Whole-wheat pita when toasted is warm, nutty and crisp, thoroughly satisfying on a cold, snowy winter night. It recalls warm, sunny lands. The salad is simply dressed with a Trader Joe Orange Muscat Champagne Vinegar, virgin olive oil and a sprinkle of coarse kosher salt. Fresh, sliced pineapple finishes the meal.
This is not the pancit Molo I remember from Prince's Kitchenette or Fatima on Calle Real in Iloilo City but it was good. I used store-bought wonton wrappers and they worked just fine. I processed the filling in my ancient Cuisinart, a mixture of pork, shrimp, garlic and yellow onions and made stock from a whole chicken I boiled with slivers of ginger, Italian parsley and celery stalks. I found out that adding surplus filling that I dropped in half teaspoonfuls into the boiling broth made the resulting soup taste closer to what I remember. Then I added my own emendations: baby bokchoy and a few drops of sesame oil.
Teachers say that in Buddhism once the thought arises to pursue enlightenment the very structure of mind changes. The goal may not be reached until after many lifetimes but the impetus once created never goes away again. So unlike its course in North America and Europe, Buddhism in Asia became inextricably linked with just the ordinary living of life, sometimes fun and exciting, sometimes momentously sad or monotonous, but like the dominant figure in the carpet background that most people no longer sees, the aspiration ticks away indecorously slow but always there. I remember a Tibetan shopkeeper in the village in New York City telling me how the Dharma among his people was as ordinary and unobtrusive as sunshine and rain. It is part of life; it is life. They prepare supper at night, might spend 50 years building up a trade, but in the background is this unspoken goal to seek the Ultimate and become free at last from life's vicissitudes. Unspoken because it is so taken for granted until one day the bud opens and the muddy water drips away as water drips away.
It has been thirty years since I encountered Buddhism not in the land of its birth but in my adopted country. Buddhism was a big part of my going home again, home where I had thought I never belonged. I like the simplicity of its practice, the barebones approach that depend solely on one's effort and utilizing only one's own mind and body. Anything else is excess. A cushion to sit on does help. Rituals inherently human can support the most genuine aspiration for simplicity. They create a feeling of what is sacred, recreate the awesome experience of something beyond words, beyond desire, beyond the very habits of being alive.
I did another portrait shoot with Linda and her family last Monday. I've processed six images from the shoot while still having to redo processing the Banthia images I want to burn on a DVD for the parents to take to Orlando next week. This photo of Linda was taken by my Sony HD camcorder that I had set to record on its own while I took still photos with the Canon 5D. The resolution is much smaller but the effect, as Linda commented when I sent her the photo, was "complimentary to my age." I need to learn to use the sharpening commands in Photoshop to soften the effect of the bright lights I use in studio shoots. A design consultant I saw who has a degree in photography and film from IU Bloomington made a similar comment. She asked me why I was using hard lights. I had gradually started using more hard lights in my shoots, not just for the background but for the foreground. With Linda's shoot I was careful enough to use only the soft box and an umbrella-filtered light for the faces. Before the clients came I took preliminary photos using manual camera controls and was surprised at the stunning clarity but once they got here I threw caution to the air and shot pellmell. The boy was uncontrollable and finally brought the backdrop down. The soft box light kept going out. I should have checked the images on the camera LCD but didn't, an almost fatal mistake. There is so much to learn and to do.
Meanwhile yesterday I went with Arron to Elite Martial Arts where I spoke with the owner who told me he wanted a commercial to draw more people to his center. He wanted a surprisingly artistic video, with a specific look and audio background. He may need additional documentary-style videos to actually show prospective customers what it is he does at the center. I have so far only been using iMovie putting off using FCP again. It's been four years or more since I learned to use FCP in NYC! I'd lamented at the lack of drive in my desire to create commercial photography and videos. I need the structure of deadlines to keep me at the wheel. When structure comes I feel stressed out by all that I need to do to turn out a creditable product. The lesson perhaps is learning to go with the flow, to appreciate the down times as well as the up times and make the most of what I can do and do.
