savannah photographic workshop

I think the first time we were in Paris was 1989. I wanted to “know” Paris quickly, because I assumed it would be the only time I would ever get there, and we only had 2-3 days before heading south. Silly me. I was still relatively new to traveling and had not yet considered how one can spend a lifetime in a single place and still only “know” a piece of it.

I only remember two things we did in those few blurry days. We went to the Moulin Rouge to see the Can Can dancers. It was a classic over worn tourist “attraction” probably designed to appeal to Boomers like me, people who saw “Gigi” in their emotionally formative years. The tables and customers were packed in and the prix fixe meal was mediocre, but I still have the menu, on the bulletin board next to my desk. It seemed pretty cool at the time.

The second memory was going to the top of the Eiffel Tower and looking out over the City of Light, in the nighttime. It was one of those moments where you have to pinch yourself to be sure you are really here, right now.

The photograph above was made on our 3rd or 4th time in Paris, out of about 10 total times now. Each time I learn a little more, feel a little more comfortable. On this visit we made a routine stop by the Tower and saw this wedding picnic. I asked if I could photograph them and, “Mais, oui,” and they composed themselves for me. I took 4 or 5 quick frames, “Merci, bon soir!”

Barbara and I are Francophiles for a variety of reasons; one of them is, you have to admire an ability to create such an elegant scene so casually.

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

“Everybody’s got a bomb
We could all die any day, aw
But before I’ll let that happen
I’ll dance my life away, oh-oh-oh

They say, 2000-00, party over
Oops, out of time
We’re runnin’ outta time
So tonight we gonna party like it’s 1999″ Prince, “1999”

Two months into the year 2000, we were fairly well reassured that Y2K issues were not going to be the end of civilization as we knew it. Some history details from Wikipedia: 1999 included the introduction of the Euro as currency, and NATO bombed Yugoslavia. I was in Serbia a year ago and, although no one was anything less than kind to me, they remember. Why not? Where I live, people are still debating a war that ended 158 years ago, and in the Middle East they continue centuries of conflict.

The Dow Jones closed at over 10,000 for the first time ever; 15 people died at Columbine High School; a tornado outbreak in Oklahoma produced the strongest winds ever measured on Earth, 301 +/- 20 MPH; da Vinci’s “Last Supper” went on display after over 20 years of restoration; and Napster was created leading to more and more social media where the concepts of intellectual property rights are “quaint.” The American Women’s Soccer team won the World Cup. Boris Yeltsin resigned as President of Russia leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as acting President.

The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, pictured above, opened in 1999, and the camera used, a Nikon D1, was introduced that year. The illusion of Venice in the hotel design was close enough that if you didn’t think about it, you might forget the stage set. I watched people move around trying to get a better cell signal until they realized they were inside. And then you realize, this is the second floor of the hotel.

The day before the D1 was announced, the base price for a professional digital camera was about $15,000. The D1 was about $5500. Game changer. It was early in the digital photography transition. There had been some interesting point and shoot digital cameras and prototypes, but initially the digital SLRs intended for pro markets and serious amateurs were a couple of modified models of Nikon and Canon film cameras offered by Kodak and Fuji. The D1 was the first full production DSLR designed from the ground up to be digital.

The res was low (2.7 megapixels), but it used all the lenses you already had, and it was the beginning of a constant increase in improvements, with additional resolution and other features. One more bit of tech geeking out: I love wide-angle lenses like the one used here. So many people are enamored of big, fast, expensive lenses that make tight framing possible at some distance, but I like wide-angles; they are smaller, lighter, less expensive, and most importantly, they are story-telling lenses, useful for stacking up supporting information in layers of background details; you just have to be willing to get really close to the foreground subject.

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

It is (or was) an urban myth that one can see the Great Wall from space. While there are more than 13,000 miles of walls (it’s actually not one wall but a scattering of many in various regions), they don’t create a large mass.

Last week’s post was from a less frequently visited Wall area, and didn’t show much Wall. This photograph is from about three hours northeast of Beijing in a more tourism-prepped area, an area with some long, connecting Wall sections snaking along the landscape.

