Tag Archives: cold atlantic ocean

Valdovino 2012

After a very successful art opening during the month of March at the National Arts Club League in New York City, I headed off to Spain.  Arriving in early April, I headed south to Seville and Granada to take in the Spanish version of Semana Santa, or Holy week.  Night after night, processions of pointy capped and robed penitents (think KKK, but not), lead several hundred-year-old litters carrying life size, candle lit, Mary and Jesus figures though the streets until dawn.  This was one of the most interesting and beautiful festivals I have experienced in all my travels.

Two weeks later, having thoroughly enjoyed the Alhambra, and much of fabulous Granada, I headed north to Pamplona to begin walking part of the Camino de Santiago. This is a thousand-year-old Christian Pilgrimage that spans 500 miles from the French border, across northern Spain to the Galician coast.  Although, I had hoped to walk the whole thing, weather, bed bugs, blisters, and a nasty cold stopped this pilgrim in her tracks after covering about 175 miles.  I would still love to go back and complete the walk, but at the time I knew I was not prepared to actually reach Santiago.

As I walked, I kept getting Facebook messages from one of my dearest friends Marilyn Poon, tempting me to ditch the Camino and head to surf camp in Valdovino, Spain.  After about two and half weeks I relented, hopped a bus, and was surfing the cold Atlantic Ocean the following morning.  I ended up spending five weeks at the Seeker Surf Camp, the last of which I was in convalescence due to my generally crummy lower back.  Thankfully, I find inspiration in times of pain and during this recuperation, there was a brilliant full moon accompanied by the rare clear, warm, Galician evening.  What follows are the images I made that night.

Due to the fact that I walked the Camino, I only brought my Cannon G12 camera with me to Spain, a glorified point and shoot, with few long exposure settings.  Thus, the ever-generous Marilyn Poon lent me her very fancy Nikon camera, but as I was unaccustomed with its format, I felt a little uncomfortable with the lenses and settings.  I honestly can’t say that these images begin to touch the ones I shot in Valdovino last summer, but I am not going to wholly discredit them either.  So with out further adeau… Valdovino 2012…

The Suspicious August Full Moon

So, I guess is deserve a spanking.  I have had three photo shoots since the last time I posted, but no blogging.  Sometimes life (Burning Man) gets in the way, but I am back and I will try to share some insights on each shoot.

The “Make Mistakes” crew held the August full moon party, up Left Hand Canyon, just above Boulder, CO.  The party was about an hour and a half drive from my house in Denver and turned out to be quite the debacle of a night.  I arrived to a dark disorienting scene of tents, people, bonfires, and loud house music scattered though a shadowy aspen grove.  Winding through the whole area was a small, shallow stream.  I had been really sick all week and was finally starting to feel better, so I thought going out for a few hours would be harmless.

I rolled my camera bag, the quarter mile from my car, down the pavement to the entrance and stashed it under a tree.  My initial explorations led me down a well-worn footpath that followed the edge of the stream away from the party.  Moonlight was filtering through the Aspens and pooling on the forest floor in a way that made my eyes jump and have a hard time adjusting to the darkness.  I felt dizzy and light headed.  Soon, I had wandered far enough to no longer hear the music, and was mostly alone except for the occasional explorative partier like myself.  The area was strangely un-deserted and had some ax murderer hunting cabins and a 60’s geodesic dome house, complete with barking dog.  I felt all the hairs on my neck stand on end as I passed.

Eventually, I heard the sound of a small waterfall, and knew I had found the place for which I was looking.  Earlier that week, I had seen the proof sheet of new work my collaborator Aloyse Blair had just created in the Adirondacks.  She was naked in a waterfall, and had done some long exposure stuff with her pinhole camera.  I returned to the party, retrieved my equipment, and quickly found myself laying naked in a freezing mountain stream on a cool summer night.  The spot was shaded from the moon so I had to use some alternative light sources.   The flashlights I had kept flickering and slowly fading, so it was hard to get an accurate light reading.  Some of the images were ruined because the light completely went out during the shot.  After a few tries, I decided to put an orange filter on one of the lights just to add softness to the image.

