Photoshop, Travel, Photography and People

Okay..."Eye" Admit It...

2010-07-20T11:24:00.002-06:00

...I am having a really hard time keeping up with everything: the special events company, the magic shows, learning the new software and designing new websites.

I see on the handy dandy Google reports that upwards of six hundred of you a day pop by this humble little blog. But I don't hear from you...and I don't see you...and other than a few emails, there's nothing other than Google to tell me you've even been here.

This is, of course, your prerogative, since the internet is a vast sea of "free" information. And if I had more time in my day, I would happily be maintaining this blog. But the internet also seems to encourage "lurkers" -- a vast silent majority of people who come, read, enjoy...and fade away with nary a word. I've done it myself...and I understand.

You just never think about the PERSON behind the writing. Sometimes it feels to me like there is no person, but that the Internet is this vast super-consciousness you can tap into at will, creepy and Matrix-like though it may sound.

But the fact is that I don't have more time...and it bugs me when so much of it goes by without updates here. It's not that I don't think about this blog. I just don't really have the time or motivation to constantly be working on it.

So here it is: I'll update it occasionally when I think there's something you, oh mysterious and silent Reader, need to know about. Or if I write something on flickr (you can find me there as magic_fella) that I want to share here, I'll cut and paste it up.

I've written a book which is called "Crap I Think About" with a bunch of stuff I've written here, there and everywhere. If you get so lonely for me that you can no longer contain yourselves, let me suggest you check it out here. It's not a Photoshop book. It's about travels and photography and...well...a bunch of crap I have had occupy my attentions.

I am still trying to finish the final draft of The Novel (Stokers: An Urban Fantasy) but the editing is going very slowly.

SO...let me suggest that you begin "following" this blog because that way you will be alerted each time I do a new submission and pearls of wisdom fall from my fingers, through my computer and onto the Internet. Ahem.

Personally -- I am going to make a point of at least saying "hello" to the people I check regularly on the Internet. It really sometimes DOES feel like we are talking to ourselves, you know.

Talk with you all again.

David

A Little Peace

2010-07-03T18:04:00.000-06:00

"Did you like my book?" asked Sheree. (Our lives, both of them, revolve around The Books lately.)

"Yes. I did. Good book. Except for the mushy parts," replied our friend J.

We laugh out loud. J calls them like he sees them. There are many interesting things about him...not the least of which is his absolute sincerity, often wrapped up in a dry, dry sense of humor you really have to be listening for.

This is a guy who telephones from his truck parked outside our house to ask if we want to join him for dinner, take a crossbow lesson or photograph ghost towns.

J joined our grandson and us for brunch this afternoon. When Caedmon wasn't sure where the desserts were, J walked him over there. We watched as the kid returned wide-eyed with a freaking dinner plate piled HIGH with slabs of cake, pie, squares and a bunch of custard stuff. We're talking PILED. Small countries could live on the contents of that plate alone for a couple of weeks.

"You try a little of everything," J told him. "That way when you go back you know what you want more of."

Like Sheree, J prefers to eat his dessert first. So far neither one has had any trouble from the Dinner Police...

Caedmon liked J and talked about him long after he'd left. High praise indeed from this little guy.

This image is for you, J. May you stay safe. May you walk always with courage and honor. May you always accomplish precisely what you have set out to do.

This shot is from Africa, which is appropriate. It's in the mysterious Drakensberg mountains, more often than not, shrouded in mist...which is also kind of appropriate.

Indy Heat

2010-06-28T05:00:00.000-06:00

"You want us to WHAT?" I ask the very serious looking security guy.

"You need to be wearing pants and closed shoes," he tells me.

I look around me. The temperature is well over 35 degrees (for my American friends, 35c is VFH..."Very Fricking Hot.")

There's hardly anyone not in sandals and shorts. And the forecast for tomorrow is even hotter.

"I mean it," he says, waggling his eyebrows to emphasize the fact that he is really serious.

"I got it," I say, using my #5 Charming Grin to no apparent effect whatsoever.

"Good. Because I mean it," he says again.

I look around. We are standing on black concrete. It seems to intensify the heat before throwing it back up in shimmering waves.

A race car screams out of the pits, leaving an acrid cloud of smoke in its wake. It seems like it only arrived a few seconds ago.

I see the crew stepping away from the vacuum left by the car.

I've watched these crews swarm over the cars, changing the tires, filling the gas tank...and doing a whole bunch of mysterious crap to the engine. They move in a perfectly orchestrated dance.

One of the crew members looks exhausted and way too hot.

Poor guy.

I see their fully insulated jumpsuits, and have just witnessed the frenzied activity that takes place when the car arrives…and suddenly pants and closed shoes don’t seem so bad at all.

Waiting...

2010-06-15T05:07:00.000-06:00

I spent several fascinated hours in Pit Row during the Edmonton Indy.

For those who don’t know, Pit Row is were the drivers get into their cars, where they interact with their crews and where they come for pit stops during the race.

Most of the time, I stayed in the background, watching and photographing the people. But I was also trying to imprint on my mind what it felt like to be that close to these fast machines, intense drivers and utterly dedicated pit crews.

Pit Row smells not unpleasantly of exhaust, oil and sweat. There are two speeds of activity. There’s an affable sloth-like purposeful motion: guys moving equipment around, laughing and chatter. And there’s hyper-drive getthecarbackontothetrackNOW perfectly orchestrated frenzy when the vehicle tears into the pits.

