Photo Walk

6.24.10 -
Photo Walk
Topic: Dusk on the North Shore
Time: 7:30 pm
Where: Gate “A” Heinz Stadium Pittsburgh PA
What to bring: camera, tripod, passion to learn and a friend.

Photography "Lighting" Q&A 6.22.10

Photo of the Week

Reminder: Tomorrow Night
6.10.10 -
Understanding Exposure Class @ Northland Library 7-9pm I will be teaching an introductory class on understanding exposure & your DSLR camera.
To register call: 412-366-8100

Show Up ~ Rant

You want to know what is great about awareness? The actual moment that you know you are aware.



Awareness...it’s an odd thing that we all search for at different times of our lives…higher purpose, simply to have purpose, guidance from the divine.

But then there is an instant when we hear our inner voice, actually hear it speak, both audible and in our gut at the same time…a truth.

Next, the hard part…What do you do with a truth from yourself? Worse yet, a gut truth that will nag at you until you do the damn thing that is revealed (nagging) to you.

You say your prayers then you go to work.

Deliver whatever it is. Be present.

Show up.

P.S.
I wrote this on Facebook yesterday but I feel it needs to be preserved here.

~ I am an advocate for being pulled together for a common “purpose”, not pushed together by a common “argument”.

Moment

Current Reading: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Current Music: Good Evening New York City by Paul McCartney
Mood: Good
Smells: Coffee & toast
Sounds: Percolating Coffee pot
Temperature: 55 degrees
Thoughts: Angels whispered in humanity ear's evolve.

Feedback ~ Critique Me

Random photo taken in my backyard. What do you think?

June Dates

6.10.10 -
Understanding Exposure Class @ Northland Library 7-9pm I will be teaching an introductory class on understanding exposure & your DSLR camera.
To register call: 412-366-8100

6.15.10 -
Pictage/PUG ~ Create Connect & Grow
7 to 9 ~
7:00 to 7:30 cocktails & networking
7:30 to 9pm into to new PUG followed by Q&A (topic/speaker TBD)
Location
Studio ~ 502 W. North Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15212

**Open to ALL photographers, including students

RSVP at craigphotography@mac.com

6.17.10 -
Understanding Exposure class @ Northland Library 7-9pm (Part II) ~ I will be teaching an introductory class on understanding exposure & Your DSLR camera.
To register call: 412-366-8100

6.24.10 -
Photo Walk
Topic: Dusk on the North Shore
Time: 7:30 pm
Where: Gate “A” Heinz Stadium Pittsburgh PA
What to bring: camera, tripod, passion to learn and a friend.

Photos of the Week ~ Random

All photography & artwork on this site is licensed under a creative commons licensing: Please feel free to use and distribute the photography & artwork in accordance with the licensing.

This is only a rant, let me do no harm.

This post would be so much better if I had a camera with me….sorry about that.

Ok I love this place; it has been two weeks since I have been in this coffee house. Last time I was here I wrote about the Brazilian girl and the Chinese lady. I did walk back into this place with expectations, but not really, it is just a coffee house.

As I stand in line – I think to myself how lonely life must me, how unnoticeable this person must feel. To be “seen’ is a hard thing to understand. From a distance, we are all seen or are all too self- absorbed to bother with what goes seen or unseen in our life.

To be outwardly self-expressive, using one's own body as a place of self-fascination. Not the body as a piece of art, but the body a canvas for art.

I stand in line waiting to order. The young lady in front of me has a full back tattoo that depicts a scene form Lord of the Rings…Seriously, truly a full cinematic-clip-in-all-of-its-glory tattoo on her back. She had a bikini top on showing off the full of her back. Two things go through my mind; one - damn this is good work (please Lord God never let my daughter do this). Two - when did she begin to feel invisible?

I have been running into extraordinary tattoos lately. There was the man with the Steelers logo (HERE) on his is head, the wedding guest with an Irish toast on her back (HERE) and last night after telling this story to a man at the pub he showed me his tattoo of a Dr Suess story that has taken up the better part of his left arm.

Don’t get me wrong - the pursuit of the unconventional is OK with me; all of life is a canvas as far as I am concerned.

