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It’s NATO weekend here in Chicago. Today marks the first day of the big cross-migration. The heart of the city has been simultaneously shutting down and receiving an influx of visitors. Some neighborhoods look like a ghost town, while others are packed with protesters and marchers.
[caption id=”attachment_3157” align=”alignright” width=”400” caption=”Chicago’s Lower Michigan Avenue at Kinzie, NATO Friday morning rush hour”][/caption]
This is the usually busy corner of Lower Michigan Avenue and Kinzie during Friday’s rush hour. No cars. Nothing.
Parking bans went into effect at 5am this morning. Crews have been removing newspaper boxes, garbage cans and even the grates that cover the tree beds that line the sidewalks. No places to hide unsavory things. Nothing left that can be used as a weapon.
If you’re traveling on our local Metra Rail this weekend, no bags, purses or backpacks of any kind.
It’s going to be an interesting weekend.
I love walking through my home city of Chicago. It’s a time to think. Observe. Be inspired. And some walks are more inspiring than others.
As I walked back to my studio late yesterday afternoon, there was a report of a large storm getting ready to roll through Chicago later that evening. The sun began to sink lower in the sky, and the clouds were billowing in a way that makes your jaw drop. The sun breaking through in unexpected ways, creating layers of light and shadows, clouds backlit in incredible ways.
It was like Michelangelo was just stopping by to say hello and do a quick sketch. You know. For old times.
All I could think about as I continued my walk was, “Why did I not have a good camera with me today?” That never happens, except when I’m in a rush to get somewhere in the morning, which I was earlier in the day.
I picked up my walking pace, hoping the spectacular light painting happening before my eyes would hold out by the time I was able to get back to my studio and grab a camera and stick it out my window, or take it up to the roof. I’ve seen perfect light like this go away in the amount of time it takes to change a lens, so I was anxious as I walked through my door, dropping my bag and headed straight to my camera cases to quickly set up a tripod and get my camera on top of it.
No time to get to the roof, I thought. Just open up a window, take a light reading and get shooting. It could all be gone in a few minutes.
Luckily, it lasted a bit longer.
I decided it might be nice to shoot some motion of this lovely scene, so I connected my time lapse timer to the camera and chose a 100mm lens to get a bit closer to the amazingness of the sky. Sometimes I like to use a wide lens, especially when the clouds are doing interesting acrobatics. This time, however, I had my eye on a specific patch of sky where the sun was beginning to play hide and seek with one of the particularly billowing cumulous clouds. Beautiful rays and moving shadows.
I made my final composition, locked in my exposure settings and hit start on the timer. As my camera clicked away, I finally had a chance to just stand there and watch it all with my own eyes. Sometimes when I’m busy setting up cameras and gear I really don’t have time to just stand there and enjoy it.
But this time, I did. Beautiful.
These photographs are two images from the sequence of thousands of photographs I made yesterday evening. I’ll have the actual time lapse moving film up in a few days.
And I’ll never forget to throw a camera in my bag again when leaving the studio. Even when I am in a rush.
[caption id=”attachment_3134” align=”aligncenter” width=”600” caption=”Fenway Park, Boston”]
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About 15 years ago, there was talk that ol’ Fenway Park in Boston might be living its last days. The home of the Red Sox was built back in the day when baseball was played in parks, not stadiums and it seemed like Fenway might be the latest victim of out with the old and in with the new.
In the early 1900s, a baseball park wasn’t built all at once. The basic field dimensions and a modest grandstand were constructed for the grand opening day, but as more people began to come out to the games, over the decades that followed, more seats were added down the foul lines and in the outfield.
[caption id=”attachment_3131” align=”alignleft” width=”266” caption=”Fenway Park”]
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Baseball parks were fit into oddly shaped lots in the middle of existing neighborhoods. The right field line might end up being much further from home plate than the left field line. No two outfields were the same. Players would learn the eccentricities of how a ball hit off the outfield wall might ricochet off in an unusual direction.
What resulted was a beautiful hodgepodge of what a classic baseball park looked like, unlike the perfectly symmetrical stadiums that were built in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, with so little character. We in Chicago have examples of both. Beautiful Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs, a true timeless gem. And then there is the last of the badly designed modern ballparks, U.S. Cellular Field, home of the White Sox, with all of the character of a major airport mall.
