Not sure that I will get back to Puerto Vallarta for some time, but wanted to note a few places that I found fun while I was there.
Cafe Roma is a fun, casual pizza resturant off the main strip. The place has cheap Corona's and very good pizza. After you have been in Mexico for a few days, a change of pace is welcome. The prices were also a relief as the tourist places were surprisingly expensive even in this weak economy.
Archie's Wok is another nice find, serving fine Asian cuisine at reasonable prices. Food was very good and service was very friendly. Again not a Mexican food place but a nice change of pace if you are in PV for several days.
Porto Bellowas an excellent. It was very surprising to be in Mexico and discover such a good Italian restaurant. I highly recommend this place but be warned that it is not cheap.
That wraps up my notes from PV, not sure when I will be back but it a nice beach location with non-stop service from Phoenix. I can also use my frequent flyer miles which makes this a destination one that I will consider again in the future.
I'm back from Photoshop World in Las Vegas that ended on Friday. I'm an enthusiastic amateur photographer and there is no place better to get the latest training and trends in the photographic industry then to attend a PSW. The National Association of Photoshop Professionals puts on two of these events a year, one on the East Coast (usually in Orlando) and one out West (usually in Las Vegas). I haven't been to the event since 2007 and below were the trends that stood out to that previous show.
Video with DSLRs. In early 2009, Canon came out with their 5D Mark II, which included the ability to record HD video. I'm told that this was almost an after thought by the Canon engineers thinking that there would be a very small audience that would be interested in the video capabilities, perhaps a handful of photojournalist or wedding photographers might use the feature. Well there has been an explosion of interest and excitement surrounding this capability and there were several classes at PSW that dealt with capturing, editing and creating video with DSLR cameras. Count me as one of the ones who is trying to learn this new skill set and expand my ability to tell stories with it.
HDR Photography. High Dynamic Range photography is a complete creation from the digital age, it isn't a process that the old analog darkroom could create. As such, it is fairly controversial in terms of its appeal. Basically the process involves taking several exposures of a scene (usually 3 to 5) and then using software blending these exposures together into one photo. By using the multiple exposures the photo can greatly increase the tonal range of the image. There were several classes on HDR at the show, and while I was there Apple announce that it would include HDR capabilities with the new iOS software.
3D Design. The 3D capabilities came in with a prior version of Photoshop but there seemed to be more interest in it this year. I sat in on one session that went over the capabilities and it was interesting. To me, this is just a starting marker for Photoshop and sometime in the next five years the capabilities of 3D will begin to expand rapidly. For example, loading multiple photos of a subject and then loading them into Photoshop to rotate around it would be very cool and something I think is not to far off, although I am completely speculating here.
Other observations: there were supposedly 3,000 people in attendance which seem strong in this economy, the accompanying trade show seemed much smaller than I remember with less vendor participation. The show itself seemed more diverse, with more women and African-Americans. In the past these shows seem to be a young to middle aged white guy fest. The diversity was a welcome sign.
Well that's all for my notes from PSW Las Vegas. I hope to make it back in a few years to see how things have changed.
I was in Puerto Vallarta last week and what better place to test my Canon G11 camera along with the new intervalometer. This is my first attempt at time lapse and although rather crude I thought it was an interesting and fun result. The sunsets over the Pacific are very beautiful and this captures a little of the essence of that experience. This was taken from my fifth floor room at the Fiesta Americana in PV. The music is a little dramatic but just deal with it since I don't want to re-edit the video and it was an initial grab from a free music website.
(Editors note: For playback I would recommend setting the quality to 720p, there is a drop down menu on the bottom right side of the menu that let's you detemine this number and I suggest you set it to that for best play back; or simple go to my YouTube channel and watch it there.)
My friend Tim let me know about an article that was in the Real Estate section of The New York Times this week on Uruguay.