It takes so little to grow a weak flicker into a fire. The wonder of it is how infrequent I do the talk.
My client didn't show up this morning but I was at the computer early so I started messing around. Before I knew it I had learned to use the video camera on the 5th generation iPod Nano. Granted this was not a herculean task but one thing led to another. By 5:30 this afternoon, I had set up a meeting with Arron to see first-hand an MMA fight in Zionsville tomorrow evening and I'd started the confounding mysteries of using Flash. I went to Lifestyle Fitness and for the first time working out there was not as uncomfortable. Again this was no big feat. I simply used the treadmill at 4 mph while watching music videos on an HD monitor 20 feet away but as I was driving home in the dark this evening listening to a performance of Brahms's German Requiem I was feeling the creative juices bubbling inside me, a sensation that had been eluding me since I came home from the trip to Las Vegas with my sisters. The iPod video is on my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Duende-Arts-Photography-Videos/194848773479?ref=search&sid=740460032.1486545904..1I shot Arron tonight as we talked about putting up a fan website before his match in January 2010.
The portrait shoot with the Banthias was instructive on several levels. I used automatic camera settings all throughout, manipulating white balance and exposure post-shoot in Photoshop. I shot with manual settings with Brandon and lost so many images. Maybe with more practice I'll get better at doing manual-setting photography but maybe I've found the process that works for me in this shoot with the Banthias.
I shoot quickly, only making lighting changes when I really have to e.g. to avoid obvious, undesirable shadows. I should probably learn to be more deliberate with lighting and camera settings but when I have a model or models with me the excitement is hard to resist. I take as many shots as I can. I end up with hundreds of images that becomes a challenge to process from just the sheer number. If I set up the lights and camera settings more carefully, I'll have fewer images to review and process. Will I be missing out on images that I'll like?
Nothing is more constant than change but we are often focused on yesterday's change, not on change happening now. Until it becomes discernible enough to call it a name: herbivorous men. Japan's economy might be lagging despite the successful launch of HDTV and Blu-Ray disks but maybe this small social change may someday be seen to be as big as our current focus on terrorism, religious fundamentalism, global warming, and economic revisionism.
My sister and brother-in-law left on Wednesday. I re-organized the house and office yesterday and today resumed work. I am going to first process the images and video clips from their visit into a small movie and slide show on duendearts.com and Flickr. Meanwhile I want to resume doing tutorials for Photoshop and start tutorials on videomaking, for starters, Final Cut Pro. I am joining my family again October 29 to return mid-November. The remaining two weeks I have in October I plan to use to clarify my work and career goals, while also rethinking what I call my "sabbatical." This is probably too much for the time I have considering that I want to continue the repair and re-organization work on the house and garage started by Arturo. All I know is that I need to get back to working on photographs and videos, while resuming my learning curve.
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leaves us nothing but grief and pain,
Instead of promised joy!
How quickly the reality of the present moment overtakes memories no matter how precious they seem to us. For thirteen days we were traveling through intoxicating landscapes of verdant mountains and valleys, crystal streams, rolling farms and quaint towns of Northern Spain. Our destination was Santiago de Compostela, a medieval center of pilgrimage that even today attracts hordes of people now coming from all over the world. Traveling the highways and roadways through Navarra and Galicia we caught apparitions of staff-wielding dark-clad pilgrims, with their nylon backpacks and space-age hiking boots as the ancient routes periodically emerged from the forest and farms into the modern age.
The tour of Spain, highlighting the green, mountainous north, ends today. I am flying back to the States on Delta at noon.
