Features from Limbo

Having to rebuild my Duende Arts web site on Apple servers has turned out to be a veritable blessing. I don't foresee myself spending the whole time working this site to perfection. What that is I don't crave it. I do want to have it contain the features I want to market my products and services on the Internet. The thing is though my conception of products is still evolving.

When I went on sabbatical last December I had a different idea where I was going. I was more focused then on videos and film but felt I needed to learn and apply the Adobe software I had bought last year after NAB. Beyond that the goal was nebulous.

Photography only came front and center after I did my first professional photo shoot with Kaleb. I shall always think of Kaleb as the model who set me firmly on the path I am now walking. Doing that shoot crystallized in my mind that I enjoyed photographing people.

Shooting Arron and Scott and talking with these guys who were so much more verbal about their goal of breaking into professional modeling little by little shaped my focus. Truthfully, on my own, I would never have thought of venturing into fashion and advertising photography. That is audacity I normally do not possess. (Duende is not, I am learning, something to possess. It comes and goes by its own light but leaves in its wake the magic that shapes our dreams into palpable reality.)

This morning, I called up my sister, Merma, in Kansas. I thought we could meet in NYC in September for a psychiatric meeting. A CME event would make the trip tax-deductible. She told me she was planning to to drive to Arkansas next month. Our niece, May, married an Arkansan in Iloilo earlier this year. She has now joined her husband. Her parents, my first cousins, are coming to join them at a reception in Arkansas when the couple will formally announce to their friends here in the States that they are "at home." I told Merma I'll check into the feasibility of joining her.

Merma is clinical director of a state hospital. They are expecting surveyors to come anytime now. If they come she won't go to Arkansas. She wouldn't be able to justify going. If she didn't go, what would I do there? I could take pictures of her friends! In fact, one of our friends, Bonnie, reportedly wanted me to email her my site's address.

That was the germ. The result is a new page on the site for portraits. I included portraits among the products I shall be showcasing on the site as something I could do in addition to magazine and print work. I figured that even as I start getting assignments for paid shoots I would still have time to do portraits. I am not interested at all to do weddings, birthdays and such but I love doing portraits. In fact, shooting the many expressions that a model comes up with is one of photography's chief delights for me. This is along the same lines as what I wrote last night in this blog. 

A person's inner life is his alone to experience. A photographer or filmmaker (or, for this matter, a writer or poet writing about that person) seeks to put that inner life into medium other people can experience. Isn't art really about our inner worlds? The inner life is infinitely vast and various. Only through art can we attempt to represent this ungraspable experience. Art seeks therefore to mirror a bit of that ineffable fullness that is our inner life where we live in a reality more true than anything the nightly news could ever show.

One idea leads to another. I'll add a page for portraits, photographs of people who have no intention or desire to model on runways or in print. To formalize the process I'll include a page for what people can expect when I invite them to a photo shoot as well as a page where interested people could request either a portrait shoot or a model shoot.

My first portrait features Ryan, son of my neighbor, Linda, who was kind enough to let me shoot him the evening before I shot Kaleb. I tested lighting on Ryan. Without his help I wouldn't have the shred of confidence that allowed me to start shooting Kaleb. Without the shoot with Kaleb I would never have arrived where I am today. Where I shall be tomorrow, why, that's still in limbo struggling to come out!