My fascination with this country started about ten years ago when, as I was working for a company that financed older aircraft, and I attended a few conferences that were put on by Bob Booth. Bob was born in Brazil, but raised in Uruguay and he was and is an endless promoter of Latin America, but particularly Uruguay. He would talk so enthusiastically of the beaches and great food, that I always wanted to visit. Last year while I was visiting Argentina, I went for a day trip to Colonia, which is directly across the Rio de la Plata from Buenos Aires. Colonia is far from the beaches off the east coast of Urugauy so no beachtown and surf for me, but I was impressed by how friendly the people were and how developed the country seemed to be. Both Argentina and Uruguay are known for their beef, so the food was very good and relatively inexpensive (at least at that time last year). The country also has a stable democratic government and demostrates a progresive streak by requiring all its citizens to vote under pentaty of a tax and by the outlawing of bull fighting early in the 20th century. (Nearby there is a photo of an abandoned bullring that I took during my daytrip.)
I think a trip to the east coast of Uruguay in on the agenda for 2009. With the dollar weak, Latin America is a much more reasonable place to travel these days. Perhaps I'll even find a new home there, well, you can always dream.
So coming back from the San Diego trip that I discussed in my previous post, I passed through some weather. It gave me a great opportunity to shoot some interesting clouds. As I learn about photography, I learn more about the differences between the way our eyes and brain interpret the world and the way a camera captures the world. Let's just say our eyes and brain kick ass. Cameras can only "see" a portion of the tonal range that our eyes can see within a particular scene. Ansel Adams developed an approach called the "zone system" to explain the 5 or 6 tonal ranges or zones that a camera can capture depending on the settings. Our eyes and brains can see 10 to 12 tonal ranges.
Clouds can sometimes create great challenges to the photographer, for what the eyes sees can sometimes never be captured by a digital sensor. I was pleased that I caught some of the essence of the weather that I passed through on that ride back. It was really fun to see.
I spent the last weekend of February in San Diego floating around taking one of the Mentor workshops. I've taken a couple of these workshops before and I have enjoyed them a great deal. Not only can you learn from the professional photographers/mentors but the quality of photographers in the workshop provides for another body of collective knowledge to draw from. We had rain on the Friday and Sunday, but had a sunny day Saturday. We had five shoots in all, Balboa Park, sunset shoot from Catalina Island, a wildlife park on Saturday morning, surfers Saturday afternoon and the USS Midway on Sunday morning. I got some decent shots but had a minor personal snafu, when I deleted all the photos off my hard drive after I had returned home. A hard lesson but certainly one that will make me more careful about my workflow. I did have a couple that I had saved on Flickr which I have link to here.
I was at the grocery store the other night and picked up a copy of Arizona Highways magazine. This month the entire edition is dedicated to Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam. I have enjoyed this magazine for most of the 30 years that I have lived in Arizona, and have subscribed to it from time to time. The photography is remarkable almost too good from issue to issue. I also enjoy the "hike of the month" and "back road adventure" each month. My biggest compliant about Arizona Highways is the consistently poor writing in the magazine. The articles always seem so mundane and pedestrian. This month, however, there is an excellent article written by Larry Cheek a Seattle based journalist. who writes a very balanced article from the environmentalist point of view regarding Lake Powell. I would have linked to it but there is no online access to the article that I can find.
In any event, this month's issue reminded me of a trip that I had taken with my friends Tim and Joey during the New Year's of 2001. We hung out in Flagstaff for the celebrations and took a side trip to the Lake Powell area. I found some pictures from back then, not very good but fun to look at because they are starting to get to that age when photos become valuable even if the exposure wasn't just right. There is a picture of Tim standing on an overlook to Glen Canyon dam. There is also a photo of the Hamblin Moutain range which is on U.S. Route 89 just south of the Lake Powell area.
I was looking through some photos that I took from Argentina and notice this one of a peso. Every time I travel I inspect the currency to see if there is anything that I can learn from the country that I am visiting. There is usually some stately picture of a historic figure (usually in profile); and if you ask the locals about the person the response is usually a blank stare. People are too busy with their daily lives to be experts on areas that don't affect them. We Americans aren't any better, in fact, if you told Americans that they could get a tax break if we allowed the McDonald's Golden Arches on the back of a dollar bill, I'm sure a large percentage would give their approval. The nature and progress of technology has also increased the separation of money from its place of governmental authority, visibility and pride. For most of my transactions, even when traveling in a foreign country I use my debit card which certainly makes the transactions feel much more commercial than about national institutions or identity. It can also impact us on a more psychological level as it divorces the physical nature of money from our lives and creates a system where a plastic card and a receipt govern our reality of the worth of a product or service. Perhaps historians will look back someday and point to this transitional period from currency to technology as the reason for our higher consumption and lower savings. Anyway, I have to go now and fill up my gas tank, pick up some dry cleaning and buy some groceries and of course I won't forget my debit card.