The idea or subject matter of being noticed has stayed with me after seeing the back tattoo of the Lord of the Rings. What is it that would bring a person to place art/tattoo on their body in a place that everybody but themselves can see?

How unnoticeable must she feel? I could be completely wrong – self-expression is not for other people to judge, it is for the individual to express.

This is only a rant, let me do no harm.

Update ~ Last Week

It is late on Sunday night as I write this, moments before midnight. I am tired. A creative tired from the past seven days of work. In the past forty-eight hours Elizabeth & I had two days of non-stop shooting. As I type these words it still feels like I have a camera pressed up against my left eye and the feel of the indent in my right hand from holding on to the camera for an extended period. The work was good; the light over the past 2 days was good. At times too bright and hazy, but all light is good.

Monday thru Friday of last week I wrote...a lot. I stepped away from my desk and wrote. I find it hard to sit at my desk and write. For me my desk is for editing photos, updating this blog and responding to e-mails. Off to write, to create (either with a pen or camera) I need to leave the desk. I sat in the library and wrote, I sat in coffee house and wrote, even ventured to my back porch and wrote. I wrote.

Filling up a journal is a good feeling. An addictive feeling and if you have ever filled up a journal there is a good chance that you will continue to fill up journals. Seeing a small stack of moleskin journals accumulating on a bookshelf is good (also scary, hoping that nobody but you ever reads them).

I walked last week. I walked as much as I could. The weather was nice so I did my best to stay out of my car as much as possible. On Thursday I had a networking meeting on the South Side of Pittsburgh at nine. Not wanting to use my car nor sit in traffic I decided to get up early and walk to the “T” (PGH subway/train hybrid). Forty minutes to get to the station, 15 minutes on the “T” and then another twenty minute walk to the appointment. The second half of the walk was a great experience. I walked down a street that I have driven on many, many times over the past twenty years.

Thursday I saw the street for the very first time.

I am going to finish my beer and go to bed. Will organize my writing projects in the days to come.

P.S. Wednesday I will be taking photos for Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy – they hold a “walks in the woods” every Wednesday evening (6:30) between the months of June through September. Bring your camera & I will do my best to help answer any of your questions (mini Photo-Walk).

Info about “Walks in the Woods” can be found here :
http://www.pittsburghparks.org/walks-in-the-woods

Feedback ~ Critique Me

Random photo taken on an evening walk. What do you think?


All photography & artwork on this site is licensed under a creative commons licensing: Please feel free to use and distribute the photography & artwork in accordance with the licensing

Flowers, Fog & Morning

Woke up to a foggy morning. Grabbed the camera & went into my backyard. Notice the spider at work.



I have no idea what these flowers are called but they do grow wild in my backyard every spring.

Moment

Current Reading: Eaarth: Making a Life on Toughs New Planet by Bill Mckibben
Current Music: Seeds by Martin Sexton
Mood: Older
Smells: Eggplant plant & zucchini
Sounds: TV, background noise
Temperature: 57 degrees
Thoughts: Faith & Creativity ~ this is one constant, recurring, ever-present thought that I should write about.

Pictage/PUG ~ Create Connect & Grow ~ Tonight

Looking forward to seeing everyone...

7:00 to 7:30 cocktails & networking
7:30 to 9pm intro to new PUG followed by Q&A
Location
Studio ~ 502 W. North Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15212

**Open to ALL photographers, including students

Photo of the Week ~ Ambient Art

Walk, Faith, Creativity

I was out for a long walk this morning after dropping my daughter off at school.

The air smelled sweet from the rain that has been falling for the better part of the last forty-eight hours. The air was cold with a heavy humidity to it, never thought that humidity could exist in cold air, but it did. The sky, gray-white, overcast, thick clouds blanketing the horizon.

I have taken this same walk twice before. I call it my urban sprawl walk. It is a walk that takes me through a couple of different neighborhoods, small biz districts where I can stop at the post office, bank and the drug store. I like that. The walk ends on a long busy stretch of road, (noise) that leads back to my neighborhood.

I have a “thing” (thing is a poor choice of word as it is more like an obsession) about the creative benefits of taking a walk to clear the mind. It’s meditation and exercise at the same time. One activity with multiple outcomes. Not a bad way to increase productivity and turn over thoughts in your mind.

