Old Dhaka

Election Madness: No it's not just the USA





Big Buoy!





Gloria and Sarah on the river.





Reminded by of a picture from the book, "They Shall Know Our Velocity".





This guy begged for me to take his picture.





Laundry on the ferry.





Sunny days making for hot shots. (What does that sentence mean?)





Bananas and more bananas and. . .





Windowed, shuttered wall at the Armenian Church. Old Dhaka.





Cross on grave at Armenian Church. Old Dhaka.




Sarah and Jody on the street in a rickshaw.





Dave, Riley, and Pruitt aloft.

Nepal: Pink Lipstick and Other Flora

This leaf is amazing.





Always a sucker for dew. I am.





This baby is about to burst into amazing color. You can almost feel the tension. I wonder if it took Lamaze classes.

Nepal: Still Life-Seeing the Unseen

This stapled denim patch makes me want to make a bunch of them and staple them to a panel as a mixed media image or take a three dimensional object (a chair) and staple denim patches all over it.





This staircase was at the Shiva guest house. We had to traverse up it to visit the communal toilet. The sun casting it's shadows was perfect. The first image depicts the warmth of the sun and speaks of the hospitality and hope of a stairway going up to light. The second image becomes flat and speaks more to me of abstract beauty with its diagonal lines and semi-symmetric composition.









I shot about ten pictures of this scene and this is all I salvaged and this is even a cropped portion of the original. There was a dumb detail above the bowl on the background that was super distracting. I love ceramic and couldn't bear to not include something so here is my solution.





I usually shy away from "plastic" and "artificial" but this shot was too good colorwise to pass up. This is on the rooftop of the Shiva Guest House where we would hang out. At night the chairs were all turned upside down to keep the rain and dew off of the seat. I was intrigued by the chairs reflection in the rain soaked concrete.






This is the light that would have illuminated the rooftop had we hung out up there at night. I love light on metal. When I changed this image to grayscale, the pole, the wire and the background changed significantly but the color of the metal stayed the same. I decided the color was more of a distraction from what I was originally intending to capture.





I am fascinated by weaves; be they fibre or Twizzlers. See that denim patch? ....ah!





A prayer wheel. The pocket version. These Nepali symbols are very similar to Bangla, I think the first one has an M sound.

Dhulikhel Streets & Dave Covered in Prayer

The washed out sky was a bit more bearable in monochrome.




Coke makes it's presence felt.





Strange symmetry. I love how the window is the juiciest part of the picture but it is the one thing almost devoid of color.





Quick snap on the walk home.





Dave Franz, behind a prayer flag.

Nepal: Nooks, Crannies and a Punctured Sky

Nook # 1, found at the restaurant just over the hill at the top of the 1000 steps. Clay has me under it's spell.





Cranny #1 only looks about half as sumptuous as it really is. It is located in one corner of the outdoor temple that I spoke of towards the beginning of my Nepal series.





Nook #2 has the beauty of clay in the background and the beauty of pigment on stone in the fore. Of course there are many beauties that I failed to mention such as the light and the shadow . . . I'll let you finish the list.





Punctured Sky #1 why it did not burst I'll never know.





Cranny #2 just sweeps me off of my figurative feet with the subtle primary colors making their bold statement . . . whatever it is . . . I'll listen. I got this shot when Lena stopped in at the post office to get some Nepali stamps for a colleague.

Nepal: Clouds, Fences and The End of the World

Read the title.





Read the title again.





. . . and again.



Finally the beauty of Ctrl (I) in Photoshop. Does it not look like judgment day? If I had time for more than one click of alterations I would select the fence from the first picture and drop it onto the second and realify it. I guess then I would need to add a dragon . . . and you wouldn't need to use your imagination.

Nepal: Flowerage and Leaf Shadow Play

I saw a bunch of these swishy beauties way down the hill and I was too hurried to go down and get the shot. I thought it would just be a pleasant memory instead of a photographic artifact. God was smiling on me though because as I walked home from eating breakfast in town one morning I looked up and lo and behold there they were in all of their sensuality. Georgia O'Keefe would have fainted at the sight, of that I am sure.









This is a biggish blossom that my middle son found and my oldest son brought to me to take a picture of . . . for show and tell. Notice how beautiful the browning petals are. If you could have held it . . . it was Delicate with a capital (D). That word actually looks better italicized. Okay, it was delicate italicized.





Looking down the hill alongside the path I was captivated at the beauty of the shadows created by the sun shining through a bug-eaten leaf onto a non-bug-eaten leaf. It somehow makes me think of marriage and how in some areas one partner has some gaping holes . . . some glaring needs and how those holes sometimes bring something beautiful out of the other partner that never would have been revealed otherwise. Anyhow the whole thing is extremely coherent in my mind . . . of course. Enjoy the picture . . . all of you fellow bug-eaten people

Nepal: Aliens Invade

Our youngest female alien. We were climbing the 1000 steps to the top of the hill and Annika was racing to catch up with everyone else after we had taken a cool picture of a worm. She is only alien in the sense that she is not Nepali.





Robin Seyfert, Sarah Peaceblade, and Marita my lovely wife.





This is my only youngest son, Shourov or Riley, whatever you like as long as you don't call him baby.

Nepal: Evening Sun

I was moving swiftly down the path hoping to get to supper by nightfall and I looked up and it almost took my breath away . . . the sun hitting this shack from around the corner with me on the shady side of the mountain. The washed out sky spited me but a photo could never have done what the real thing did to me. I am just glad I captured as much of it as I did.






Ah . . . no comment other than the fact that I love this photo and want it framed in my . . . good question . . . in which room would it best hang? I vote for the entry way. Do you think that it would be better if I would straighten it up so that the vertical lines are more verticaler?

Nepal: Art on the Walls

I love the light and the shadows. It sort of made this face look like a pudgy Zorro. The color in the original took away from the effect . . . believe me.





I didn't know that you were allowed to do this. If I ever build a brick home, I plan to make some of the bricks and do all sorts of cool stuff like this.





I will probably outsource the doors to the wonderful craftsmen of Nepal . . . using non-endangered wood of course.





I love this monochromatic vignette of an urban sketchpad. The broken window and the non-window is the icing on the cake (for me).





Must be a political symbol of sorts because I found him (the buffalo) again. I guess politics and art have never been too far apartNote the symbol inside the buffalo that the Nazis stole from the Hindus and inverted and perverted. Honestly, I don't know what it means to the Hindus and I was a bit disturbed when I first saw it all over the place.