The Red Sox Nation turned out to be very smart about their beloved Fenway. They kept it. They added as many seats as they could here and there. And they put aside any plans to tear it down and build something new that would never live up to the historic and imperfect park that they all loved.
In 1999, when the future fate of Fenway seemed grim, I flew my parents out to Boston to take in a few games one weekend. We wanted to experience Fenway before it was gone. The hurt of the tearing down of old Comiskey Park in Chicago, where the White Sox played for over 80 years, was still a fresh wound for us. Fenway, as one of the greatest baseball parks in the world, deserved a proper visit.
[caption id=”attachment_3133” align=”alignright” width=”400” caption=”Fenway Park”]
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Yes, the seats are small and uncomfortable. And yes, some of them don’t face home plate, but instead some seemingly random point in center field. That’s okay. Fenway is baseball history.
And today it celebrates its 100th birthday. These photographs are from our 1999 visit, when we thought it might be gone soon. It’s a happy birthday indeed.
This is part nineteen in a series of blogs on my recent artistic adventures in Mexico.
Todos Santos Inn is a lovely place to live for a while. It’s a cozy, secluded and lush bit of paradise in the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. I had been staying there for almost a week as part of the artists retreat group of ZoeFest and was really beginning to feel at home. Waking up to the sounds of birds and wind whispering through the giant palm trees above as I walked down my little garden path from my apartment to the main house where a cup of delicious coffee was always waiting for me.
But with the exception of the pool and some of the garden, I hadn’t really done too much photography at the inn itself. Sometimes it takes me a while to find the handle on a location. Todos Santos Inn was such a place for me creatively. Many lovely areas, a little library off of the main office and a nice bar as well. But after walking around it all for nearly a week, I still hadn’t quite decided how to work with it photographically.
It was the lush leather chairs that finally began to strike my creative muse. Chairs in the library and chairs in the bar. There was definitely something there.
After my Saturday morning shoot with the lovely Stephanie Anne, it was time for my shoot with the first of two gorgeous Australian models that were along for the ZoeFest ride.
Anoush Anou is based in Melbourne and a woman whose work I was familiar with before our Mexican meeting. Like a few of the models I was working with, I had been aware of her for years. And since the fine art photography world can be a small one, it’s usually only a matter of time before we would end up working together.
[caption id=”attachment_3106” align=”alignright” width=”266” caption=”Anoush Anou at Todos Santos Inn”]
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Anoush has a striking physical beauty about her. But there is also a haunting mystery to her in photographs. She has a completely emotive face. Sometimes somber. Sometimes sophisticated and sensual. Yet always revealing a story unfolding in your mind as you ponder what she has created.
But she is also joyful in person. Silly fun and wonderful to hear laugh. A model with great positive energy even when her creations are slightly somber.
My mind was still a bit preoccupied with my mother at home in Chicago, still recovering in the hospital and I knew I was slightly less prepared that I would have preferred for my shooting time with Anoush. And once again, with a model of her caliber, she met me more than half way. It took me a while to find the correct angle and set up in the library where I wanted to begin photographing Anoush. She patiently waited until I had found it, giving me the extra mental space to figure it out.
That was the beauty of ZoeFest. We all wanted to create incredible art while we were there. And as artists, we all knew that creativity is not a switch you throw on when the clock strikes one. Sometimes the muse arrives fashionably late and as long as everyone involves respects it, something wonderful does eventually happen.
Not wanting to make her wait on set until I was happy with my vision, I began by photographing an empty chair in the library. There was wonderful indirect light coming in from a nearby balcony door. Soft and delicate. The library was a small room and even with a 50mm normal prime lens on my camera, I determined the best angle to photograph Anoush from, was actually for me to be outside of the room itself. I could use the doorway to the library as a bit of a framing device, which I like to do sometimes. It adds a slight distance in mental perspective from my subject. Not exactly voyeuristic, but not quite as intimate. Found beauty.
