A few weeks ago, Marina, Nyusha, and I have spent a day in Montreal. Here’s a shot I grabbed as we were walking around with no particular goal in mind. I used to spend quite a bit of time in Montreal back in the day. This trip brought back memories.

A quick portrait I grabbed of my nephew, Max, when we were eating lunch in a little restaurant in Newton Centre, not far from where I’ve spent my formative years in the US. I came to Newton from Moscow a shell-shocked 11-year-old back in ’91. By ’97 I had gone through a small chunk of elementary school, all of middle school, and somehow managed to graduate from Newton South high school. I left to California in ’02 and haven’t lived there since.

There’s something, for lack of better word, special in the eyes of little children. They haven’t build up layers upon layers of the kinds of smoke-and-mirrors and defense mechanisms that we all assemble around ourselves as we get older and, generally, not any wiser.

I really love this picture.

Another picture I took during our honeymoon in New Zealand. To be perfectly frank, I’m not quite sure where I took this one – I could have been either in Christchurch, or in the Franz Joseph glacial village. Not that it matters much. This wasn’t a premeditated picture – I just happened to notice the magical way light was falling on Marina while she was taking a shower and snapped it.

I’ve always been fascinated by how a little bit of light can change things in a picture. This exact scene, this exact pose, could easily have been a sexy picture of a girl in a shower…

Hi, it’s been a while.

This is going to be the first photo I post from our New Zealand honeymoon. They are not in a chronological order – I did a good job labeling the first couple rolls of film and then, unsurprisingly for those who know me well, let it go. Now, I’m going through the rolls, developing them one-by-one and will be posting the photos as they come. This one was taken in Christchurch, in the South Island of New Zealand. We were staying at a gorgeous government-building-to-hotel conversion and the second we walked into our loft-suite and looked up I saw this shot. It turned out to be hard to get though – our wireless flash trigger has given up on life by that point, and the ambient light was all wrong. What we wound up doing is setting the camera up on the tripod, posing marina as I looked through the viewfinder, then walking over to the light stand right next to her, on another floor, using a looooong shutter release cable that we happened to take along with us for self-portraits to trip the shutter for something like 1 second and then manually flashing the flash. It was kind of a pain in the ass, but I like what I got out of it.

I actually have a series of these – photos of people (kids mostly) getting lost in the music – but this is the first one to make it on this blog. I took this shot of my little niece showing off her rapidly advancing skillz about a half a year ago, when we were both visiting my grandmother in Houston, TX. Since then, Dina has probably gone up a few more notches.

On an unrelated note, I’m about to go off to New Zealand for just under a month. As you may have guessed, I’m packing tons of film and certainly more cameras than I need. Hell, I’m still contemplating bringing along my alien bees complete with a giant battery pack for a full mobile studio. Still not sure which way I’m gonna lean on that one. It also means that there will likely not be any updates for a little while. Or not – the laptop’s coming with me and I may feel inspired to do something digital… You never know…

A little while ago, as Marina was looking for something deep in the bowels of our pantry (or was she cleaning?) she found a roll of film from a long time ago. Not knowing what it was, and taking a guess about how it was shot, I put it in HC-110 soup and hoped for the best. What came out were pictures from a trip to Point Reyes Station celebrating the birthday of one of our good friends. This was one of the first photos on the roll, and it does a good job describing the prevalent mood for those two days in a giant house with more rooms than we could count and a heated swimming pool.

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.

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.