Travel is exhilarating. I love sampling the breads, cured meats, cheeses, and pastries of various parts of the world. Food encapsulates the culture of a country and its people, and reflects the regional experience which fascinates me no end. Some people on the tour spoke of how they didn't like Spanish food. For me Spanish food is the dark side, the opposite side of food I knew as a child in the Philippines. I love the spices the Spanish use because they are the same as those used on the islands they once ruled. We're in Madrid, cosmopolitan and stylish in the area around the Cybele fountain, touristy and historical around Plaza de Oro but I can understand why the early Filipino illustrados largely lived in Barcelona where art is softer and divergence from the mainstream is cultivated.
This is the second hotel we've been in with free WiFi but I have not posted to the Internet except for some photos to my Flickr photo stream. This one was shot at a public park near the Old Town area of Santiago de Compostela. A co-traveler, Wil, and I took a walk the afternoon after we arrived in the pilgrimage city. I enjoy visiting tourist spots, the remarkable features of the cities we visited, but I am most interested just in seeing how people there live.
In Spain, by five or six in the afternoon, public squares, parks and pedestrian malls are full of families enjoying themselves. What a refreshing change from the States. Children run and play while their parents, often both father and mother, watched them and chatted with each other. The public spaces become Spain's giant living room. We're flying to Madrid at noon, then back to the U.S. tomorrow.
On the eve of my scheduled travels the next two months, these photos of my previous trips bring up even more feeling. I look at landscape images from other photographers and marvel at the quality of their images. In particular I like the vividness of the images, not so much the composition i.e. the crop they choose to make of the 360° world they are standing in. On the other hand I believe I've improved my own skills at both photography and processing the images after the shoot but the way to where I want them to be is very long, shrouded as always in clouds and mist!
In his 1995 book, Becoming a Chef, coauthored with his wife, Karen Page, sous chef Andrew Dornenburg wrote: "This profession requires a tremendous amount of hard work. There is more to being a chef than creativity, just as there is more than creativity to being an artist. As in any other craft, chefs must practice, practice, practice. Perfection is the only acceptable benchmark."
Reading this was reassuring. We have our innate, gut sense of what looks, sounds, tastes, smells or feels good but as human beings that mostly do things with their hands, art is also craft, the manipulation of objects to align with what we see in our minds and hearts.
Scott Bourne, interviewed by Jason Anderson on the latest Learning Digital Photography podcast, had some attention-grabbing comments. He quoted someone else saying some 99% of camera lenses are better than 98% of the photographers who use them. Humbling! He told Jason that when he did portrait and fashion photography he shot with long lenses, 400 and 500 mm babies! He said photographs in fashion magazines like Vogue are taken with long lenses for richer detail. Use side lights for maximum texture in landscapes but direct frontal light (light behind your shoulder) for shooting nature and birds. He started his photography career in the 1970s when his father who worked for an Indianapolis/Bloomington paper got him a pass to shoot pictures at the Indy 500. After doing motor racing photography, he did the usual wedding and portrait, fashion and product photography before he was lured into nature and finally avian photography. Shooting with a Canon for 17 years, he switched to Nikon D7s that focus more quickly and have less noise at high ISOs.
His one comment that floored: he is a businessman, not an artist. He spends 80% of his time selling his photographs (and now videos), only 20% on actually doing photography. I'm not there at all.
The podcast host, Jason, writes in his photography website that he has been shooting pictures for three years. His portraits are ordinary but his landscapes are very good. Like me he wants to shift from doing IT to making his photography his bread-and-butter. He is married, apparently with children.
I shot the photo above on my walk up the Monon Trail to 116th Street this evening. The sun came out after a rainy morning and a cloudy afternoon and the light was great. I had not walked on the Monon since I walked there with the Banthias in early August. I fall into other routines and forget how pleasant it is walking on the trail in the late afternoon when the air is cooler and the light perfect for taking pictures.
Ah, the joy of creating a meal from refrigerator leftovers! I rather like the balls of white sushi rice studded with raw Pepita. I know I need to eat pumpkin seeds for the estrogenic effects on the prostate so any way to encourage consumption through taste sensations is welcome.