[caption id=”attachment_3108” align=”alignleft” width=”400” caption=”Anoush Anou at Todos Santos Inn”]
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By the time I brought Anoush into the library, she needed very little direction from me to find the moment. Like the other models at our retreat, she has a complete sense of who she is from the first click of my shutter. And I found a familiar sensation wash over me as you have when you finally have physical proximity to someone you’ve long been aware of from a distance.
Just posing while seated in the chair, she was lovely. Every limb a coordinated effort of beautiful flowing lines and curves. Every purposeful point of a foot or toe completing a perfect composition.
And then she turned the world upside down. Literally.
“How about I try some like this?” she asked with her lovely Aussie accent, as she laid her back on the seat of the chair, her long hair cascading toward the floor.
As I continued to photograph her, she began to rotate herself until only the small of her back was on the seat, completely inverted as if her support was no longer the chair, but a trapeze, or maybe thin air for that matter. Creating the most interesting compositions in my frame.
[caption id=”attachment_3115” align=”alignright” width=”266” caption=”Anoush Anou at Todos Santos Inn”]
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One of the great things about our arrangement with the four boutique hotels we were all calling home during our time in Todos Santos was that if we saw a room or area that felt particularly inspiring we could secure it for private shooting very easily. I had my eye on the bar ever since we had arrived and now it was time to utilize that space in whatever way we felt like.
A quick check in with the bartender and the bar was “temporarily closed” while the lovely and undressed Anoush followed me into the room. I knew I wanted to do something with the chairs that were group along a windowed wall of the bar. I quickly began redecorating by rearranging the chairs in a way that made no sense for would be bar patrons, but made so much sense from a visual photographic point of view. I also tried to remember I would need to reassemble everything the way I found it when we were done.
I only made a few dozen photographs in the bar because Anoush and I were on a roll and she quickly interpreted what I was looking for. The light coming in through the sheer curtains was perfect and in short order we had created what I was hoping for.
We thanked the barkeep and allowed the bar to reopen once again to the public and walked out back to the veranda, another area I had been looking at every day while having my morning coffee and daily photographic editing sessions one one of the many tables we would all congregate at during the day.
The brick arches of the veranda were visually interesting to me, although the low afternoon sunlight was creating a fairly severe contrast with the shade Anoush was posing in. We had to be careful to keep the harsh shadows off of her an that location and we found a spot for her in the first arch that had a bit less direct light.
[caption id=”attachment_3111” align=”alignleft” width=”266” caption=”Anoush Anou at Todos Santos Inn”]
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We began with her standing and using her strong fingertips to hold difficult balancing poses that looked more effortless than they certainly must have been. I was still fighting the contrast of the bright arches behind her, not really satisfied with my composition even though Anoush was holding up her end of the collaboration bargain spectacularly.
We changed to her sitting instead of standing and it created a slightly more relaxed feel. Her compacted shape also allowed me to compose a bit tighter which helped my slightly too bright sunlight issue with my composition. She began to emote something a little more somber as well in her facial character, which I really liked.
When our time was up, I felt very good about what we had created. One of those shoots where you can’t wait to get back to the computer to see what you have. Working with the various chairs at the inn and the natural light really was all I was hoping it would be and more with Anoush’s beautiful collaboration. She really brought what I felt was a classic beauty to the images and we had a great time while creating them.
A perfect way to spend a Saturday afternoon in paradise.
As always, more to come.
It’s with equal parts amusement and bittersweet acceptance that I noticed a bit of name changing going on in the professional film editing community the past few weeks. It’s just one initial, but it might as well be a thunder-clap.
As many of you know, I was one of the founders of the Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group back in 2002. Yes, ten years has flown by. CHIFCPUG (pronounced SHIFF-see-pug) was, and still is, a great community of editing professionals who gathered together once a month to discuss, troubleshoot and share the knowledge about our favorite film editing tool, Final Cut Pro.
And then, depending on who you talk to, in June of last year, Apple released either a revolutionary new editing program, or as many more professional editors came to believe, Apple took ten years of good faith and flushed it down the toilet. Final Cut Pro was dead. And in its place FCP X.
The debate on which scenario it actually was, still rages on. But perhaps most telling is that here in Chicago, as well as in many other cities with Final Cut Pro Users Group Communities, there has been a small but very significant bit of name changing going on.
CHIFCPUG is dead! Long live CHICPUG!