There are always the fans: pressed up against the fence, as close as they can get. They stake out their favourite driver’s pits and wait. They will stand there for hours in the hot sun, hoping for a glimpse of their heroes, often calling their name.

And there are cameras: hundreds of them. The fans carry them, of course. So do the reporters and media photographers. There are video cameras operating on huge booms and carried by puffing steady looking men following reporters around.

There’s the constant sound of machinery and power tools, the clanking of metal on metal, the drone of the track announcer and the sound of the fans. But it’s all purposeful. It’s all very much “on purpose” – tasks carried out by crews that have done them a hundred times before and consider competency, speed and excellence as the sacred trinity of their jobs.

These are all people who spend their lives in a fishbowl and have grown used to it.

I saw Helio Castroneves arrive on a scooter. He chatted with some fans, posed for pictures, got interviewed and flashed his smile.

But then he went off by himself to watch his competitors.

He looked very much alone to me…and content to stay that way. He was motionless, watching the other drivers, seeing things I wouldn’t even notice.

I wonder what drivers think about…how they prepare for the race. I wonder if they consider that they might get killed or set on fire. I wonder if they refuse to even let these thoughts into their mind.

I wonder what Helio Castroneves was thinking about as he sat by himself under my fishbowl.

Fearsome Danica...

2010-06-14T05:10:00.000-06:00

"I heard a little boy asked her for an autograph and she just walked away and he started to cry," says one breathless volunteer.

"Yeah? Well I heard her whole pit crew is scared of making her mad," responds another.

They are talking about Indy's legendary beauty, Danica Patrick. She was racing yesterday.

She arrived on a scooter, looking neither right or left, ignoring the myriad of cameras clicking as she passed.

Patrick chatted with her crew and laughed often and I saw no sign that people were afraid of her. She seemed like a race car driver concentrating on her job.

I shot a LOT of photos in the pits yesterday -- and am going back this morning.

PDTBVE ("Pretty Darn Tired But Very Excited")

Graham Rahal In The Pits

2010-06-09T05:00:00.001-06:00

I highly recommend getting a media pass for events like the Edmonton Indy.

It hangs around your neck and lets you into places like the Media Walk. Visualize this: the stadium seating is behind a fence. In front of the stadium is a walk right next to the track. There are holes cut into the fence at strategic places and when the cars come snarling by, you are just a few feet away from them.

So there I was, leaning into one of the conveniently placed holes in the fence. My leg was braced against the concrete block for stability when I saw two magazine type photographers standing behind me.

One of them had a lens longer than my car. He was wearing a seriously disapproving look. I shrugged and went back to shooting. The cars were coming so fast and I was trying to track them and get my shot.

When I turned back, the Serious Photographer Guy was frowning so deeply his eyes disappeared. He was looking right at me. The cars were loud but the tisking sound was loud enough to be heard over the roar.

“What?” I asked.

He gestured to my feet.

“You got to step back from that block, guy,” he said.

“Huh?” I inquire shrewdly.

He pointed to the concrete block again. Then he pointed to the track.

“One of those cars crash into the concrete,” he paused to smack his hands together, hard enough to startle me just a little. “If that happens, your ankle snaps.”

He holds his fists together and snaps them apart like he’s breaking a pencil in two.

I realize that this guy isn’t being a jerk. He’s looking out for me…so I thank him, step back and we both start shooting again.

We stood side by side for a while – he wielding a lens that could capture a pimple on the butt of a naked astronaut on the moon – and me with my Olympus telephoto.

“So…I haven’t shot at the races before,” I started.

He looked at me like he’d sort of suspected this already.

“Are there other things…etiquette…for shooting at the track?” I asked.

“Don’t put your crap on the walls,” he says. “Don’t ever lean your camera against the wall. Shooting is cool, but when you are looking at your shots, move aside for the next guy. We all have our shots to get.”

Serious Photographer Guy points to Not Quite So Serious Photographer Guy, who is standing beside him.

(I know he is not quite a serious because his lens is shorter than the one the Serious Photographer Guy has...and he is only carrying two cameras, whereas my mentor has FOUR cameras. All serious looking Canons. Geez.)

SPG points to NQSSPG and says "He has to get shots of specific drivers," he says.

"I do not," says NQSSPG with a self conscious laugh.

SPG ignores him. "One of those cars crashes against the wall, crap goes everywhere, tiny bits of it. You want to be out of the way."

I nod in agreement. I have a sneaking suspicion they are having me on a little...but still, it makes sense.

"Have you ever seen a crash?" I ask.

"Well...no..." responds SPG. "But I've heard it's bad."

I nod again.

“That’s it?” I ask. "That's all I need to know about shooting here?"

“Yup,” he says.

I thank him again and he smiles and wanders off, his good deed done for the day. I was actually grateful that he took the time to tell me this stuff. How else am I going to know?

So I stay and shoot some more. But before long I come to the conclusion that photographing cars isn’t all that interesting to me.

So, a few minutes later I am back in the pits again. It has become my favourite place. I love the sounds and the people and the colors. Besides, I realize I may never be in this position again…with a media pass and access to the pits…and the media walk.

A car rolls into the pit a few feet away from me. These drivers really are the rock stars of the weekend. When the drivers come into the pits, someone stands over them with an umbrella to keep the sun off of them. Someone else puts a blower directly in their faces. I can only guess how hot it is in those suits.