To finish the new website I am working on the video page before tackling the text (currently called blog) page but I didn't anticipate diving headlong into video compression. Compression, like motion and color, are the most intimidating phases of preparing a video for delivery. The videos I have completed are all large files. I worked under no file size constraints. They are too large for the iWeb software I am using. I can post them but streaming would be stringently slow.
So, I'm stuck here whereas I had envisioned flying through these last two sections of the website.
The image above shows the video display on QuickTime Player 7 and the new QuickTime X that is included in the recent Snow Leopard Mac OS upgrade. I exported the Final Cut Pro movie file as a 1280x720 video on QuickTime with an appreciably sharper and more vivid picture but the size fourfold!
More than ever I feel mastery of compression is the final Holy Grail of video production. This should not be! Shooting and editing should be at the heart of the beast!
I am excited to revisit my old photo shoots and look at the images again, processing them as I see images today. Instead of using previously processed images I am starting from scratch, and the images are surprising me. This shoot with Lenny lasted just four hours but he was such a natural that he executed pose after poses easily. Compare this with the shoots I did with Brandon. Over nine hours and I got so few usable images. Brandon has done more modeling than Lenny but he generally models for commercials and ads. There shoots are often more straight-forward and probably heavily directed. Model photography for me is a more creative process. My most successful shoots were done with little planning. The results came from the intense collaboration between the model and me.
The new website is live and the model portfolios are growing steadily. Pretty soon I want to weed them down although I am rethinking the concept of "portfolio." I may redesign the site and have a separate page for my best images on a separate page that I'll call 'Portfolio."
I want to post more videos on the video page then decide what I want to do with the blog page. What I really want is a page containing the equivalent of my writing "portfolio" - the more disciplined work I want to get into.
Once I am done with these, I'll continue to revise the web site but will shift my focus to doing new shoots. Before I do new shoots (unless a new shoot hits me on the head), I want to work on my shoot technique and learn additional skills in Photoshop.
I took this photo yesterday afternoon during my end-of-the-day walk. I love shadows. I think they give images not only depth but mystery. This is a shot of an alley beside a Chinese restaurant. The front of the restaurant is painted gold and red with plaster dragons and faux pillars.
Days are crystal-clear and cool, suggestive of fall that technically is not here yet. Already I feel nostalgia for summer even as it dwindles into fall. Nostalgia is okay. Any feeling is better than no feeling at all. Feelings help me identify images to composite and shoot. Isn't creativity largely feeling?
Peter runs a small Chinese restaurant on a side street near busy Keystone Avenue. I stopped having lunch there ten or more years ago when I became embarrassed by his mother’s attention. Walking by the restaurant yesterday afternoon, I decided to check it out again. I had fully expected the restaurant to be gone by now. The larger, more successful Chinese Ruby closed this spring, before the economic downturn began to affect other businesses.
Peter is ebulliently friendly as always. He treats me like a long-lost brother without mentioning that I have patronized his restaurant in years. No recriminations, everything as though I had been going there all these years. I am older and Peter, too, is older. He has gray in his sideburns. His father who used to be the main cook passed away a year or so before I stopped going. His mother now stays at home.
“She walks slowly, moves slowly, but still talks fast,” he says. He spends as much time at the restaurant to get away. She is 81 years old.
Peter talked about the new China. There are 300 cities with over a million people. The people have idolized American capitalism but since the recession their adulation turned them from being disciples to leaders in their own right.
“They come to Chicago,” Peter says, “and are disappointed.” The buildings are old. In China, because they “started from scratch,” the buildings are spanking new and glitter in the newfound prosperity of abundant, cheap labor.
They have evolved a kind of communism different from that of Soviet Russia. The politburo collects information then makes decisions that affect the whole country. One size fits all. It works for the country if its economic triumph is any indication. Peter admits there is no room for protest. There is no room for the individual.