Notice the difference? Very similar, yet the difference represents a chasm. Just one letter, but it epitomizes the significant shift in my corner of the professional editing community world.
The Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group is now The Chicago Creative Pro User Group.
And it’s not just Chicago. When the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention takes place in Las Vegas next month, there will be no Final Cut Pro Users Group SuperMeet. In its place will be the Creative Pro Users Group SuperMeet.
Once again, the F is no more.
Ditto for Boston, Washington D.C.-Virginia-Maryland and others. New York is the Moving Pictures Collective of NYC. San Francisco and Atlanta managed to avoid the name change altogether by being agnostic from the start as SF Cutters and Atlanta Cutters respectively.
Ironically, many of you will recall, Apple took over what would end up being the last NAB FCPUG SuperMeet, to preview Final Cut Pro X to a room full of professional editors. Professional editors, who would, two months later, wake up to their editing software of choice being unmercifully removed from the shelves and replaced with what even the most accepting editors would have to admit was a frighteningly incomplete version 1.0 of software that defied the collaborative workflow many of us made a living with.
Both Avid and Adobe Premiere wasted no time and pounced on the fumble when editors such as myself switched and/or returned to editing software that allowed us to keep working at the level we were accustomed to. Yes, there was a bit of a learning or re-learning curve, but even staying with Apple’s new editing tool would have been a learning curve. It was time to put our eggs in a new basket. A basket that worked today, not someday… maybe.
Probably the silver lining that came out of all the unpleasantness is that the discussion has once again become about the craft of editing rather than the platform specific-ness of the software. Even the best of us find ourselves with blinders on once in a while and it’s been refreshing to reassess the ol’ toolbox in the past year and reconnect with what we love about editing.
So, yes. I am sad to see the Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group end an incredibly successful run. Yet, I am thrilled to see that in Chicago and in many other cities all over the world, that vibrant professional editing group of scrappy creative people, have dusted themselves off and moved forward. On to other tools and methods that will continue to help us all tell the amazing stories that we live to tell.
Long live the Chicago Creative Pro Users Group indeed.
We’re taking a break from more worldly topics today and concentrating on my home state of Illinois. It’s our 2012 Primary Election Day tomorrow.
Yep, it’s been our turn to have our televisions inundated with desperate political advertising and our mailboxes full of propaganda from local candidates.
Even with all of that, it’s still important to vote. Yes, even the primaries. As I like to say, you’re more likely in your lifetime to have a face to face encounter with a judge or alderman than you are the President of the United States. It does matter.
But it’s a bit overwhelming, so as a continuing public service on the blog, I like to point out a few sources for getting real actual information about the candidates, rather than relying on their paid advertising.
First up, The Windy City Times. The LGBT community is hella plugged in to local politics. And more often than not, I find myself in complete alignment with their recommendations. Here’s a link to their 2012 Election Survey which lists the results of questionnaires sent out by several LGBT agencies.
If you’re more conservative in your thinking, The Chicago Tribune has a list of their endorsements here.
Here in Chicago, the Cook County Bar Association has a list of it’s judge recommendations here.
So there you go. Print the lists. Take them with you to your polling place (you are completely allowed to bring lists into the voting booth as long as any material your bring in is not campaign literature), and vote.
If you’re someone who feels, “They’re all corrupt and it doesn’t make any difference who gets elected,” then how about just voting out the incumbent? Throw the bums out. Keep doing it until you’re happy with your government. At some point, they may get the message.
Really, seriously. It matters. Even if you hate politics.
Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled photography blog.
This is part eighteen in a series of blogs on my recent artistic adventures in Mexico.
Sorry it’s been a while since the last ZoeFest update. I’m usually always busy, but the last few months have been even moreso here at Billy Sheahan Photography. Finding a few hours to compose new ZoeFest entries has been a rare occurrence.
So where were we? Ah yes. Stephanie Anne!
It was Saturday morning in Todos Santos, Mexico. Not that Saturday really feels much different than any other day in paradise. Hell, even Monday feels like Saturday here.
I had two photoshoots scheduled that day, first with the lovely Stephanie Anne and later with the beautiful Anoush Anou.