For years I have taken walks as I did today. This morning's walk was an odd thing for me. Usually my walks are in the woods where I can feel all Henry-David-Thoreau-like and get a sense of a connection to the divine. (Thoreau nor the Divine show up on busy roadways, it's just not safe.)

Walking on sidewalks, inhaling bus fumes while trying to block out the noise of…well everything. I miss the woods, but the urban sprawl is new, different and unexplored on foot. For years I drove to the woods for moments of quiet, never learning the landscape that I was driving on. Change brings creativity. That is why I was out walking in the first place. To think about creating something new; project, thought, idea. I get this feeling inside of me that I need to have a creative release to give quiet back to my mind.

Walking in silence when the world is erupting is an act of surrender. Quietness brings out answers to the seeking questions that I have been asking myself.

There is only one giant problem; I have no way of recording these thoughts in my head because I am out walking in all this noise.

Odd isn’t it – people have creative important epiphanies when they are nowhere close to being able to write them down (some magical curse from the Muse of creativity). Whatever fragmented thoughts make it all the way home must have been the finest ones. The Muse must send out the leftover mini-epiphanies to somebody else pondering in the streets, actually, most likely the woods. (Do you think people get these experiences when golfing??)

The reason for this specific walk: over the past couple of months I have been taking a class on spiritual journaling. Truthfully, I have not been journaling on my spiritual pursuits. I have been journaling, just not while asking God to speak to me through pen and paper.

Nonetheless, this class stays present in my mind, just sitting there begging me to write it out (not down, but out as in a release).

Faith & Creativity ~ this is one constant, recurring, ever-present thought that I should write about.

I need to figure out how to write down my story of faith and creativity and the effect it has guided my life.

By the time most of you have read this post I will have had my first conversation/meeting to bring this subject to life.

Is creating something enough to build your spiritual faith on?

Yes…

It is not the starting or ending point - it is the realization of the experience.

Brazilian girl & Chinese Lady

I see a Brazilian chick wearing a short black skirt just long (or short) enough to cover her girlie parts, canvas-hiking boots that are well past worn out, a beat up gray sweater that she could have borrowed from her Grandmother or purchased for five hundred dollars at Anthropologie. Wild, nappy hair, as if she used to have dreadlocks and has tried to comb them out, clumps of hair that are dyed platinum white and some that are died blond to give depth and texture to her brunette quaff.

She carries a persona that she is trying to pull off, defiantly an urban city girl with a love for punk edge – I bet she can hold her own. The only thing that is odd about her is her hands. Her hands look much older than the rest of her. The Brazilian chick is thin, young, olive skinned, 20ish, with style, but her hands look as if to belong to a woman in her seventies; a woman who has worked a lifetime with those hands.

Small, round red glasses perched on the edge of her nose while she sits with good posture having a video-chat on her laptop with a lady that is obviously Chinese speaking Mandarin.

A Brazilian chick speaking Portuguese to a Chinese lady speaking Mandarin and it is quite clear that they both understand each other just by all the laughter they are sharing.

As for me, OK, yes I do feel a little guilty eves-dropping on them but neither of them knows it. I am sitting in a coffeehouse on the upper east side of Pittsburgh, one table behind her and a row of tables separating us. It’s hard not to notice a crazy (but cool) looking Brazilian chick speaking Portuguese and laughing out loud while having a v-chat with a Chinese lady speaking Mandarin…Ok, I am not eves-dropping, just witnessing the spectacle.

Brazilian chick and the Chinese lady both start dancing to the Humpty dance song that has started playing over the coffeehouse stereo system.

The Chinese lady just kissed her monitor and pressed her breast to the screen while dancing to the music. Both start laughing painfully louder than before ~ they’re probably making fun of the creepy guy at the corner table eves-dropping while writing in his journal.

Photo of the Week

Moment

Current Reading: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Current Music: Nothing Like the Sun By Sting
Mood:Good
Smell:Cat
Sound:Treadmill
Temperature: 61 degrees
Thought: I need to rest the part of my mind where words come from.

Pittsburgh Wedding Photographer

I love this photo!