Once I was thoroughly freezing, and could not take the cold any longer, I dressed in green and headed off to do some pure moon light shots.  I found a small meadow further up and created the forest nymph series.  These images were pretty much exactly what I know how to do, so they were easy to create once I decided how I wanted them to look.

After I finished shooting, I felt clear and fresh.  All of the disorientation had vanished, and I was light and focused.  I found some friends and went to dance.  Soon I was hot enough to take off my jacket and boogie down.  A few minutes later I looked over to see that my jacket had vanished.  My car keys were in the pocket.  I spent the rest of the night futilely searching in the dark for a black jacket.  I was flashing everyone who walked by, hoping someone had accidentally borrowed my nice North Face.  My night of a few hours ended with the sunrise.  As it grew light, I sat down in a fancy camping chair at the entrance to scope out the patrons as they left, hoping for a glimpse of my coat.  After a little while, I started to fidget with stuff in the built in cup holders.  I looked down and there were my car keys and my glasses.  Only in Boulder can you go to a full moon party and get your jacket stolen, but the thief is kind enough to leave you your keys and glasses behind.  Needless to say, I got sick again.

Valdovino, Spain or Surfing with the Seekers

Back In Madrid, I think I could live here.  This is such a sweet city.  I have been out on the Celtic coast of Galicia for the past week, surfing with my old friend Marilyn Poon at the Seeker Surf Camp.  It felt so good to be in the water again (even if we did have to wear full wetsuits).  Getting into Madrid was such a temperature shock today.  Galicia is pretty cold and windy for the most part, and today it was really a gloomy drizzly Irish day.  By contrast, Madrid is hot, I mean really hot, I think it was around 35c today.  This temperature thing really played into how few images I made while I was at the coast, not to mention I was totally exhausted after surfing all day.  There was also the daylight factor, as Galicia really does not get dark in the summer until 11:30 at night.  By that time, we were eating dinner and falling into bed, dead to the world.

I was feeling pretty lousy about not making any images, so last night I grabbed Marilyn, just at twilight and went out to the beach right in front of the house.  This big sandy beach is in the tiny town of Valdovino, and although that is what most people call this beach, its official name is Praia de Frouxeira.  The tides were swinging really high and low, and we just happened to be out there during low tide, so we were able to get some really nice images with the reflections in the tide pools on the sand.  Not to mention that we were able to get really close to the tiny island of Percebelleira.  Known for this strange edible barnacle, the Percebes, or “pinky finger.”  I missed out on trying this delicacy, but maybe when we are back up north in the Basque country, I will run across a few.

It felt good to be on the beach, and it was actually the warmest night of all.  For which I was very thankful.  I think we got some really nice images, and I am happy with the outcome.  I even reverted back to what I have now deemed the “ghost dances.”  I have had some resistance to these images, but I am really drawn to them.  I like getting out there, dancing and moving, it feels so natural and yet ritualistic.  They are not nearly as static as some of my images, which have a different kind of rooted strength.

Tomorrow my sister comes, and I have no idea if I will be making many more images on this trip.  We shall see.  (P.S. If you don’t already know, just click on the images to get a full sized view)

Coney Island

Last night’s adventures took me down to the land of the Russians: Brighton Beach and Coney Island.  We spent the evening strolling up and down the boardwalk as evening fell, stopping for giant beers, pickled cabbage, and Nathan’s hotdogs.  It felt otherworldly down there, and a big part of me really could not believe that I was even still in Brooklyn.  What a crazy wonderful place, and how have I never been there before?

Getting caught up in the ambiance, I let too much time pass and had to beg the gatekeepers in the park to let me in for one quick shot, before the park closed.  Nothing like two ghostly creepy twins in blue dresses haunting a run down carnival.  In fact, I think it would be really fun to do more of these types of shots in different carnivals, as two headed ladies, Siamese twins and such.  Ghost carnies.

As we were shuffling out, we stopped to watch this ride where they slingshot a chair on bungees way in to the air.  In the image it just comes out as a streak of sparkles like a firework.  It was an odd scene with people giving me very strange looks as I waved my flashlight around like a crazy person.  Good thing they moved fast enough not to register on the image.  Without much time to work out a concept and shoot multiple images, I opted to let just the light stand in for myself: thus the ribbon of light.