I was looking forward to yet another day of working with incredibly creative humans. Unfortunately I was a bit distracted at the same time. You see, a couple of days earlier, I had gotten a call from my sister back in the States that my mom suffered what seemed to be a small stroke. A few years earlier she had a major stroke and it severely incapacitated her, taking over a year for her to get back a fair amount of mobility and that was only after which we could breathe a sigh of relief that she was going to live through it at all.
[caption id=”attachment_3036” align=”alignright” width=”266” caption=”Stephanie Anne at Casa Bentley”]
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News was slow in getting to me in my cocoon of paradise and I had been weighing whether I should even stay or cut my adventure short and fly back to see my mom. We had decided to wait a few days to see how serious it was. There was a lot of family looking in on her, so while my mom was constantly on my mind, my absence was less noticeable than it might have been otherwise. But I was still unsure that staying thousands of miles away was the correct decision.
A small group of family members finally convinced me that considering my penchant for overworking myself during the year, it might be a good idea for me to stay put in paradise and try to enjoy myself unless things took a turn for the worse.
Still, since telephone service was spotty, I was spending a lot of time looking for signal bars on my phone so as not to miss an urgent call. It was tricky to fully relax and concentrate on shooting.
By the time I met Stephanie Anne at another of our artist hotels, the lush Casa Bentley, I wasn’t nearly as prepared as I wanted to be for her. I wandered around the grounds looking for inspiration. Some unusual spot to allow her to find something special and inspire her as well. By the time she was ready to go, I had found very little that spoke to me. Or perhaps it actually was speaking to me, but I was having difficulty hearing it over all of my mental chatter.
Luckily, Stephanie is a joyful soul. Her energy and spirit can lift the volume of any gathering, and I mean that in a good way. I apologized for my being a bit distracted and Stephanie immediately took over the load of creating the inspiration. She carried me that morning. No question about it.
[caption id=”attachment_3039” align=”alignleft” width=”400” caption=”Stephanie Anne at Casa Bentley”]
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I remember starting at the base of a beautiful wide Hule tree that anchored the grounds of Casa Bentley. I was still trying to decide which lens I was going to start with and when I looked up for a moment, I could see that she had already found a place among the intertwined roots and vines and was handing it to me on a platter. I really hadn’t imagined that. But she did and that was enough to kick start our shoot.
I stepped behind a low branch, putting a series of long slender leaves between Stephanie and myself, defocused enough so that it created an almost there set of diagonal lines across the frame that played with her poses and the strong lines of the tree’s root structure. My head was beginning to find some focus at last.
It was wonderful to feed off of Stephanie’s energy. I was still struggling more than usual. But I knew the pictures were beginning to work. She was brilliant and beautiful and as I sometimes have to do when my mind is preoccupied with events away from the photo shoot, I just tried to not over think anything. I’ve found that emptying my head in these situations is the best way for me to go. It results in less direction to my subject as to what vision I’m seeing, which is a bit more challenging for my model, most of whom are accustomed to more feedback from me. Instead I find myself switching to a more documentary photographic style where I’m just looking through the viewfinder and composing what feels right at the moment.
Just letting go.
[caption id=”attachment_3041” align=”alignright” width=”400” caption=”Stephanie Anne at Casa Bentley”]
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We walked along the grounds of the lovely Casa Bentley, the design inspired by the castles of Portugal. The owner, Bob Bentley is a geologist and used his collection of rocks and gemstones, acquired during years of world travels, to adorn the walls and surfaces of the lavish grounds when he designed and built the hotel beginning in 1985.
Stephanie and I stopped along the garden path and I began to compose photographs of her along the walls and ledges of our idyllic environment. She stretched and curved and evoked and I began to see a character emerge. I was watching a story unfold. Sometimes joyful, sometimes somber. A fitting mirror to my own thoughts at the moment.
I was enjoying the dapples of light cascading down through the leaves creating additional patterns to compose with in addition to the decorative rocks and gemstones. As hard as the surfaces were that we were creating in, Stephanie managed to add a softness that made the rocky nature feel more like a living organism rather than an immovable force.