One of the biggest drivers, Graham Rahal is in the pit, a few feet away. He is waiting for his car to be put back on the track. I know he’s only going to be here for about 45 seconds.

I step into the pit and raise the camera. Rahal looks at me and I look at him. I take the shot and smile a thank you. It would be cool to say he nodded or waved back. He didn’t. He just fixed his eyes back on the track.

I am learning a LOT about photographing at the Indy.

One and a Half Seconds

2010-06-06T04:57:00.000-06:00

I am standing in the pit on a blisteringly hot summer day.

The "pit" is an area of frenzied activity at the Edmonton Indy. Cars snarl in for quick service from their crews and seconds later, tear back onto the track with an almost deafening screaming of their engines.

It is an exhilirating thing to watch. I have never been in the pits before and am not quite sure what the rules are.

Can you walk right into the area beside the track? I have a sneaking suspicion that these guys would walk right over anyone who got in their way and kill them later.

Still...I know I have only a few seconds here before the drivers take off.

I step into the area behind the pit on the opposite side of the crew hut, train my telephoto on the driver and shoot.

There is the space of a second. Maybe a second and a half.

The crew lowers the car. The driver shifts slightly and I can feel sudden intensity bristling from him. He is total focus.

I am in a race of my own, because an instant after I take the picture, he's gone.

I watch him go, the rear end of his car fishtailing just a little as it seeks purchase on the hot track.

No one killed me. No one walked over me. No one told me to get the hell out of the pit area.

And I got my shot.

Danica Patrick

2010-06-04T05:00:00.000-06:00

The first thing I noticed about Danica Patrick is that she’s very small. Her body is slender and I don’t think she even comes up to my shoulder. I doubt she weighs a hundred pounds.

The second thing I noticed is that this girl has a serious presence. She’s intense and that intensity crackles in the air around her.

Contrary to popular opinion, I did not see flames shooting from her mouth. I smelled no brimstone. No children cried. No women screamed. As I stood in the pit and watched her interact with her crew, she seemed relaxed. She smiled often and frequently touched the person she was talking to.

This doesn’t compute with her rep as the driving diva, the Indy beauty with a fiery temper.

I was interested in photographing her because she really is an enigma.

The other thing I noticed is now often people in the crowd call her name. They are, of course, trying to get her to look their way so they can take a picture. Sometimes the sound is coming from round men in way too tight “Danica Rules Indy” t-shirts. Other times it’s women in stretch pants or children that sound like they live just on the edge of panic, are not really sure who she is but know she’s somebody and really need to blow their nose.

Is it a surprise that she totally ignored the fans? She didn’t look at them, didn’t speak to them and appeared completely indifferent as to whether or not they took her picture. If you wanted the shot you had to be quick. Even from my vantage point in the Pit Walk, I had to time my shots perfectly.

Unlike the other drivers, she didn’t pose for pictures with fans and I don’t think she signed a single autograph.

But I wondered how it would feel to be her. People constantly calling to you, wanting you to look their way. What would it feel like to have every move scrutinized?

She had just finished a lackluster time trial – and was about to hop onto her scooter and take off. She was standing in front the small tent her crew was working in. She was blocked from the view of most of her fans and she seemed to be thinking some deep thoughts. That’s when I took this shot.

I wonder what she was thinking about.

I wonder what it would be like to be a woman racing cars…and constantly be described as an Indy babe. I wonder what actually happens inside her head before, during and after the race.

That’s what this image is about. It’s all about “wondering.”

And of course, the fact that she is a total Indy babe doesn’t hurt either…

A Fricking Sunflower

2010-05-31T06:00:00.000-06:00

God has a sense of humor.

Aardvarks, for example. Or the fact that I keep winding up in places where the only logical attraction is...flowers.

We wound up in gardens on a day trip to Calgary and on the Kelby Photo Walk, we wound up in gardens again.

Whatcha gonna do? If you're me, you start off looking everywhere else for anything else.

Then you take pictures of that "anything" knowing full well that the images are going to be 100% crap...but you stay stubborn and shoot anyway.

It's not like I hate flower pictures. I'm just indifferent to most of them. I look and say "aha...a flower. Oooo."

Then, having saved face, you sigh and turn your attention back to the fricking flowers.

It was a wonderful day: perfect weather. Nice people (photographers of all sizes and experience levels) too.

This flower simply wouldn't cooperate. I wanted to make an HDR exposure and it kept moving in the wind.

"Let me hold that for you," said Lady Caroline (who is brand new to flickr. Her stuff is here: www.flickr.com/photos/capturingmemoriesandmagic/) who bustled up, took the flower in a death grip and waited patiently for me to finish shooting.

We got to talking. Carolyn has just retired and she's getting serious about photography.

She has a bag full of gadgets that made Sheree go "oooo" and "ahhhh."

Carolyn also has a patient husband who follows her around carrying her tripod.

Why not pop by her site and welcome her to flickr? She's a nice person.

In the meantime here's another fricking flower. Tuh Dum.

An Angel for Dave and His Better Half...

2010-05-21T05:30:00.001-06:00

Our flickr friend Dave H. (who has some excellent images here: www.flickr.com/photos/22775126@N00/ ) gave us the gift of showing us around London on our last day here.

Dave knows our fascination with graveyards and went out of his way to take us to Highgate, a very old cemetery.

Later on his wife Jenny joined us for a lovely supper.

Thank you very much for your time, Dave. And thank you for introducing us to your vastly better half.

This image is for both of you with our warmest thanks...and the certainty that we will see you again.

