SoFoBoMo day 6 - a bit of expansion.

I'd started out the SoFoBoMo project creating a profile of just 2 Bangladeshi artists - Zeba & Juise.  I'm now expanding it to include a few other artists as well. Rokeya Sultana, a Bangladeshi artist; and 2 an Indian artists living in Bangladesh: Ujwala Prabhu and  Smita Srivastava, all just said yes they would be happy to be featured. GREAT! I am waiting confirmation from a couple of other artists..... hopefully they too will consent. With the addition and expansion, time required to complete this SoFoBoMo is shrinking! I have only until May 20th to get it all done. The actual shooting is the easy part, the final editing and selecting of images; the post-processing and then the formatting of the Scribus book etc takes up a lot of time.

A trip to Sonargaon, around 30 KM from Dhaka city.... the ancient Capital now in ruins. Like a ghost town, the homeless living in abandoned buildings. Buildings that were probably majestic and stately at one time, now crumbling in neglect, robbed of their ornate carved doors and windows, full of rubbish and the homeless... pathetic but still beautiful. The old Hindu temples and the Havalis in a similar state of disrepair.

We had first made a stop at Sadarghat, the jetty on the banks of the [very highly polluted!] Buriganga..... it was disgusting. The stench from the river, the jetty and the street was overpowering and so we made a hasty retreat to the car and were off to Sonargaon as quick as we could. Here are a few images from Sadarghat - we stepped on to the jetty the ferries were coming in [or leaving?, or both?].
   

THANKS HEATHER & STEIN. Great trip!

SoFoBoMo Day-4:

Juise's workbench. We had a power outage [one of several that we have every day], and I had just stepped into his small «office» and setup 2 SB800s to take some photos of the workspace. It went completely dark in there when the power went out, I was able to focus on something, cant remember what, and took 4 frames in quick succession. This one was fairly in-focus.

Zeba had a bunch of students doing still-life work in the other room.... I wanted to get a portrait of Juise against one of his paper and sand sculptures which were hanging in that room. Juise could not keep a straight face and we had a lot of laughs trying to set-up the lights and get him into position. He kept looking «skyward» and joked about how artists are supposed to have a vacant far-away look in their eyes for portraits. LOL! I gave up. But am posting one, on the SoFoBoMo Log page anyway. Shall try again, on Sunday next.

The set-up portrait session for Zeba went pretty much the same way. She was very conscious of the camera and I could not distract her enough to make her relax. Juise tried, and had us in splits mostly. End of session.

So much for Day 4.

SoFoBoMo re-take day-4 will happen on SoFoBoMo Day-5 which will be Sunday 4/27/08 as it is the weekend here [Friday and Saturday]....and everyone wants a day or two off. Gives me time to consolidate the images so far taken and do the edits and drop the tentative final ones into the book format. Oh, and I have an early morning photo trip to Old Dhaka and maybe also Sonargaon Village on Saturday at 4:45 AM with a friend to try and get some images of the old buildings and «Havalis» at dawn....