[caption id=”attachment_3044” align=”alignleft” width=”266” caption=”Stephanie Anne at Casa Bentley”]
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We continued through to the back of the hotel grounds and found a shady, more natural area. Again, she played among the trees and a large stump in the center of it all. At this point I was simply happy to observe her explore and play. Creating human shapes among the existing elements of nature.
Nearby, we noticed a small little canal perhaps for water runoff from the rest of the grounds. In a rare bit of direction on this shoot, I had Stephanie pose near one end of the small waterway while I planked across the other end, trying to line up her reflection in an interesting manner.
While water is something I always enjoy working with as an element in photograph, since we didn’t know exactly where the water was coming from, we decided it would probably be best to be close to the water without actually touching the water. I felt a bit like a human teeter-totter balancing precariously above while trying to focus and compose. But it worked.
The day was getting hot by this point and I thought we might try to find something interesting in the Casa Bentley pool. Whenever possible, I like to compose pool images without any of the obvious pool tile decorations and as Stephanie and I got our bearings, I found an interesting look when I stood right at the pool’s edge, leaning as far over the water as possible without falling in and shooting straight down into the water with a wide lens.
[caption id=”attachment_3046” align=”alignright” width=”242” caption=”Stephanie Anne at Casa Bentley”]
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I told Stephanie to submerge a few feet below the surface and try to pose as she would out of the water. It’s actually a challenging thing to do because bodies tend to want to float to the surface, but Stephanie did an amazing job of swim posing as I followed her along the edge.
The resulting photographs are very unusual for me with their bold color and loveliness. The combination of the intense sunlight overhead created interesting patterns and water reflections and gave Stephanie a nice glow. her hair picked up the highlights from the sun resulting in an unearthly splash of red color. Something unexpected when I got back to my studio to review everything. A very happy surprise.
I was so pleased with how the shoot turned out, especially since I was not at my best that day. It proves again what I’ve been saying all along. Stephanie and the other ZoeFest models were such intelligent, lovely and creative collaborators. My shoot that morning could have been much less than it turned out to be without Stephanie’s positivity and her love for creating beautiful art.
Thank you Stephanie Anne. You can put me down now.
A lovely piece by Jillian Ann on her Confess music video I directed & photographed for her as well as remixes by many talented people. http://bit.ly/zy2RFg
Another in my series of short iPhone films, usually created during a few hours of downtime, waiting for client feedback on other projects. A short personal challenge to create a film using my iPhone in a limited amount of time.
The B&W vintage film look is realized in camera with the iPhone, using the 8mm Vintage Camera App and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Music track is a public domain recording of “Cançons i Dansas” by Federico Mompou.
This is part seventeen in a series of blogs on my recent artistic adventures in Mexico.
The secluded beach cove at Playas Las Palmas had become quite the popular shooting location as ZoeFest progressed during the week. That was both good and bad. It was good because it’s always fascinating to see what other photographers and models do with the same location. Quite varied and everyone had their own styles they brought to the party. Bad because, as the week went on, we were no longer under the radar.
Todos Santos, Mexico is a very traditional kind of place. It had seen it’s influx of non-natives from all parts of the world in the last couple of decades which had brought about some changes, hopefully not affecting the tranquil beauty or culture in a negative way. But impacting it nonetheless. And when a group of artists sets up camp in an environment such as this as we did during ZoeFest, we were very aware to try not to impact both the environment and culture in a way that would be undesirable to the locals. The old photographers adage of,
“Leave no trace. Leave what you find.”
[caption id=”attachment_2915” align=”alignright” width=”400” caption=”Tara at Playa las Palmas”]
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It probably applies to many other activities that involve exploring anywhere that you’re not a local, but we photographers have adopted it as our own.
Playas Las Palmas presented a tricky dilemma. While the beach itself was not private property, getting to the beach from land did involve crossing through what was private property. Something none of us knew when we arrived. When I had photographed Ella Rose on one of the first days, we were literally the only ones there. Not a person to be seen along the coastline as far as you could see.
But by the time the lovely Tara Liggett and I decided to return there, days later, we had started to hear stories from others in the group of, while not exactly what could be termed shakedowns to continue shooting there, but definitely encounters that made it a little uncertain whether it would be possible to continue to shoot there.