The Changing of the Guard

2010-05-19T06:12:00.000-06:00

There have been a number of theories advanced as to what actually is going on during the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace.

Contrary to popular opinion, it has nothing to do with diapers...or 'nappies' as they are known on this side of the pond.

Here's what is REALLY going on: the guys in the funny hairy hats have lost a bet and so they have to wear them in front of everyone.

As a part of the "lost bet" they must also apply huge amounts of starch to their underwear, which explains the funny way they walk.

All the rifle guys are followed with one guy with a sword...to ensure they follow through on the bet. He is also a handy back-up in case an enemy army attacks and the troops run out of bullets.

The soldiers simply cannot get things right, so an old guy comes out and yells at them.

Now you know everything about the Changing of the Guard...quite unlike all the tourists I saw when we were there. They had no idea at all what they were lining up to see.

A Soft Kiss Goodbye to Africa

2010-05-18T05:00:00.000-06:00

I don't want to go.

Sheree has been asking me what's bugging me today, since I am not my ordinarily sunshiny self. (You just shush.) It's because I know I am leaving Africa.

Tonight we fly to London which, under ordinary circumstances would be a good thing. But it means leaving South Africa and I don't know when I will be back...only that I WILL be back. Some day.

**sigh**

This shot was taken one perfect summer morning when some school children sang for us. It was hot and sweat was pouring off me. When we left, a little boy with impossible eyes asked for our water bottle. Sheree gave it to him and he scampered away and had it immediately taken away by bigger boys and bigger boys took it away from them...and so it went.

How do you say goodbye to nights so dark that the stars glitter in the sky with other-worldly brightness and it feels like you could reach out and thrust a handful of them into your pocket?

I stood and watched sheet lightning show that went all night. Not a whisper of thunder...but such brilliant light!

Cape Town is a place where the wind gets so strong that you actually need to hang onto something...as you walk by beaches so perfect that they make your heart hurt.

There's something so exotic here, something that dances in the air like a capricious sprite you can only catch a glimpse of at the best of times...and then only when you're REALLY looking for it.

There's danger, of course...and the constant sense you are an outsider longing to join in..but there's magic here too.

I stood on top of a mountain and felt cool cloud against my skin. I have felt the hot sun on my face and I have been mere feet from majestic elephants.

Africa is magical. Wildly exotic. Wonderful...so very lovely. Dark and dangerous...but perfect in its way.

It is as wild as a Mardi Gras and as stealthy as a stalking lion. It is as distant as a glittering star and as lovely as a child's smile.

I just never imagined I would like it this much...after all: I have sore muscles, a few bug bites (though no where near as many as poor Sheree)...and a thousand perfectly preserved memories.

Does it make sense to fly away from this? Does it ever make sense to leave a place that has touched your heart?

I am shrugging...but I didn't quite know how to convey how it all feels right now. As I was trying to pick a shot to go with this text, this one felt right.

At the End of Africa

2010-05-17T07:00:00.000-06:00

We were at the southernmost point of the African Continent.

Most people posed at the tourist monument. This was a place where you could put one foot on either side of the dividing line between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I stand to be corrected, but it seemed to me that most people made a bee-line for the monument...and just didn't look around much. They just got into the line-up of tourists waiting for their turn at the monument.

This girl chose to go onto the rocks and sit, looking out at the ocean.

She was much closer to the most Southern part of Africa than the tourists were.

I really liked that.

There was the steady pounding of the ocean, the call of birds and scent of the sea in the air. It all happened under a perfect African sky on an equally perfect summer day.

It was a Perfect Moment.

I thought you might like to share it.

I am working on the final draft of my novel with the help of great readers and one particularly comely blue eyed editor (who is very likely rolling her eyes as she reads this), the company is busy (thank you, God!) and we're prepping for a little hop to Florida next month to visit Susan, Bill and Mickey.

Just sit quietly for a second (particularly if it's been a hectic day) and try to imagine the sound of the ocean waves washing up on the African coast, a cool breeze on your face and a wonderful moment of peace in your heart.

Roger, Wilco

2010-05-13T17:57:00.000-06:00

You start with a 25 year old guide.

You add 15 people, 14 of whom are over 50, four which are self - professed 'REALLY picky eaters' -- add 14 km hikes UP mountains and stops everywhere from spider infested 'hobbit holes' to beachfront resorts.

You make the old people carry sleeping bags into most of the venues and you send them on road trips that can be up to 11 hours long.

Back to the guide. This guy (remember he's like 25) has to be able to drive a huge truck over rutted roads, make impossible turns and do MOST of the cooking from the side of a truck.

If one of his aging brood is missing, say on a massively difficult trail (and NO...it wasn't me), this guide has to put down his lunch and go back over the trail until he finds, rescues him and brings him back to the fold...having remembered to set a plate of food aside in case he's hungry.

He also tackles hills and trails and slippery rocks with speed that would make Superman pee his pants...and he does it in flip flops. Then he smokes a cigarette. Or three. (**sigh** Who said 'Youth is wasted on the young?')

Amazing guy, this Wilco (pronounced "VIL-ko.) Here he is being asked questions by three people at a time before making six km hike along the beach and into the forest.

The only time he was left alone was when he was on one of those marathon drives across this vast country. Then he plugs in his ancient iPod and listens to Disney tunes as he navigates the roads and rutted paths with unerring precision.

