close your eyes and hope for the best

Two girls, Banna northern Laos. (click image to enlarge)

These two girls live in the tiny village of Banna in rural, northern Laos. It is so rural they don’t even have bicycles let alone cars or motorcycles. I don’t even think they have the wheel there. I am not kidding. I didn’t see a single wheel. They are incredibly resilient and persevering, lugging heavy loads on their shoulders with just a long bamboo plank with a basket tied to each end. They don’t even pad the planks with cloth to ease the load. It certainly put the notions of comfort and need into perspective.

We ended up staying the night, the villagers practically fighting over who would have the honour of hosting us.

Pierre (my husband) and I thought we were just going on a two-hour walk from our small, riverside hut in the neighboring village of Mong Noy Neua. We were told that there were villages nearby that might be worth visiting for the afternoon.

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Don Thur Woodturner turning 8000 year old log. (click image to enlarge)

His bowls are owned by the King and Queen of Norway, Queen Elizabeth, President George Bush and former Prime Minister Paul Martin.

Creativity. Inspiration. Where does it come from? Sometimes it just happens. Sometimes I manufacture it. Sometimes I despair for the lack of it. My friend Jer who’s a pretty creative guy said, “Wait Andy! Don’t despair. Instead, try sitting with a pencil and paper and do some word association. Think of a concept, or object, or idea you would like to photograph and write down all of the words you can think of related to the central idea or object. Next, pick some of the more compelling words from that list and make a new word association list for each of those words. Repeat the process until you are satisfied.”

As you can probably ascertain, in short order you’ll have a nice tree of ideas and concepts related to the original idea. Try it. It works and it may surprise you where this simple technique will take you.

So what’s the deal with this image? First, let me tell you about Don. Don is a Canadian woodturner extraordinaire. His bowls are owned by the King and Queen of Norway, Queen Elizabeth, President George Bush and former Prime Minister Paul Martin.

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Aerial photograph: pulpmill wastewater lagoon. (click image to enlarge)

One friend of mine said this image reminded her of so many butterflies. Another saw in it the suggestion of tree stumps. Most others, well, most of you can guess what the photo reminds most people of. When my friend and pilot Bo Curtis and I were photographing Canada from the air, we looked for angles where we could isolate just two of these rounded shapes in a composition, our obvious intention being to produce a photo that would, of course, resemble a nice pair of eyes.

…the ground-based observer is in the position of one hopelessly viewing a painting edge on. By contrast, seen from directly overhead, the grandest of landscape subjects, mountains, often resemble little more than flattened rubble.

While very few animals even recognize themselves in a mirror (and I must admit, sometimes I have trouble with that myself), it is probably a safe guess that ours is the only species that abstracts diverse and added meanings out of our patterned world.

We are sometimes amazed to discover a face in a cliff or in clouds, even though all it takes is finding among varying colour or tone a scheme of two circles, a line, and another line ;- |

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Kaskawulsh Glacier Yukon. 1978. (click image to enlarge)

I started taking pictures for the same reason nearly everyone does: our memories can’t retain anywhere near the same detail that albums of photographs do. It is still an important reason, as looking at this view of the Kaskawulsh Glacier brings me back to my most memorable campsite ever. 1978 (yikes!) was my first year as a fulltime photographer and I was working on my first book, Alpine Canada.

Back then, you only had to know three technical things to succeed as a scenic photographer: tripod, Kodachrome, depth of field.

And of course you had to understand light, which resulted in my cultivating a tongue-in-cheek reputation among friends as one who was lazy to the point of actually taking most photos without bothering to get out of the sleeping bag. In the high mountain chill during a 3:00 AM Yukon sunrise, the idea had considerable appeal, and in fact this photo could pretty much have been taken exactly as is straight from my tent door.

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Photoshop composite image. Lindsay and leaves. (click image to enlarge)

This is Lindsay. She works in a bar/restaurant that’s within a short walking distance of where I live (sometimes it is a bit of a longer stumble home). Lindsay is not only very attractive but she is also a talented writer. I had been wanting to do more portrait work and so invited Lindsay and her huge dog Samson to my place where I have a fairly decent setup for doing portraits. Lindsay admitted to being somewhat nervous as she had never had her portrait done. I cracked a couple of beers and suggested we try a few shots and then have a look at them on the computer. Once she saw how great she looked on camera (and possibly with the help of a beer or two) Lindsay quickly relaxed.

I started with sort of waist up compositions and a few shots with Samson. Eventually, as you can see in this photograph I ended up with some very tight shots of just her eyes.

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