Seeing and walking on the Wall, it’s impossible to not be impressed by the audacity of the idea, the engineering, and the physical accomplishment, tempering that with the understanding that, like the pyramids of Egypt and Central America, or the Roman aqueducts, or the Taj Mahal, or Monticello or Mount Vernon, thousands of slaves labored and died over centuries in the execution of the plan.

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

Try to imagine Donnie’s and Barbara’s legs being essentially vertical, and you can sense how steep this section of The Great Wall is, and there were places even more challenging to walk. Just past this point was an area where we just sat down and slid rather than risk standing and falling.

Near the end of our China workshop we had taken the group out to the Wall (not where this photo was taken) along the Mongolian border, a place polished for the tourist trade–gift shops, motor coach parking, well restored Wall. Visually breath-taking, but, even with well maintained stairs and walkways, climbing up and down, and the heat, and the weight of all the camera gear, made it also literally breath-taking. I was impressed in particular with a small Chinese woman who was one of the many vendors hustling the visitors with various wares and refreshments. This woman, maybe 90 pounds, carried a standard sized cooler full of ice and beer up the stairs onto the Wall, and then hawked along the undulating top looking for customers, making it look effortless, and causing those of us huffing and wheezing some chagrin . It may be the best $5 can of beer I’ve ever had.

The day after the workshop Donnie arranged a private motorcycle sidecar tour of Beijing and some countryside. They took us to this place, another Wall section, not rubble, but also showing little benefit from any TLC, and with more challenging trekking. Riding back into Beijing, the smog was bad; the particulates in the air were so thick they stung my face, and I finally had to put on the face shield offered. Not very manly, but when we got back to the hotel I still had facial skin.

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

An anonymous couple walking into a blurred nexus of land, sea, and sky could easily be a visual metaphor for a variety of concepts. It could be the first, or last, image in a story-telling series, illustrating the beginning, or ending, of a grand adventure.

I went to a funeral last Saturday. I did not know the young woman, taken much too early; her parents are friends of mine, so I went for them. I did not know her, but a real display of how far and wide she reached positively into other lives was the overflowing parking lot at the funeral home, and the standing room only aspect of not only the chapel, but the lobby as well.

I don’t know when it became a practice to show or display a variety of candid photographs of the deceased at funerals, but I think maybe the 90’s or aughts. The funerals I have attended were for people I knew, so the photos would have been familiar; I took less notice. This time, as I stood in line to speak to the family, and throughout the service, I watched a repeating series of those life-span photographs of a person I never knew, and it hit me all over again, the power of photography. I learned much about this stranger: she liked travel, and horses, and boats, she had close friends, she was funny and had a sense of humor. She was dearly loved.

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

In last week’s post, I talked about the extravagant, expressive use of color halfway around the world from home. Today’s photo is similar energy, but just a few blocks from my front door. Last Friday was the annual Savannah bacchanal, officially known as Saint Patrick’s Day, the premier public party event in Savannah. There have been years in the past when I started early and went late, but that was then and this is now. Barbara and I can stop by several friends’ parties for Bloody Marys or Irish coffee, plus breakfast buffets in the morning, wander the streets randomly sampling the never-ending parade, and be back home for a nap by mid-afternoon.

Because the March 17th Friday date made it a long weekend this year, and with beautiful, cool, sunny weather, I think most expectations were for a very large number of visitors and a rowdy crowd in the evenings. It seemed to be pretty quiet to us though, judging by the few numbers of drunks yelling at each other at 3 AM about who was supposed to remember where the car was parked, although there was one in particular I remember, hearing the near weeping relief when he yelled out, “I found it! I found it!”

Not comprehensive by any stretch, I did shoot some random scenes (somehow missing all the military and ROTC units) that I’ve posted as a new gallery, St. Patrick’s Day, Savannah, 2023. To see that, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G00006PGSXuRa_cw

The streets of Dhaka are an open-air gallery teeming with rickshaw art. Subject matter may vary wildly, but one emphatic consistency is color. Rich, saturated color. In your face color. Color combinations that stretch one’s imagination about ways colors can be synchronized.