He was offered a new iPod (no names of course) with Ozzy, AC/DC, Led Zep...and other music more befitting a 25 year old...but he politely declined. He likes the Disney tunes better.

He speaks with that smooth South African accent. He teaches us that "now now" means 'Yes, I heard you and I'll get to it...soon." He also teaches us that 'a little hike' CAN mean scrambling over rocks, in unreasonably high winds and along the side of a mountain for miles.

When I was 25, I considered myself a success if I remembered to pull up my fly...and responsible if I could remember where I parked my car.

So here's to you, Wilco. You did a splendid job. We enjoyed having our lives cross with yours. Stay well.

Neil: Out of Africa

2010-05-11T05:00:00.000-06:00

Our safari truck growls into a tiny South African town. It is one of the few stops I haven't been looking forward to much. Here we are offered one of two options: We can go to a micro brewery or we can take in some arts and crafts. This is most unlike the rest of the Drifter's tour. It's touristy...and we never like touristy.

Sheree and I exchange looks and decide not to do either. We will pack up our cameras and take a walk and meet people.

We wander into "The Village Inn Restaurant and Karoo Kitchen."

The Karoo is a vast beautiful place. The day is searingly hot with just enough of a breeze to keep certain Canadians from melting, leaving only cameras, sunglasses and garish colored shorts in haltng little bilingual puddles.

We step into a dark interior, twice as dark because the sun outside is so very bright.

The menu is hand printed on a fireplace. It offers items like ice cold ginger beer, lemonade and fresh scones.

I am struck by the idea that I have walked ito a hobbit hole because the rooms are crowded with lovingly placed bric-a-brac. Everything has a place.

No one's here. But there is someone humming a softly off-key tune in the distance.

We stand and chat with another tour-fleeing couple and poke around at the stuff on the shelves.

Eventually a voice that has seen a LOT of miles cheerily calls he's 'on his way.'

Shuffling feet that sound like they're encased in favorite slippers. Into the room walks an old guy who looks a lot like James Whitmore.

He's a friendly little fellow whose face lights up at the prospect of actual customers.

"Hello," he says. "I'm Neil."

It feels strange to be introducing ourselves at a restaurant, but we all do and shake his hand.

Sheree orders a coffee and I opt for ginger beer. He nods again, increasing my suspicion that I am with an affable hobbit and shuffles off into a back room.

He's gone a really long time. I mean a REALLY long time. I start to wonder if he has died. Eventually he shows up again, carrying a small kettle and a frosty glass of ginger beer.

After putting the drinks on the table, he settles into the table next to us, for a little chat.

He's very curious about Canada. Having farmed until recently in South Africa, he wants to know about how farming works here. Personally, I have no idea.

We chat about how proud he is that his wife is the official translator of plays for a South African playwright I have never heard of.

Sheree takes a sip and declares she's never had coffee this good. She's not making it up...she's really impressed.

I sip the ginger beer. It's really sweet.But it's cold and it's wet...and there's this wonderful bite to it.

Neil is impressed with our cameras and he asks about them. He doesn't seem to know much about photography but he's interested.

I am replying to his questions...but I am thinking, not unkindly that Neil has the bushiest eyebrows I've ever seen.

"We've got just under a thousand people here," he says. "A 40% unemployment rate and 23 restaurants."

"That seems like a lot," I observe shrewdly.

He nods again "It is. But tourism is increasing every day."

I am thinking of the rutted African goat trails we took to get here. Neil is, apparently, an optimist.

He tells us about some of the photographic opportunities in the area.

Sheree thrusts the kettle at me. "You have to try this COFFEE," she says.

We've been living with instant truck slop so long I have forgotten what coffee tastes like.

This stuff is dusky, buttery and rich. It is amazing. I want to order a pot of my own, but can't afford to wait the seven hours it will take to make...and our time is already running out.

If we are going to take any pictures, we have to go.

So we say goodbye to Neil and his charming restaurant and his classic coffee and walk out into the African sun.

I thought you would like to meet Neil. But then I think EVERYONE should meet at least one Neil in their lives.

Not Just Another Pretty Face

2010-05-07T04:30:00.000-06:00

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in doctor's offices. And nearly all of them had this hardcover with DO NOT REMOVE emblazoned across the cover.

But there were great Bible stories in there: and the kind of illustrations you only see in books from the 60's: lush colors, idyllic subjects. Everyone was smiling. Adam and Eve stood behind strategically located trees and palm fronds.

But the image that interested me the most was of Eden where a bunch of animals were displayed: lions and elephants, big birds and turtles. They just kind of lounged around together. No one ate anyone.

I loved that picture: and can still see it clearly in my mind.

And that shot is pretty much like what Kruger National Park in South Africa is like. The vegetation is so lush and green, and there are animals everywhere.

We were lucky because I've seen pictures of Kruger where the traffic is so thick it's a constant gridlock. We went several minutes without seeing another vehicle.

But SO many animals!

The herbivores travel together. Usually there's a giraffe in there somewhere because they have the longest necks and the sharpest eyes and when they start to freak out, the rest of the animals know there's a nasty something with teeth and claws lurking in the undergrowth.

This elephant sauntered out about twenty feet from our truck. It was like rounding a corner in Rome and seeing the Colosseum for the first time. It was magic. It was right there...HUGE...munching on a tree.

I was speechless, jaw open and very possibly a trail of drool working down my chin. It was...amazing...so amazing I forgot to take a shot for the longest time. The whirring and clicking of cameras around me brought me to my senses...and I took some shots. But all the while I was so completely aware of the majesty of what was before me.