A large percentage, something like 60%, of Argentineans are descendants of Italian immigrants. From what I understand, as the United States began to slowly close its doors to new immigrants in the early and middle twentieth century, the continuous flow instead headed south, many landing in Argentina. Whether that fact is true or not, there is a very Italian feel to Buenos Aires. The people are friendly, tolerant and easy going about life. They also know how to cook. But best of all they know how to make coffee. I start each day by going to one of the local sidewalk cafe's and getting a cortado, which as its name implies is a quarter steamed milk with expresso, served in a very small cup. It is fantastic. Being an American, when I first saw it served I thought that I was going to need ten of them to replace my typical morning grande. Surprisingly, one does the trick and you are off and running.
To be a sports fan in Phoenix, where I live, means to go watch your team occasionally and jump on the bandwagon when they start to make a playoff run.
But in other parts of the world it takes on it's original meaning, as to be a fanatic, to be seemingly possessed with the spirit of the team, or to have single-minded excessive zeal. That is what it means to be a football fan in Latin America.
Prior to arriving in Buenos Aires, I had arranged a day tour with a guide that I had seen on the Travel Channel. (I hope to have a separate post about that experience at a later time). During the tour today, the guide received a call from a friend who had tickets for this evening's Argentina versus Chile football match. This was the first of the 18 matches that are part of the qualifications for the 2010 World Cup. I have never thought of myself as a big football (soccer) fan, but going to the game live certainly changed my interest level. The stadium is in the northern end of town and is called El Monumental, it is one of two major stadiums in town the other being the more blue collar area of town called La Boca. (Perhaps more on that in a later post). The stadium holds 70,000 and these are not your-sushi-eating, Perrier-sipping, fifth-inning-arriving Dodger fans (sorry Kevin), these people come early and they come loud. An hour and half before the start of the match, the stadium was full with people chanting and singing. At various points they reach a frenzy and begin to jump up and down. It was quite an experience. I'm sure the entire southern cone of South America was watching as these two neighbors battled it out on the football field.
I had my small Canon point and shoot camera that takes video and so I captured a few of the moments from the evening.
The first video is from the moments right after the Argentinean national anthem has ended and immediately before the game begins. It gives you a sense of the atmosphere of the match and enthusiasm of the crowd.
The next video is actually from a French TV broadcast of the game. (I couldn't find the Spanish language version on YouTube.) I post it here so that the next video will make sense. The shot was brilliant as the Argentinean player "bends it like Beckham" and curves the ball into the goal.
Below is the video I shot of the first Argentina goal. It will give you a perspective of my seats in the stadium and the pandemonium that breaks out after the goal. I'm not sure that you can actually see the ball go into the goal, on this grainy video, so that is why I posted the first video.
So that is my first Latin America football experience. Argentina won 2-0. I may begin to follow the World Cup qualifying a little closer now that I have been introduced to a few of the teams.
Walk or drive along the major thoroughfares and the posters are plastered to any available public space. I thought that political advertising was bad in the United States, but in Argentina it is literally an urban street art form. Plaster a poster with the same face 300 times on a public space, expose it to weather, pollution and graffiti and you have quite a work of art. As it specifically relates to the election, there is an interesting situation that is occurring in Argentina that echoes U.S. politics - the sitting first lady of Argentina is running to replace her husband as president. Apparently she is very intelligent, a current senator in the Argentinean Congress and a heavy favorite to succeed her husband a few weeks from now in the election. The Argentineans call her "Queen Cristina" and she certainly has shrewd political instincts. If she wins she will follow a trend that includes female presidents in the Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand, Germany, Liberia and Chile.
