an 18 year old girl who weighed 105 pounds need with a girdle? What could possibly need to be flattened or contained. Of course you could use it to hold up your hose....one on each leg. Or if you wanted to be a little more daring you could use a garter belt to hold up the hose. And who would dare go to a dance in a dress with a tight bodice and skirt with 200 yards of tulle without their Merry Widow bra that encased your torso with at least 9 vertical spiral wires. You had to dance because sitting down was miserable.

And what was the 50's thing with petticoats. You wore circular skirts or full peasant skirts with crinoline and/or starched petticoats underneath, miles and miles of petticoat. It was a nice fashion statement BUT in humid Houston without AC for the schools for most of the year it was incredibly hot. And you always wore a full slip under your dress. It must have been sometime in the 60's when we were brave enough to wear a half slip but only if the fabric of your top garment was thick enough so no man could see the outline of your bra.

Finally along came the late 60's, the time to rebel and burn your bras. I never did burn a bra. Did anyone really burn their bras? But I did feel very free and empowered when I didn't wear one. Of course, I didn't go braless at work so I guess I was in a controlled rebellion. I don't know how my brain connected things like being told I couldn't have a car loan unless my husband co-signed, with showing that bank that I was a woman of means and could pay off a car loan with out any co-signer. How not wearing a bra made the statement that I could travel in business just like any man. Well, I guess you had to have been in that time to understand.

Pantyhose came along about the time of the mini-skirt. Thank God, the garter belt clips would have looked ridiculous. Actually the pantyhose weren't too bad because it eliminated some other foundation garments but then they added "tummy control" and all women think they need "tummy control." Another garment of control...no bulge, no jiggle, no wiggle. The pantyhose were the first thing I took off when I came in from work!

But somewhere about this time the bra manufacturers came up with the underwire bra. Obviously they must be very popular even to this day if you check out the lingerie shops but I think they are instruments of torture. And do women really wear thong panties? How do they do that?

Dynamic Building

One of the things I like about building here in Mexico is that the process is dynamic and fluid and one of the things I hate about building here in Mexico is that the process is dynamic and fluid. When you build a house in Houston you start out with pages and pages of plans where everything is spelled out to the 1/8 inch in 3-D.

Not here. On Monday, Memin and his helper arrived before 8:00 AM and soon La Arquitecta was here too. We were starting on the remodel of the patio but the layout drawings by Alfonso Alacron were not exactly what I wanted to do. Nevertheless, Memin and his helper knew the objectives...get rid of what was there, build in a new bed and fountain and be sure that the slope in the patio took the water away from the cistern and to the drain to the street. So in no time at all Memin had marks on the wall for his levels taken from the point of the drain. And before the end of the day he had almost all the destruction done and the cantera pond that we had ordered before we left for the USA had been delivered.

On Tuesday, Alfonso came to advise us on how to make the beds. By the time he arrived we had set the pool in its place and had drawn the outline of the big bed with calc....similar but not as symmetrical as his layout drawing for the garden. When he came in he laughed and said, "You like things more organic don't you." We worked with him on shaping another bed, on where he wanted to have lighting and how to make sure that it all worked together. He and La Arquitecta talked about how to do some of the mechanics of the beds and the fountain. Just when I think I'm starting to be able to understand Spanish, then I hear Spanish that is so fast, I'm not getting ANY words. But Memin, the helper, La Arquetecta and Alfonso were gathered in a circle talking, asking some questions and nodding heads as the work plan was laid out. What a team we have!

The electrician and plumber have been here and moved contacts and switches and made a connection for the gas grill. We have bought the Laja stone for the patio floor. The Laja stone looks to me to be very similar to slate but here it is called Laja and I guess they get it from around the Laja river. And it will be delivered when Memin is ready for it.

Building anything here is just so different. There are no prefabs to set in place. You want it tall, you want it short, you want it round or asymmetrical....no problem. Albanils like Memin are truly artisans. We have been so fortunate to have people working on our house who are wonderful people and know what to do or can figure out a way to get it done. I feel like one of the reasons that you feel good when you walk into our house is because every piece of it, windows, doors, cabinets, walls and floors, were made by knowledgeable, caring hands.

Why is SHE here?

A few days ago I wrote about why I was here but I don't know why SHE is here.

The SHE is someone on a local email group who wrote that she was happy that finally the San Miguelada or running of the bulls was cancelled. Now she thought that WE should work on getting the fireworks toned down although she admitted that when she came to San Miguel she was told that she would have to put up with roof dogs barking, church bells ringing and fireworks.