Elephants are cool.

So is Africa.

"Take My Picture"

2010-05-06T06:00:00.000-06:00

I don't know why it is that so many South Africans saw me with my camera and demanded "Take my picture."

It happened a number of times during our too brief 20 days there.

They didn't want money. They didn't want anything except to have their picture taken. When I showed it to them on the screen, they were unfailingly delighted.

This guy was by the beach on the Dolphin Coast. He was a big fella, lounging around by a fence. His eyes were fixed on me from a block away.

I kept walking, but kept everything close. When I got there, he put up his hand and said "Take my picture."

Big sorta scary dude talk? Me listen.

So I did take his picture. Here it is....and he liked it. Thank God.

I think a lot about Africa these days...and London...and a serious tug to be back on the road again.

We are NOT GAY!

2010-05-05T07:00:00.001-06:00

God has a sense of humor.

Every TINY African town we go into, Sheree goes rushing about looking for an Internet cafe. That woman can sniff out an internet connection in a mud hut...

I, on the other hand am not addicted to the internet and so I dawdle and take pictures and hang out. I also carry stuff, since I am male and this is my apparent function.

Right now Sheree is on a boat looking for whales. Since I vividly recall my last time on a boat "Five Hours of HELL" due to seasickness and very poor judgment, I wandered around the town which is (I think Knysna?) and I come across an Internet cafe all on my own.

So here I am, somewhere in Africa writing to you guys to say HELLO!

These two "no doubt about it MALE zebras" (which is apparently pronounced 'ZEB-ra') were in the midst of some very heated...interaction...as we rounded a corner in the world famous Kruger National Park.

Our tour guide, a mega-man type, actually blushed and insisted hotly that there was nothing at all going on and there are, in fact NO gay "ZEB-ras." Maybe they were just wrestling...

It looked pretty gay to me...and the one who was doing the...ummm...well...male part...ahem...got very upset and gave us the ZEB-ra stinkeye and bared teeth at being interrupted.

I could wax on about the amazing sunsets and the fabulous people, the many razor wire fences and repeated warnings not to go out after dark. I could tell you about the most spectacular lightning displays I have ever seen, or sitting on a porch watching the astounding stars...because we've done all that.

But the un-gay zebras were among the most interesting things I've seen so far.

I thought you might get a bang out of it. (No pun intended.)

Whisper of a Lioness

2010-05-04T06:00:00.001-06:00

Here's what a safari in South Africa's Kruger National Park feels like.

You ride in an enormous truck with massive windows and all around you is tall grass, exotic flat topped trees and the steady hum of vibrant African wildlife. The sun is very hot on your skin and the stark scent of pure life crackles in the air.

The first time you see an impala, the whole bus goes bugshit and there is a frenzy of camera clicking. Before long you see hundreds of them. There are so many, so close to road that you simply yawn and shrug after a while.

There are long periods of relative quiet with people staring intently out the windows, each one trying to be the first to glimpse an animal that is not some form of deer.

Suddenly someone hollers (despite repeated warnings to keep our voices down) "LION! THERE'S A FRICKING LION OVER THERE!!!"

Everyone on the tram oooohs and ahhhhs...even the people who don't see a thing because no one wants to look like some loser who came all the way to Africa and missed the fricking lion.

I look hard into the bushes and at first I don't see a thing. Sheree is snapping and enthusing like crazy.

I look in the general direction of her lens and then I see something move in the bushes. It is the slightest movement and when my eyes finally make sense of what is before me, I see a lioness and two cubs, hidden, unmoving in the tall grass.

Cameras around me are clicking and people are whispering excitedly to each other that it's a 'lion' (which is, without doubt, most useful information).

To be honest, I realize I should be taking pictures. But something so profound is going on inside me that I can't raise my camera.

It is a M.T.M. (Magical Travel Moment) because I am mere feet away from a beautiful animal and I am seeing her in her own environment. She's not miserably pacing the confines of a cage in a circus, or looking out with trapped eyes at the hundreds of people examining her mysteries in a zoo. This is a lioness seen the way she is meant to be seen.

I loved that I really had to look for her. I loved that she started grooming one of her cubs and the moment seemed so tender and natural that some part of my spirit soared at seeing it.

I did take a picture, of course. But I think that for a flash of a second, I truly understood Africa. An instant later that understanding was burned away like morning mist and I was reduced again to being an outsider, looking with absolute wonder at what can only be described (at the risk of sounding a little trite) as a savage beauty that was far far beyond anything I could possibly comprehend.

Revenge of the Wetsuit...

2010-05-03T05:00:00.000-06:00

Here’s the idea: you put on a wetsuit. One of the crew members tosses a decapitated tuna head into the water, affixed to a tow rope. Another crew guy spills a steady trickle of fish guts into the water. Since we are in South Africa's “Shark Alley” – the cunning plan is to draw as many sharks as possible so that when we get into the “shark cage” the sharks will come along, expecting to eat something.

“You should go in,” says Sheree…who is the only one who wanted to do this whole thing in the first place. It’s one of those adventures where I would look at a brochure; roll my eyes and wonder briefly what kind of moron would be stupid enough to pay money and actually go into shark infested waters ON PURPOSE.

“Me?” I ask, squeaking just a little. “I should go in?”

“Yup. I’m going to take pictures from here. Do something I’m not doing,” she says.

