We finally made a terribly overdue visit to dear friends in Seattle. It is bad enough that we hadn’t made it there in about four years, but worse still, we missed the celebration of a significant anniversary. So a couple of days before school started, off we went, squeezing in one last get-away for the summer. At least we know enough to go in late Summer when one is as guaranteed as one can be in Seattle of clear skies. And clear skies is just what we had for four beautiful days.
As you can see from this, the first picture I took after arriving in the emerald city, the interiors aren’t bad either. That’s what you get with artist friends. In fact, the whole trip was a stunning reminder of what I miss about living here — the abundant creativity and aesthetic sensibility falling like rain, soaking everything.
It is pure coincidence that after a lengthy hiatus, this next post is again related to the Berkeley Arts Festival. Dean Santomieri reprised his spoken word presentation from the previous performance and he was followed by jazz quartet The Glasses. Mr. Santomieri’s set was one piece shorter and all around tighter than last time. The Glasses came together to perform songs penned by bassist Safa Shokrai. The rest of the quartet was: Chris Grady, trumpet; Larry Leight, trombone; Dave Mihaly, drums. I hear that the quartet usually includes a violin rather than trombone, but the arrangements and the chemistry for this performance were outstanding. Hopefully, we’ll get to hear more of them in whatever configuration they can muster. The light was low, but I managed to get a few decent shots.
I had every intention of meeting my obligation to put up my daily post last night. But as we all know, there is a famous paved road…
I really wanted to put up some photos, but do it in a gallery format with bigger images. So, since I had already gone searching for a WordPress photoblog theme and didn’t find anything I liked that much, I thought I’d just quickly find a gallery/lightbox plugin to get started on revamping the blog.
This too, turned out to be much harder than I expected. The main problem seemed to be that most of the gallery plugins don’t work with WP 3.1 yet, including the one I was particularly interested in based on the look of the front end. I finally ended up with something called “Fancy Gallery” that is acceptable in terms of the look of the lightbox, but nowthe thumbnail presentation looks all wacked. Very annoying. Example with semi-random photos follows.
By the time I got even this far, I was sleeping with the laptop on my belly and drooling into the keyboard. If anyone knows of a cool plugin, or how to fix this thumbnail display with the images all shoved together, please wack me upside the head with it. Or just leave a comment.
Today was such a day of photography, it was almost like work. It started this morning with Albany Cub Scouts Pack 3 Pinewood Derby. That was over three hours of shooting. Then, after a little lunch, I went out to make some progress on the Albany Commercial Streetscape project. I started shooting the east side of San Pablo at the El Cerrito border and made it down to Solano Ave, before it was time to get home. My guess is that this is about half the length of it. I was pleased with the progress made today in terms of quantity. It remains to be seen what was accomplished in terms of the images themselves. Right now, I’m predicting that the two liquor stores are the most interesting subjects on the side. I thought I’d play with this one in black and white, even though I keep saying that the series won’t be. Maybe I’ll have to rethink that, too.
I’m happy to announce my next photography show, coming up very soon! I will have a series of photographs of found autos from around the East Bay on display at Chop Salon hair salon. I have the editing almost done; it’s down to two sets of images, and I’ve got to pick which one to print tomorrow. It’s definitely down to the wire but I expect the show to be all hung and ready for the reception, Friday Evening, November 6. I will be up through the end of December. I will update with start time and more details in the next day or two.
The first set consists of complete broadsides of cars found parked on the street. Set B includes cropped cars. I’m not sure which it will be at the moment, but I’m leaning towards A. I’ll be including the nine square format shots of cropped cars from the last show (yes, sadly none sold from that), and I’m thinking the complete cars will provide the right amount of contrast. Here is the first set.
Here is the second set.
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