Juise was painting up the 2 massive «muppets» made of paper, cloth, foam and various other materials.... they are really big. One is around 7 feet tall.... the colors were fantastic - yellows and greens. The articulated limbs are incredible! They work by pulling on strings and each joint works separately... images follow asap.

Got some great images.

BUT, my PC crashed just after I'd finished processing the batch and was going to start uploading them to the server. A stupid mistake actually, I should have seen it faster when a virus on a flash-drive autoloaded and I clicked «OK» instead of «Exit»....seems that the HDD is wiped clean and the operating system cannot load. Oh well.....

Am working on a dinosaur of a desktop now - the monitor is uncalibrated and the processor is so bloody slow that I gave up after trying to process these 2 images...I cannot even tell if the contrast etc is ok! Will have to do for now, until I get the other PC back working again.

The links are on the LOG page, as usual.

............... bye for now.

SoFoBoMoSTART!

I've been procrastinatingbut finally have begun photographing for the SoFoBoMo project. I'll be photographing 2 Bangladeshi artists, Fareha Zeba who is a painter and her husband Saidul Haque Juise a paper sculptor and mask/puppet maker. I spent the afternoon at their home studio, talking over endless cigarettes cups of black tea and chilled beer.... I'd take a photo or two and we'd resume our banter.

A Black Hooded Oriole perched on one of the shrubs in their garden so we all went out quietly to watch and I got a few frames of the bird and a few of the plants in the garden.  There is a bush of [apparently] very hot chili pepperswhich are almost white in color - Juise refuses to let these be plucked because there are some tiny birds who come to feed on these. Don't touch! The peppers are for the birds, only!

The plan is, to photograph and record their daily life, casually, while they work and go about doing what they do.... creating works of art....and they do it beautifully. This project will [eventually, hopefully] turn into a small book with a collection of photographs, some background information about the artist pair, and some excerpts from our conversations...

The first few processed images of Zeba and Juise are posted in the SoFoBoMo Log file.

2 purple and yellow Sunbirds come to a flowering shrub in the small garden patch which projects out from our apartment into the Mahogany trees outside. They have been busy destroying the shrub by pulling off the outer fibrous bark to take for nest-building.... and I've been trying to shoot photograph them for weeks now. Without any success. The few frames I got, are too dark. So, I setup 2 SB800s suspended them with bungee-cords to the grille above and put a 300mm on the camera inside the room. I wait and I wait and wait and nothing happens! Then, just as I move off for a coffee or a ciggy - I can hear the tweets! By the time I am in position, they are gone.... Anyway, while waiting in vain I've photographed raindrops, flowers from the shrub, and today a dragonfly that spent a while visiting and keeping me company...... but no Sunbirds yet.