Peter himself is a product of the old China. He has been running his restaurant for decades through sheer perseverance and hard work. He told me he planned to keep working for another ten years then will retire to Hongkong. “There,” he told me, “he could hire a Filipino to do his household work at $500 a month. Your money there goes a long way.”
Unlike the new Chinese immigrant businessmen, Peter is not looking to rapidly expand his business or build a franchise. He does most of the cooking himself. He greets each customer personally, chats with each one before he seats them, and takes their payment after they finish. As I was leaving today, I told him his food is as good as it was when last I ate there. He told me he cooked Cantonese and now Sichuan. A young woman helps with cooking in the kitchen.
When I think of business, my model is similar to Peter’s. Personal touch is high on my values. Customers are treated like old friends. Like Peter I would like to be generous with freebies. Lagniappes is how I think of the most successful small-time business owners in the Philippines. After you conclude your business, they add a few more prawns to your heap while making small talk, never making a big deal of the tiny addition. Those little gifts are what the customers remember, what keep them coming back again and again. They become suki, regular patrons.
I'm finishing the new website (www.duendearts.com), creating links to my Internet sites on the home page. I've had an account with YouTube for years but never posted a video there. I think the Dubrovnik video I made in July is the best I've done. Watching it again yesterday I revisited the memories of that trip. I had not planned this video but somehow the footage I took worked really well in editing the 22-minute video.
YouTube has limitations for free account holders: no more than 2 GB, no longer than 10 minutes. I couldn't upload the video. As I get back to editing videos I have to consider the YouTube limitations. Vimeo has a .5 GB weekly limit and only standard, not high defintion, Vimeo Plus 5 GB with a limit of 1 GB per file. I knew short videos are more effective (I've seen enough director commentaries on DVD to see how feature movies are edited down and down, often eliminating the director's favorite clips all in the interest of creating a more powerful movie) but ignored caution. If I want to post my videos they'll need to conform to these requirements.
I took this photo yesterday afternoon during my end-of-the-day walk. I love shadows. I think they give images not only depth but mystery. This is a shot of an alley beside a Chinese restaurant. The front of the restaurant is painted gold and red with plaster dragons and faux pillars.
Days are crystal-clear and cool, suggestive of fall that technically is not here yet. Already I feel nostalgia for summer even as it dwindles into fall. Nostalgia is okay. Any feeling is better than no feeling at all. Feelings help me identify images to composite and shoot. Isn't creativity largely feeling?
Visha did the honors of rolling out the pizza dough that I had prepared Sunday morning for a successful launch of my home pizza-making enterprise. The crust was heavenly—thin and nutty, the filling of Mozarella, tomatoes, and fresh basil leaves just right. We ate it hot out of the oven, with a salad of fresh greens from the deck garden with a simple balsamic vinegar-olive oil dressing.
Yesterday I rolled out my own pizza, this time adding strips of Prosciutto and more fresh chili. I overloaded it with seeded tomato, even adding a few Kalamata olives. It was not as good. Sunday's pizza was thinner like Neapolitan pizzas. I ignored everyone I consulted who urged a thin crust for the best Margherita and rued my disobedience. The center of my pizza was thick, like bread, or, I guess, like Sicilian pizza and I missed the crunch and flavor of Sunday's pizza.
See the full gallery on posterousLast night, our Thai friend, Usana, invited us to the Thursday night buffet at Thai Taste on the city's north side. My Chinese friends, Allen and Helen, had been urging me to check this out for many years but last night was the first time I went. I'd been too attached to Chinese food when I do go out to eat.
As it happened, Allen and Helen, were there, too, last night. They asked me where I'd been. They had not seen me at the usual restaurant haunts where we often meet. We're Asian buffet aficionados. They told me that the Saturday lunch buffet at The Journey is the place to go on Saturday, better than the dim sum buffet at 8 China Buffet. For Sunday lunch, they go to Mandarin House in Carmel.