"The unexamined life is not worth living..." - Socrates In recent years I notice that when I take these trips it is not just a physical journey but a mental excursions as well. The long distance and time away from the day-to-day distractions allows me to reflect on my life. Typically there are moments during the trip where I begin to question the various aspects of my life, the questions start simple and build to a crescendo: Why am I traveling alone? Where are my friends? What am I doing in a foreign country far from my family? Why aren't I married? How come I don't have any kids? Do I want kids? What am I doing with my life? Why did I plan a trip during the baseball playoffs? These questions and many more as I bounce around a foreign land. With age and travel experience the answers have become more refined and I have become more accepting of my life and situation. Socrates may have thought it valuable, but sometimes while I am on vacation, I just find my mental process annoying. It is amazing that I have these thoughts at all, in so many ways I am living a life that incredible by any standard. I have my health, family that loves me, friends that support me, a job that I am fulfilled by; I live in the richest country in the world, I have college education that has help me to build a very acceptable level of comfort and freedom. Perhaps it is because of this level of comfort I have the luxury to worry about such mundane things, where as the rest of the world seeks a simple level of survival and security. I learned the other day that the Latin root for word decide means "to cut off from" and so I therefore every decision that I have made in my life has cut me off from other opportunities that would have put me in a different direction. Not necessarily a better direction just different - I just need to learn to accept and enjoy the direction I am headed.
I'm in Las Vegas for a Photoshop convention and had an opportunity to go out on a pre-conference field trip to Red Rock National Conservatory which is about twenty minutes outside of Las Vegas. The area strongly reminded me of Sedona with the red clay rock surrounded by blue skies.
As part of the trip, three of the professional photographers for the convention acted as guides Moose Peterson, Joe McNally and Vincent Versace. I always find it interesting to watch how differently the personalities and styles are amongst the professional photographers that I meet. They all seem to take a different route to work every morning but somehow arrive at the same place; and that place is always understanding light and using it in the way that you want to produce the image you want to convey. These three couldn't have bee more different, Moose is the hard core outdoor photographer who likes to photograph "critters", while Vincent seems to take a very abstract approach to his work. Joe is the blue collar photograph who is very capable of taking quality pictures, which reflects his year shooting for Life, Sports Illustrated and National Geographic.
Anyway, the light was very harsh yesterday afternoon, so the photographer's suggested that we look for pattern, texture, shape and form. Not sure I quite understood what they wanted us to do but I am posting a few of the pictures because I wanted to be able to record my trip to this cool (near urban) park. It would certainly be a place to go and explore again if I had some extra time in Nevada in the future.
I just learned about this new way to be able to post some of my Flickr photos here on my blog and they are in a slideshow format. I thought that I would try it out with some existing photos that I have on Flickr. These were shots that I took while I was in San Francisco earlier this year. Click on the thumbnails below the larger photo to see that image. Click on "Photo Link" below the image to see the larger image in Flickr.
I had my brother Peter and a couple of his friends, Dominic and Paula, over for dinner tonight. Peter's friends were terrific people and I had a great time getting to know them. Dominic is a contractor so he was interested in looking around my house and gave me some good suggestions on some projects that I could undertake even giving me estimates on what the projects will cost. Dominic and Paula are also both from Ireland, own a home there and visit the country on a fairly frequent basis. As they have done with Peter, they invited me to meet up with them on one of their trips back to Ireland and provide a more personal guide to the country. I hope that I would be able to take them up on the offer sometime soon.
Overall the evening was very enjoyable and interesting as we talked about travel, the economy, and politics or perhaps more precisely foreign policy. Several bottles of wine were consumed. At one point I believe that we had solved most of the worlds major problems, unfortunately I didn't write down the answers and couldn't remember them this morning when I woke up.
Dominic and Paula own a house in a town just outside of Dublin called Ardan. The town name reminded me of a town that I had visited while in Ireland last September, which was called Adare. I've posted a picture of the Adare Manor Hotel, which is a beautifully restored hotel with a golf course. I have since read that President Clinton stayed there on his trip to Ireland in 1998. In any event it was nice to think back on my trip to Ireland and I found myself going through some of the pictures from that trip, I may post some more at a future time.
While waiting for a delayed flight on Friday afternoon, the Southwest Airlines gate agent began playing his ukulele and singing a few songs to keep us entertained. As I was sitting there watching him, I thought that the experience highlighted something about our culture in general. It seems that we have become so passive about our lives, (and I don't exclude myself in this) as we watch television, surf the internet and listen to our iPods, that we really don't know how to interact with each other any longer. This gate agent had to work pretty hard to get people to sing along with him, eventually he got people singing but it took some effort. I thought it was a unique experience and now he is famous through YouTube.