I decide not to point out that I do lots of things she doesn’t do: peeing standing up, for example. But I have already made up my mind to go into the cage. I am, after all, paying two hundred dollars so that I could get up a little past four, and finish my morning in the water with sharks. My mom didn’t raise any idiots. (Well she did…but I am not one of them.)

“All divers must pick up their wetsuits on the first deck,” says the captain, an affable craggy faced man who drops tourists into shark water for a living.

With one final thought of “What the HELL ARE YOU DOING???” I join the line up of brain dead prospective chum donors. Most of them are twenty-somethings from around the globe. There are several blond gym bunnies and their attending frat boy/muscle head/young-guys-who-can’t-seem-to-keep-their-pants-up companions.

The captain sizes me up and hands me a wet suit. It’s sopping wet and heavy and looks like it’s designed for someone of more conventional size. (I am a touch rotund.) I look at the rubber scrap.

“Are you sure?” I ask.

He nods and responds “Ja Ja” which is South African for “Yes Yes.”

I go to the head to put the wet suit on – having no desire to do what I am certain will wind up being a very undignified procedure in front of the gym bunnies.

As I stand locked in the tiny room with the outer space looking toilet in my underwear, the ship takes off. It seems to me they could give some warning…that someone could call out: “Hey Disgruntled Little Fat Guy In His Underwear In The Head: We Are Planning To Take Off With a REAL Joyful Spurt of Speed Now.”

I lurch to one side, banging my head on some mysterious pipe, begin cursing anyone and everyone as someone knocks on the door.

“In a minute,” I call.

The fricking wet suit is inside out. I pull at it, still as dubious as an elephant contemplating a napkin tutu…but the idea of bravely facing sharks in their own environment without peeing my pants sustains me.

I settle onto the tiny toilet seat and thrust one leg into the wet suit. No. That’s not the right word: I TRY to put my leg into the leg and am stopped by clammy rubber. It feels gross. But I, Great White Hunter, do not know the meaning of the word "gross." Ahem.

I try to work the rubber over my leg and it isn’t going.

Someone knocks again. The boat lurches to one side. I bang my head again. Shit.

“In a minute,” I call cheerily. Dork, I think. Did you SEE me come out of here since the last time you knocked?

I have the wet suit leg almost up to my knee now and am slowly working the rubber down my ankle.

Sheree forgot her sea bands somewhere. And I have taken seasick medication…so I gave mine to her. And the head is starting to smell bad. Diesel fumes? Poop? Sea? I stop my brain right there, resolving NOT to think about it. For the love of God: don’t go there. Nossir. Four fricking hours on the fricking water surrounded by gym bunnies…and me heaving my guts into the water? No way the Great White Hunter will be seen like that.

The leg finally kind of is on and I must now raise my other leg, while balancing one butt cheek on the toilet seat in the rocking boat while I try get my other foot in. (Like that’s gonna happen.)

The boat pitches again and my precarious balance is disrupted and I slide off the toilet and, with a fleeting thought “this is really gonna hurt,” slam onto the hard metal floor.

Knocking again. This time more insistent.

I ignore it.

I am pinned on the floor, one leg straight, the other bent at a vaguely unnatural angle because I can’t get it through the rubber. I try to think through the motions that will allow me to get up. I brace my hands on the toilet seat (don’t even think about it)…and the almost smooth wall and shove. It almost works, but the boat runs into another ice burg and it lurches and I thump to the floor.

Fury charges my muscles and, in the midst of a fifty-something tantrum I thrash and shove that fricking leg forward with all that is within me and am rewarded by the appearance of a big toe…nearly…at the bottom of the leg. The knee pad is still around my ankle…but I choose to celebrate the small things.

Seizing the moment, I struggle to my feet and try to thrust my arms through the microscopic arm holes. Does the head actually stink more than it did a minute ago? Are they piping the diesel fumes directly in here? Who the hell is smoking? Are they hitting waves on PURPOSE?

I am suddenly and without warning in the familiar position of being driven to the floor, only now I have one arm trapped under me.

Knocking again.

“Piss off,” I call out cheerily.

Arms are easier than legs and I get both of them into the wet suit finally and realize there’s no way I can stand up. The rubber traps me in a forward leaning position and I look like I should be ringing the bell at Notre Dame, not facing down sharks.

No way this suit is the right size.

I sigh…ignore the knocking…and work the suit off.

When I go up top Sheree shrewdly observes. “You’re not in a wet suit.”

I just look at her.

“How come?”

“They didn’t have my color.”

“Really…how come?”

I just look at her for a long moment. She shrugs and goes back to snapping pictures, enthusing about what wonderful shots she’s getting, completely indifferent to my recent suffering and obvious need for a touch of human comfort.

I shrug and decide I wanted to take pictures from the start.

This is one of them.

Da Feet of Africa

2010-04-30T09:00:00.000-06:00

We spent a morning at a school in a VERY rural part of Africa. We rumbled up hot dusty back roads in the Apparently Indestructible Truck Thingie and after a number of spine jarring bumps, we rolled up in front of a brick building.

It was a drab brick affair with peeling paint and a tired principal standing out front. My expectations weren't all that high.

But there were kids singing inside and despite the drab feel of the place, there seemed to be a little cloud of joy surrounding it.

We were led into a grade eleven classroom and the kids sat there looking at us with shy eyes and we looked back, nodding and smiling and feeling like nasty interruptions in an otherwise lovely day.

The principal assembled the kids and they started to sing.

