I haven’t posted here anything for a while. I guess mostly because I was too lazy or might be because I’ve been mostly using my iphone to take photos. I’ll try to change that if our daughter Nyusha allows me.
I took this photo while Alex was shooting Morgan

I think it’s pretty fascinating that every time Alex and I take photos together – results are completely different.

I haven’t figured out yet what poem should go together with this photo, so I might add something later.

I haven’t posted here for quite a while, I guess it’s time to change that.
I took only a few photos at this photo session. I know that some of them should have been really good, but since I forgot to take off the lens cap, we will never find out if that was true or not.
Silly me.
Anyway, here is the photo and another poem by Amichai:

A girl goes out in the morning, like a knight -
Ponytail and riding motions.
Dresses, handbags, sunglasses, chain, buckles,
Like armor on her body.
But underneath all that
She’s light and thin.

Sometimes she is naked at night and alone.
Sometimes she is naked and not alone.

You can hear the sound of bare feet
fleeing: that was death.

And then, the sound of a kiss
like chirping of a night butterfly
caught between two windows.

I have to say that sometimes it’s pretty useful to clean the house. The other day I found roll of the film hiding from me in the pantry, developed it and found this great photo on it. I took it almost a year ago at Death Valley.

For no particular reason, whenever I look at this photo I think about “Tomorrow’s Child” short story by Ray Bradbury.

This shot came out of a quick light-test I did last night. I’ve been using umbrellas off and on for a while, but I’ve pretty much always been shooting through them to create a kinda soft, but hard to control light that spilled all over the place. Yesterday, as I was driving back home, I got the idea to try to use a reflective umbrella, with the strobe close to the center, as a giant beauty-dish type of light, coming at the model from a bunch of different directions at the same time and filling in all the shadows. Seemed to work. On top of that, I added a second smaller umbrella on the bottom for even more fill light. I kinda like this setup for tight portraits, I think.

I was going through my old photos and found this one. Last Thanksgiving we went on a road trip to Portland and drove by this beautiful town on the border of California and Oregon. We stopped there to get breakfast and I’ve noticed this abandoned café.
Anyway, here is another Amichai’s poem, hmm it looks like I’m really obsessed with his poetry.
 

Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.

A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.

I haven’t posted anything here for a while, so here is photo of the Alex’s grandmother. I took on a trip to Houston last January.

A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day;
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

W.H. Auden

This photo is part of Alex’s photo shoot.

It was the end of the photo shoot and all three of us were pretty tired, so I decided to save us some time and not to use film camera. Shame shame shame.

Anyway, here is poem by Y.Amichai to pair with this photo:
They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

I took this shot during our trip to Boston. I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t even think about taking photos, but then something about Dina’s posture hit me.

And since I’ve got this idea of adding somehow suitable poem to my photos, here is another poem by Yehuda Amichai:

And in those days before we made a home for ourselves,

we made the whole country into homes.

Even the beach at Caesarea

where we piled our clothes onto solemn mound,

sandals and shirts and towels and pants, yours and mine,

jumbled together, like us, and then went into the water.

I said to myself: If we’d lived in ancient times and made love

in the mountains and desert, we’d have piled stone on stone

and called upon the name of the Lord and gone on our way,

but we made love by the sea, our clothes

a mound of witness in the sand,

and we called upon the name of our love.

Passerby thought we might drowned in the sea.

But we did not drown in the sea, we drowned in all the years

after that chapter, still wrapped up

in each other, like our clothes on the mound on the shore.

Alex has finally convinced me to start posting my photos in this blog, so here is the first one, it was taken couple weeks ago in Death Valley.