We decided to go anyway and see what happened. When we arrived at the end of the dirt road, as close as we could drive to the beach, we spotted Robert and Ella Rose already heading down the path ahead of us. The cove was a fairly large area and I wasn’t concerned we’d be tripping over each other or in each other’s shots.
[caption id=”attachment_2917” align=”alignleft” width=”400” caption=”Tara at Playa las Palmas”]
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Tara and I walked through the little tropical forest path before reaching the beach and the glorious late afternoon sun that would be setting in a few hours. I had photographed Ella Rose at the same place in the morning light, completely different from the light now.
This time, as we approached the beach area, Tara and I spotted a couple of official looking men a couple of hundred meters away. It appeared they were inspecting something, pointing and walking a few meters, then pointing away and walking off in that direction. While Robert and Ella were off beginning to shoot in a much more secluded rocky area away from where the men were looking, Tara and I were much more in the open.
We decided to sit and wait and enjoy the ocean view for a while. We talked about our art and our travels and although we were both anxious to begin making photographs, the inspector men continued to do whatever it was they were doing for nearly another hour. Finally they got into their truck and headed off out of sight. And the sun was really getting good by that point. Perfect!
[caption id=”attachment_2919” align=”alignright” width=”400” caption=”Tara at Playa las Palmas”]
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I did really enjoy the brief downtime with Tara. It seemed like I was doing so much rushing around from place to place that even though I was really enjoying myself, it was nice to just stop for a while and relax with such a lovely human as Tara is. She has a wonderful heart. I certainly felt like a better person after our little break.
We began to get ready as Tara laid down in a little stream that had formed over a little sandbar near the mouth of the cove. This time I remembered Ella’s suggestion for me to make sure I didn’t leave any of my own footprints near the delicate sand ripple patterns formed by the waves over the last few hours. It looked like it could be rock with the sun reflecting off of it, but it was definitely sand. Gorgeous with Tara in the middle of it all.
It was really a beautiful time of day. Perfect light.
Tara and I spotted some interesting divots in the sand off to the side of the stream where the tide had been higher earlier in the day and we thought it might be an interesting thing to put Tara in them, her beautiful curves mirroring the curves of the sand. We tried a few different ones until it was difficult to find Tara at all in them, blending in like a chameleon.
I suppose if the Pope was looking to hang one of my nude photographs in his Vatican dining room, one of these would be the least likely of all of my work to raise a holy eyebrow. I’ll have to ask him the next time I see him on Facebook chat.
[caption id=”attachment_2921” align=”alignleft” width=”400” caption=”Tara at Playa las Palmas”]
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Meanwhile, back at Playa Las Palmas, the sun was just about ready to hide behind one of the two cliffs that bookended the cove. Tara moved back into the stream and started to pose. She heard some splashing and turned to see me running back and forth in the stream.
“What are you doing?!”, she laughed in her beautiful Irish brogue.
Whah tahr yah doe ehn?!
I stopped in mid gazelle leap and laughed along with her.
“Um… I’m trying to find where the beam of sunlight is best behind you,” I sheepishly said. “You know… because I know you’re holding your pose and I don’t want to have you hold it too long.”
“Alright,” she laughed again, that beautiful laugh. “Just checking.”
Ohl-rate. Joost chay-kehn. (or something like that.)
She posed, I scampered and splashed back and forth. The hardest part was focusing looking straight into the sun, but I got it eventually.
[caption id=”attachment_2923” align=”alignright” width=”400” caption=”Tara at Playa las Palmas”]
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Out of breath and a wee bit tired of looking so silly, we moved over to an area of sand I had noticed the last time I was here at the beach. There were these dark dramatic lines of sand that had washed up along a slightly drier area of the beach. Not a footprint to be found and quite striking.
I had Tara lay down in between a few of them and made of few more photographs of her as the shadows grew in the setting sun. If you look closely, you can see one of my errant footprints as I got a bit too close when directing Tara on which way to lay. We’ll call it a bit of a self-portrait, that one.
I moved around her to compose the length of long shadow her curves were now creating in the sand. Beautiful.
Done with that set, I wanted to try to incorporate the beautiful stream carving in the sand again from a slightly different vantage point. I had been shooting with my short 50mm prime lens up to this point and decided to switch to my longer 100mm prime for a different look. It meant Tara was further away from me, but I really loved how it compressed the sunlight shining off of the sand as the stream had carved through it.