Until recently I was a dedicated aisle seat person when I traveled. After flying for a number of years, I found that aisle seats gave me more room and access to stand up if I felt like stretching. I didn't have to ask anyone's permission to move around or to retrieve an item from the overhead bin. But a few months ago, I came across a book about photography from the window seat of a plane, which inspired me to reconsider my old seating regime.
Since that time I have started to request a window seat and with my camera started to photograph out the window. At first I was skeptical that I would get any images that would be interesting, and some of the shots like a lot of my photography are rejects. The biggest challenge is the high contrast (the difference between light and dark in an image) and strong haze that is created on bright sunny days. But with all else digital, Photoshop comes to the rescue. With a little color balance and some sharping, the photos are a bit more presentable. Because I don't want to draw attention to myself during the take offs and landings I use my little point and shoot camera, which means the resolution on these photos is not the best.
So far, because I live in Phoenix, I have had the most luck photographing landmarks in and around the Valley. The shot of Camelback Mountain includes my favorite public golf course, Papago, which is located on the boundry between Phoenix and Scottsdale. In the same shot if you look to the north of the McDowell Buttes you'll notice another golf course, Arizona Country Club, a course that I worked at during high school. I even tried to photograph some afternoon clouds as they hover over the desert. The heat during the summer raises off the desert floor and creates dramatic cloud formations. These thermals are very popular with hang gliders and bald eagles because they provide the energy to soar for hours; they're a little tougher on the fixed wings of a commercial jet. So they are much more fun to photograph than to fly through.
I went camping this past Friday and Saturday night with a group of friends from my work. We went north near Flagstaff, to a place I affectionately call Camp Luke. The name is derived from a couple of the participants at this year's camp. This is a new site from the place we stayed at a couple of years ago which we called Camp Shane. I use the term "camp" rather loosely, because if you look at the map of the site you'll see that we weren't far from Flagstaff which made the entire trip very comfortable. If we needed anything we could just run into town and pick it up. In a way, we were just escaping the heat of the desert by going up into the mountains. We ate like kings - we had steak on Friday night, and BBQ pulled pork on Saturday night. Some of the guys went fishing in upper Lake Mary but didn't catch anything. Lower Lake Mary is dry and looks like a marsh. I went for a hike on Saturday. Overall the forest is extremely dry and there were very restrictive fire conditions including no campfires.
The roads around the campsite were very dry and dusty. The main road was some distance from our camp, but one morning I was able to get a picture of the sun rays as they reflected off the airborne dust in the air. Both mornings and evenings were terrific, as the transition from a warm day into a cool evening took place; or as a very cool night would turn into a warm early morning.
My friend Shane organized the entire trip; he is a very experienced outdoorsman which makes camping with him ideal because he has all the necessary stuff and knowledge. He also has a good attitude about life. He appreciates the simple things, good food, an open campsite and decent fishing. Sometimes it is the simplest things in life that can bring us the most happiness, we just have to slow down enough to appreciate them.
First off, I must admit, that I stole the "Stranger of the Week" idea from another blog. Actually the photographer on that blog was posting a "Stranger a Day", which seemed far to ambitious for me. But I found the idea compelling. I particularly like the concept because I tend to be shy and it is difficult for me to meet new people sometimes, but by having a "project" that I was working on, I had a purpose to approach people and ask them for a photograph. So far I have only really done it once in Chicago, and actually it was a guy looking for some spare change, so I guess technically he approached me. See post below. But I digress. Since I really didn't have a photo to share this week, I thought that I would put one up that came from my recent workshop to Guadalajara. I was walking through the town of Jocotepec, when I met this guy. He was friendly, spoke decent English and wanted me to take his picture. He had family in Southern California and was interested in telling me all about them. I eventually had to duck in a store to get away from him. I thought he had an interesting face with good character. The lighting wasn't the greatest because it was around noon on a very bright day. His nose is almost blown out. Next time I will use a reflector or some other way to bring some light to the other side of his face.
