Hey, Teach!

I was invited to teach a class on digital photography at Granite Bay Montessori for the upper elementary kids this summer.   I feel totally honored and excited about this.  I'm already thinking about making models that explain how ISO, aperture and shutter speed all affect light.   

I get to be a geek again!  I'm stoked!

A Stowaway Butter Knife, Rubber Chickens & How Dane Made Me Cry

Some things can only happen in Las Vegas. I just got back from the WPPI 2009 conference where I learned a ton of stuff, and had lots of fun. Even if I did skip the Pictage Studio 54 party.

I found a new way of taking notes.  Pictures are WAY easier than trying to write everything down.  Now why didn't I think of that in college?

Alison Stahl finally found a place to plug in her iPhone.

Carlos and Jeremy partied til all hours of the night, while Alison, Sharon & I had dinner and enjoyed a bit of wine, then turned in earlier than I ever thought possible in Vegas.  Midnight!  Can you imagine?!?

I got to hug the Kubota Action Hero.  Yummy!!!

The very first night we were there, I stuck a butter knife in my back pocket going through the buffet line after the Canon Welcome, promptly forgot about it, then discovered it later that night at the Finao (effin' awesome albums!) party.  Not wanting to seem too weird for taking a butter knife to a party, I put it in my purse, and there it stayed for the rest of the conference.  It came home with me, too.  I wonder what TSA thought....I found a little love note in my bag when I got home.  LOL!

There must of been a contest to see who could make Keri cry the most.  Dane Sanders and Amber Holritz were the winners.  Dane inspires me to keep being genuinely me, and Amber creates some of the most beautiful images of real life that I've ever seen.  Of course, then I went and offended Dane by saying he was a buddhist......let's just say that ketchup makes shoe leather taste pretty good.  But we made up, and I think I might even have a new friend.  Yay!

Tanja Lippert is a total Dork.  She's fun!  She's high-larious! She rocks!  And she encourages you to let your inner dork out--not that I need much encouragement. ; )  Her talk had a hula-hoop contest, a pink flamingo, a rubber chicken, and a lot of dancing mardi gras mask wearing people.  I did a chicken dance to win some swag.  Easily the most fun I've had at 8am!

I did cartwheels for swag, too.  Literally.  One can never have too much swag.  Yes, it's true.  I am a Swag Ho.

I am SO going back next year!

Miksang & The Agony of Defeat

Yes, I did borrow the phrase from the Olympics.  It happens to be the one athletic institution that I still respect.  Well, except for the recent Chinese women's gymnasts' age debacle, but that's another blog.

The Miksang conference I was so looking forward to attending has been cancelled.  While I'm terribly disappointed that I won't be going, I can still practice Miksang on a daily basis.  That's part of what I've always loved about photographing, anyway.  I get to turn my experience of what makes life beautiful into a visual translation.  So as I was shooting the Fall Carnival at Granite Bay Montessori yesterday, I also started looking around for those little, overlooked things that make it unique.  Here's something I found.  Hope you enjoy it.

Miksang

I'm incredibly excited about a photography conference/retreat I signed up for recently.  It's called Miksang.  This was started by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and is the art of contemplative photography.  It is seeing beyond looking.  Too often, we go through our lives too busy to really take in the world around us.  We start off being able to see everything when we're small.  One simply has to watch a toddler's fascination and excitement about something we adults consider mundane to remember this.  The trick becomes, then, how to see like a child.  And in Miksang, this is taken a step further:  how do I see as a child (or with beginner's mind for all my fellow Buddhists) and translate that into a photographic image.  I know that this is a place I can get to when I have camera in hand.  When I truly let go of all my shoulds and oughts to simply be present, I cease to exist.  I become everything and nothing.  I am photographer, camera, and subject.  It's a strange concept, and I have to admit, sounds a bit "new-agey" when you first hear it.  But I see it more as this:  I know, in that moment, that I am interconnected with everything in the universe, and that what benefits one benefits all; and that what harms one, harms us all.  I am perfect, just as I am, with all my imperfections.  I think this is the state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (a professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago) describes as Flow.  

So back to my conference.  It's in LA.  Actually, worse, it's in the Valley.  And most people who know me know that--with the exception of a few tiny enclaves--I don't like LA.  For me, LA represents everything about American culture that I hate:  pretension, self-loathing, a strive to have someone else love us without ever loving ourselves, pollution, wantonness and waste.  Oh, and traffic.  I can't forget that.  So I foresee a big challenge for me.  I will need to embrace everything that I love in a setting where my feelings about that place can be the utter distraction. I need to forget my preconceived notions, get out of my own way, and see the world with the eyes of a child.  I'll let you know how it goes.