The spread at Thai Taste was okay and most of the tables were occupied by six o'clock. Service was excellent. I do love Thai food but compared to Chinese food it tends to be a tad more expensive. Not as expensive though as Japanese food which is probably the top of the heap in terms of price, especially Japanese steak houses.
Outside the restaurant after the meal, I met a friendly Caucasian guy. The front of his white tee shirt was splattered with chili sauce for which he kept apologizing. He told us he discovered Asian foods when he lived in California years ago. There he had a Vietnamese friend who introduced him to Asian cooking. Thai Taste was his favorite but he also loved Korean food. For Korean he went to a restaurant (Ma Ma's Korean or Bando) on Pendleton Pike and E. Miracle on Allisonville Road.
The evening reminded me there is a small group of local people into East Asian food. Our party consisted of three Filipinos, a Thai and a Japanese. Yoichi loved the food. When eM invited him to join us, he was incredulous. He hadn't known there was good Thai food in Indianapolis. He was going to Golden Corral for dinner on the nights he didn't want to cook after work.
Maybe I should a food blog since food obviously is high on my value list. I can easily add a food blog to my new Duende Arts site. iMovie does not allow me to group the blogs together into an album page as it does photograph pages. I am still looking for how I can put my text products into the site.
As summer comes to a close, my herb garden on the deck facing the lake morphs into everything I shall miss when the season ends. Tarragon, I discovered today, is wonderful in salads. I didn't even tear the leaves up so when a leaf is included in the mouthful the flavor and aroma stands out, pure gustatory sensation flooding the tongue and mouth.
Cauliflower is also underrated but its texture is priceless especially when simply stewed with fresh tomatoes and herbs and a few drops of extra virgin olive oil.
I have not done much cooking at home this past month. Quality Improvement applied to lifestyles is ongoing as it is in the corporate world. Unlike the Obama administration on the abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects I must move on. Dukkha (in Buddhist practice, what we feel when we don't have something we want or have something we don't want) eggs us to make karmic changes in how we live our lives.
Last night's supper resulted in discovering how blueberries can add not only color but flavor to rice. The inspiration came from a book on Spanish foods featuring a simple recipe for rice cooked with fresh tomatoes and herbs. No sauces, just veggies sautéed in the lightest film of olive oil and cooked rice added to the pan. It's a gentler version of Chinese fried rice, the flavors at once fresher and more refreshing.
I have been reviewing my model shoots to see what photo images fit my idea of what to post in the new website. This time I am not going to post all the photos from the shoots that I have processed. The new Duende Arts website will have a specific objective: to post products to begin to move into a money-earning phase of the business of photography, videos and writing.
Even more than I felt before I started this review I find myself wanting to hone my image processing skills. The images are considerably better in terms of color correction than the images I have on my current website but now I need to work on making these images of striking quality.
As I contemplate reviewing Photoshop techniques for image-processing, I am reminded how I need to work on lighting and exposure techniques again. I also need to resume working on videos while dipping my foot in FCP again.
Meanwhile Apple has announced its new system upgrade, Snow Leopard, from Leopard. The slight change in name might reflect Apple's acknowledgement that this upgrade does not bring about major changes in the OS although full support for 64 bit should, once implemented by software developers, make for a significant increase in processing speed for those of us with multi-core computers.
I especially look forward to integration with Microsoft's core software so that using Apple's iCal and Address Book I automatically access the comparable data in my Microsoft business software. Apple takes an important step in making Apple software more attractive to business and corporate users!
But where's the Blu-Ray support?
I have been looking at the images I shot of Greg and his girlfriend, Jaz. Since completing the shoot is unlikely now I have decided to process the shoot as I would have done had we finished it. I am pleasantly surprised at how many good shots we were able to take in the uncompleted shoot. This is one of my favorites, with an element of unintended humor. I hope Greg goes farther with his modeling ambition. If he can get over some of his natural qualms he has the potential.
You can view the set so far posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71/3840568992/in/set-72157618679412656/
