SoFoBoMo Day-7

Spent a couple of hours at Smita's studio, talking about her new paintings while she was working on a few consecutive canvases with acrylic paint. The most interesting, was how she works some of her paintings up-side-down and gets all the background effects she wants... then flip them over right-side-up and work the details....
Apparently, working with the painting «backward» she looks at her compositions completely differently, and sees things unlike me as a bystander did. Only when she started to point out what was going to happen next, and what the smaller details were did I see it «her way». 
I need to do one more session with Smita and get some of the images I had in my mind but was unable to make today....

More later!

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.

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....