Duende Arts

I am down to the last few minutes of the 20-minute video on my trip to Dubrovnik in 2004. I may have to trim what I have on the timeline already because the video already lasts 15 minutes with the main activity, the city tour, has just begun! When finished, this will be the first video I've completed since doing "Brock in Michigan" in August 2007.
 
I am using iMovie for this edit, just as I did in 2007. I want to have a couple of new videos under my belt before resuming work on the heftier FCP editing suite.

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Greek ruins continue to fascinate me. These skeletal remains of marble columns once painted with the bright colors of Mediterranean sky, earth, sun, and sea are highly evocative. I should feel the same way towards the artifacts of ancient Asian civilizations but for me there really are East and West and they evoke different primal emotions. Inchoate emotions coupled with equally deep memories we no longer visualize still affect us in some deep part of the psyche where they swirl chaotically in the mythic sea stirred by the primal winds that initiated creation in the first place.

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Colors against black, light and shadow: I love photographs for these. I shot this on a lark last night because I liked the color of cranberry juice in a wine glass. I like it so much that I might use it on a new website, if I get around to redoing my site.

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Without my photo internal HD, I am relearning how to do photography tasks. On the USB drive, access to the files is so slow with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop that I copied the files to another internal HD for now until the replacement drive arrives.

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I decided against trying to recover my photo files from the failed HD via a Seagate affiliate and just move on. I did back up my model and most of my foreign travel photos. I am still discovering what I lost in the drive, like model contact notes, photography business files, etc. I organized the files on that drive just the day before it failed. I was so proud of myself: all my photography files organized into personal, travel and model folders going back to 1999!
 
Seagate did have an easy warranty-return procedure. I opted to pay $20 to get a replacement drive in two days (will probably mean I'll get it on Monday) and paid UPS label and packing (from the drive they are sending me: clever!). I am still waiting for my OWC RAID array that was supposed to save me from this disaster but itself ended up being defective.
 
The lovely thing about all this is how losing the files has been relatively easy. I credit Buddhist practice for this. The ultimate goal of practice is dealing with loss more critical than a mere hard drive!
 
I continued processing files from my trip to Hungary in 2004. Using the backup USB drive demonstrated how an internal SATA drive is so much faster! I think I'll wait to process any more photos until after I get the replacement drive back. I shall probably receive that the same day I get my RAID back-up array from OWC.
 
Meanwhile an Indian couple has invited me for lunch. Life is really largely what happens beyond what we plan to do, beyond what we spend our time thinking and worrying about!

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I am shame-faced to say that I had not organized my digital photo collection until today. Amazing, huh? I had a sense of the year the photos were taken and would search in Bridge to find them. Actually I usually didn't view the photos I took away from home when I got back home! This is from our 2004 trip to Central Europe. We visited Hungary, the Czech Republic and Austria, basically staying in each country's capital city. In a way I am glad I had not worked on these images. I know more about how to process digital images today than I did when I started shooting with a Sony Mavica digital camera in 1999!

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This image is from an unfinished photo shoot with Greg and his girlfriend, Jazmyn. More from this shoot on http://www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71/

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It's a lazy, summer's day. The air conditioner is humming away at the ninety-degree heat outside. I went out to the pharmacy and came back to the cool as soon as I can. Time to catch up on processing images. More of these images are posted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/karuna71/

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The Lumix continues to provide me with images with which to learn to use the Camera Raw 5.3 Tone Curve, to use the basic adjustments for shadow and highlight. I especially like the effect of increasing black to make the colors richer and balancing that by increasing brightness a little.
 
Summer is in full swing. Just days after the summer solstice, it stays light past nine o'clock when the dark then suddenly falls. The light for an hour or so just before the light disappears makes for wonderful images. Summertime, the song says, when the living is easy but in the middle of the day the sunlight is relentless and cruel. I have to water the tomato, pepper and basil plants on the deck nearly everyday or they wilt in the intense abundance of sun energy.

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