First of all, WE, the ex-pats, didn't get the San Miguelada cancelled. That was done by the city government in response to what they want for THEIR city. Yes, the ex-pats complained to each other and most of us stayed home and maybe some even called the police about parked cars blocking their garage, the kids puking and urinating in front of their house but so did a lot of the Mexicans. Maybe that is, in a way, a part of the reason that it was cancelled this year but certainly not the main reason.

If you don't see the fireworks, church bells, barking dogs, crowing roosters, gobbling turkeys, calling street vendors and music from the street as a part of the charm of living in foreign country, don't live in the centro. Find an isolated place in the country OR STAY WHERE YOU ARE IN THE USA where you can have deed restricted subdivisions and noise ordinances.

Sometimes when I read another blog or an article that is critical of the way the ex-pat community in San Miguel behaves, I feel myself getting indignant. That isn't the way MY friends behave! But then I read something like this and I'm embarrassed to be included with the SHE and HE ex-pats who move here and want to start changing the things that make Mexico so different from the USA. My dear readers, let me assure you that I'm not joining any movement to get the fireworks toned down.....I say bring them on. Keep Mexico Mexican.

Holga?

Yes, this image was shot with a Holga. Last Saturday I wanted to play so I loaded up one Holga....12 shots on a roll of 120 film and headed out the door. I had found out that there is one of the labs here in SMA who can process 120 negative film locally. Between the lab and my house I shot the roll of film so I could give them a try. This one is from a children's park that I passed on my way to the lab.

I haven't been shooting with the Holga for quite a while now because I don't have a darkroom here and somehow I just haven't been able to make myself do the developing in a daylight tank. But this roll of film was color and I changed it in Photoshop CS3 to black and white. The new CS3 has a very nice process for changing color images to black and white....very similar to a plug-in I was using in CS2.

Another reason that I haven't been too excited about scanning film is that there is so much dust here that it takes forever to clean up a negative after it is scanned. BUT I now have a new scanner, the Epson Perfection V700, and it has Digital Ice that takes care of most of the dust and scratches. I just started up the scanner yesterday and I have some issues to work out with it but I was able to scan the film that I picked up yesterday.

Shooting with a Holga is freeing. First of all it is light and secondly, you have so little control that you just let go and go with the flow. That is not to say that all of your knowledge about photography doesn't kick in but there will be light leaks, exposures that are not correct....just things that you can't control so you turn it over to your muse, your angel......... It is all very freeing to let go of expectations. Then every time you get a roll back if there is a keeper or two it is exciting and you feel like you have been given a gift.

Oh No, Not Again

Yeap, another construction project. This time it is the patio. We're taking out the old wall fountain that was backed with WHITE tiles and besides not being able to keep the tiles clean, the darn thing was sitting at the very end of the long wall of the patio. I have no idea why they chose that location for a fountain. The location related to nothing, absolutely nothing in the patio. A new fountain will go in. It is a round cantera pond with a cucucha pot in the center for the fountain. We'll also have a raised bed to add some interest (and because the cistern is under a little piece of that part of the patio.)

I should have taken pictures this morning when Memen and his helper were measuring with a water filled tube to set levels for the floor of the patio. Ancient method but it works. This is important because one side of the patio is lower and doesn't drain toward the drain that takes water out to the street.

We think the hardscape will take about 3-4 weeks and then bringing in the soil and the plants shouldn't take too long. But who knows, this could still be going on when family comes at the end of July.

Baylink

One day while we were in San Francisco, I put the Lensbaby on the digital camera. The Ferry Building was just across the street from our hotel. I cropped this square and added some vignetting. I keep trying the Lensbaby because it could make life much simpler not to deal with film but it still doesn't look like a Holga image.

Golden Gate Park

One day while we were in San Francisco, we went to Golden Gate Park and our first stop was the Conservatory. I love orchids and this was orchid heaven. Maybe not as heavenly as my friend Debbie's orchid "shed" but still it was beautiful.

I think Debbie, who is in Houston, has more varieties all blooming at the same time than the Conservatory did. She doesn't just have a green thumb, she has a green hand. Next time we are in Houston, I'll try to get some pictures for all you orchid lovers.

Texas Wildflowers

In Texas we are proud of our wild flowers, even leaving the road sides unmowed until the flowers go to seed so we can be sure that we have lots more of them next year. Where my son lives in Austin they have green belts throughout the subdivision and there is one right beside Doug's house that has a variety of wild flowers in bloom. We were sitting in the front yard watching the children play and I decided to get in a little play time too.