While I don’t think I’m dogmatic about general, foundational elements of art-making (but then,who ever thinks they are dogmatic about anything?), I do have some training and experience with the codification of things like design and color theory, and that inevitably influences choices I make. On color, I learned about the color wheel and how every potential/theoretical color (hue, brightness, and saturation) can be placed in a specific definable position. I used the Munsell Color System to create a three color mix to decorate a box choosing a primary, contrasting, and complimentary color selection, in diminishing proportions, based on their relative positions on the wheel. In hindsight, that all sounds more like an intellectual exercise than art, but it’s the sort of education that is useful if you can avoid getting caught inside the lines.

So, I have been inclined to work with color over the years in terms of contrasting and/or complimentary, with a kind of visual “weight” deciding the balance of volume for each. Several years ago I was planning some spring planting for my deck’s clay pot garden, fussing a bit over color combinations, when a friend said, “For gardens and flowers you can mix anything and it will work OK.” I relaxed, tried it; she was right.

Bangladeshis apparently apply that color philosophy to all of life, illustrated here by the young woman’s outfit consisting of at least four very different fabrics/prints. Coming from a part of the world where the standard pant is khaki, walking around Dhaka is like stepping inside a kaleidoscope. It’s a rich, vibrant, chaotic, fascinating, hypnotic visual explosion.

I have mentioned previously, I’m sometimes surprised to find how many people pictures I make without realizing it at the time. True, once again, in Bangladesh and here is a new gallery “Faces, Bangladesh, 2012.” Go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G0000mEaxYnNexwQ

“A still is a stopped movie.”

It’s funny how a simple comment can alter the way you perceive something. In any consideration/comparison of still and video photography, I usually think about how a moving image (video) is actually a series of still images, shot and projected in quick enough sequence that the eye/brain “sees” a moving picture. This opening quote suggests starting with the perception of motion that is then frozen, rather than going from still images that then create the illusion of movement.

The quote is from “Words and Pictures,” (published 1952) by Wilson Hicks, an Executive Editor for Life Magazine, and the book is Hicks’ look at how photography, photographers, writers, and editors work together to cover a story, some of it modeled on the way Life worked their teams, some of it a hope for photographers to become a more integrated part of the coverage team. It’s the sort of book at first I think I should have read many years ago, at the beginning of my career, because it talks about a lot of the things I learned through experience. Probably would not have mattered much in my learning curve, though. You can only absorb and understand what you are ready for, and knowledge is built in layers, over time.

I like the way the “stopped movie” idea mimics the effort to trigger an exposure at a peak moment, where the image is taut with the tension of what will happen in the next moment.

For more photos from the Buriganga in Dhaka, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G0000Pf25lXK9vOc

The Buriganga River cuts through Dhaka like an interstate. Commercial and public transportation create constant activity back and forth between the banks, and large ferries connect Dhaka (metro area population-over 22 million) with the other communities around the riverine delta at the apex of Bengal Bay.

East, west, and south of the city the Brahmaputra, the Ganges/Padma, the Mehna, and numerous smaller rivers like the Buriganga gradually merge as they drain the majority of the Himalayas into the bay.

For more photos from the Buriganga River, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G0000Pf25lXK9vOc

I was sitting at my desk thinking about what to write about this, but realized, there is nothing I can say about a pink burka that the pink burka does not already say, and better than me. I will say that it was about 110 degrees F. that day, and I felt like I was dressed too warmly with just a t-shirt and shorts.

Panam Nagar is a short drive from Dhaka, the current capital of Bangladesh. It was established in the late 13th century and was a trading and political hub as the capital of Bengal in the 15th century. Today the elaborate buildings sit, mostly abandoned, slowly deteriorating. I suppose location really is everything when it comes to real estate. These places would command a very large purchase price, and substantial financial commitment to renovation if they were sitting in Savannah.

To see some of the Panam Nagar architecture, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G0000xJrK3P2v4ek