[caption id=”attachment_2925” align=”alignright” width=”400” caption=”Tara at Playa las Palmas”]
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Due to the distance, Tara was a bit confused. “What do you want me to do?”, she yelled to me over the sounds of the crashing waves.
“Something like this,” as I pantomimed stretching my arms out one way and the other.
Happily, she understood my silly posing reference and improved upon it greatly. Another model who can take questionable direction and make it into something wonderful.
I was really happy with what we were doing when Tara suddenly stopped and began walking toward me.
“There’s a man coming toward us,” she stage whispered.
“Is he close?”, I said without turning.
“Getting closer.”
With my back toward the unknown man, trying to keep myself between him and Tara who was trying as casually as possible to put her dress wrap back on, we tried to look as normal as possible. I began to take photographs of the rest of beach area, in an effort to look like a pair of normal tourists out for a walk on the beach.
“Where is he now?”, I quietly asked.
“Right behind you.”
Oh. Damn.
I turned to the man, and said the only appropriate thing I could think of at the moment.
“Hola, señor.”
“Hola,” he said back.
He wasn’t very menacing or anything like that. Just standing there within a few feet of us as I snapped a few more tourista photos of the ocean.
In my head, I was asking all the things I wished I could confer with Tara on. Does he want money? Has he called the authorities? Is he the authorities?
Before I could figure out what to do, I heard Tara begin speaking to him in Spanish. A few questions and he began to give a few answers.
I forgot how fluent in Spanish Tara was. After the translation with las tortugas (the turtles) just the day before.
As with my brush with Los Federales with Meghan yesterday morning, I really tried to follow the conversation as best I could with my limited Spanish. The good thing was, this conversation Tara was having with the man sounded casual, not argumentative in any way.
And then I felt this wash of regret start to fill me. Not about perhaps being in some kind of trouble, but forgetting my first rule when traveling abroad. It was rude of me to wait so long to address him. A far too common American thing. I was in his country and now Tara was making it right.
“Yo soy de Chicago,” I offered at one point. It helped.
Tara would speak a few sentences to him and he would respond and Tara would fill in the blanks to me as I nodded.
He was in charge of watching the property we had crossed to get to the beach and he was checking up on us. He waved his arm over the area between the beach and where we had parked our car. All of that land was owned by a man he worked for. It was okay that we were here, but he wanted us to be aware that he was letting us be here for the moment. More than fair enough.
[caption id=”attachment_2935” align=”alignleft” width=”266” caption=”Tara at Playa las Palmas”]
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We asked him if we should leave and he told us we didn’t have to this time. He continued to tell us the story of his family and the family he worked for and how sometimes people would pay them to hold lavish weddings here. I could see how that would be an amazing setting.
I could see three dogs waiting on the other side of the ocean stream.
“¿Sus tres perros?”, I asked. Your three dogs? “
Sí, mis perros,” he smiled. And then he said something about the dogs I didn’t quite understand, but I nodded anyway.
This was better. This is how I should have handled our meeting from the beginning.
We talked a bit more and said our goodbyes. He walked away and I turned to thank Tara for being such an amazing translator. Without her, her warm spirit and excellent communication skills, our interaction wouldn’t have gone nearly as well. I really don’t think he wanted money in the end, just a bit of respect that perhaps other touristas hadn’t given him. Just to let us know we were on someone else’s property when we came here.
We collected our things and started to head back toward the palm forest path, when I saw a sign near the edge of the beach that had been confusing me all week. It basically translated to Private Property. No Entry. What I couldn’t figure out until now was why it was facing the beach. In other words, you wouldn’t see the front of it until you were on the beach, after you had crossed through the private property. Perhaps there needed to be another sign closer to where we parked the cars. Then again, perhaps it really wasn’t a big deal, until people started to take advantage of it.
My shoot with Tara ended up being a bit shorter than some of the others, but it was a great experience and we did collaborate to make some incredible photographs. Plus it was nice to spend a bit of time with her just getting to know her a little better. One of my favorite moments in Todos Santos.
And it reminded me to be a better visitor next time.
More to come.