Okay: I admit it. I put my polite face on. I was prepared to endure a school assembly type of thing.

That lasted five minutes. As the kids sang and the audience clapped something PDC (Pretty Darn Cool) happened.

The kids started to laugh and really sing and dance. Energy infused the room and suddenly everything was magical. Inside of a few minutes, we were all laughing and clapping along with them.

It was one of those wonderful travel moments where two completely different cultures meet, shake hands and actually like each other.

It happened in a "way too hot" classroom in a town so small I'm not sure it even has a name.

Midnight Visitor

2010-04-28T07:00:00.000-06:00

It was our second night in Africa. Our guide warned us to watch the path carefully at night for scorpions. So Sheree and I made our way back to our little cabin sweeping our headlamps back and forth looking for these venomous little peckers.

It was sort of exciting in a strange way,. We don't get a lot of scorpions in Edmonton...although I felt a geek wearing a headlamp. (I knew a kid who was president of the Science Club who took a headlamp to camp once...enough said.)

Anyway: since the room lights ran off a generator and we were asked to keep the power uses down, I decided to read my book using my headlamp.

Sheree was sleeping beside me and I was turning pages on a Mankell thriller about a guy in South Africa during the bloody uprising era waiting for the machete to fall.

Time passes and I am deeper and deeper into this book. Then all of a sudden there's this humming thrumming sound and something flies into my face.

I assume it's a bug, but it's a fast little sucker. It smacks me in the face and flies away. Since the only light source in the room is currently on my forehead, I accept it. (I don't like it, of course and am better than half way grossed out by it, but I accept it.)

Since the hero of the book is landing in serious doo-doo, I go back to my book. A few minutes later it smacks me in the face again -- and I am starting to get better than half pissed now.

It must be some serious kind of bug, I think. And, being a great white hunter, I shrewdly evolve a clever plan: I shall hang my lit headlamp on the bedpost, wait for the insect to be drawn to the light again and I will squish it with my book (being very careful not to get any African bug guts on me because...well y'know.).

(Sometimes I surprise myself with my own cunning.)

So I sit there in the dark, novel poised, every sense alert and tuned to the whispering darkness. I was quivering with a hunter's anticipation.

Nothing.

I wait.

Pretty smart bug I think.

I get tired and begin to think it's a little silly for a grown man to be waiting in the darkness to outsmart and then ambush a bug.

That little sucker comes round again, with the usual soft whispering thrumming sound I can't identify...and I see it's not a bug at all. In the flash I see it's a BAT. A little tiny bat.

I abandon the "wait and squish strategy," turn out the light and go to sleep.
Being a Great White Hunter, I most definitely do NOT pull the covers over my head.

Score?

Bat: one.

Great African/Canadian hunter: zero.

I love Africa. I really really do. This is an amazing place.

We're here for another two...almost three days...before we leave for London.

Thought you guys might like to see The Headlamp...and it makes for an excellent excuse to tell the story.

Tomorrow, Sheree and I are going into a shark cage in Great White Shark infested waters. They promise up-close interactions with the most ferocious ocean predator on the planet. Seriously...we are. Her idea. Of course. Imagine that: going into a cage in the water...with sharks. On PURPOSE. Geez.

I think I'll take my novel with me in case I need to squish the shark.

**sigh**

Once Upon a Time...

2010-04-27T08:00:00.000-06:00

I was in a South African city. I can't remember which one. I was out with Sheree looking for (what else...?) an Internet Cafe.

Our course took us into a seedy part of town, lots of people standing idly on the stoops of worn out looking shops, talking and sitting and watching us.

We found two Internet Cafes. One was closed and the clerk in the other looked up and said "Not working," with a sad shake of her head. Many things don't work in Africa.

We were walking along the seafront and saw a fascinating old building: broken down with shattered windows that looked like broken bones to me.

I tried to photograph it from different angles, but nothing was working.

An old man came by and I stopped him.

"Are you from around here?" I asked.

He nodded. "All my life," he said.

"Do you know what this building is...was?" I asked.

He nodded, and stood looking at me.

I raised my eyebrows in the universal "Ummm...well?" gesture.

"I was born there," he said finally, looking at the broken windows, the peeling paint and the graffiti.

"It was a hospital?" I asked, seizing on the obvious.

"Yes. A hospital only for children. It's been closed for years. The government can't decide what to do with it." He looked at the building for a long moment. "Very sad to me."

The desertion of things, people and places in Africa make a strange kind of sense after a while. So many beautiful things are ignored and forgotten...so many lovely things are treated casually or allowed to stand and rot away...but then there are SO many wonderful things there you can sort of understand it. Most of these people are just trying to live through the day, to get enough to eat. Buildings fall low priority lists.

Still it was such a lovely old place: with a grand edifice and superb old world touches...

I played around with this image for a while. But nothing was working until I took a child's face and put it into the corner. This child was a student in a remote school not far from the seriously wild areas of Africa.

I loved Africa. There is something utterly mystical there. Maybe it's a vibrant quality in the air or the exotic nature of the people. Maybe it's the way you can turn a corner on a dusty road and see something amazing...or stand mere feet from an elephant or lion going about their business.

I loved Africa. I loved being there. Part of me still is.

Mystical Focus from Auto FX

2010-04-25T16:12:00.006-06:00

It's been a bumper crop for new releases from the long silent Auto FX. You'll see information on Mystical Lighting & Ambiance 2.0 a little further down. But brand new on the market is another package called Mystical Focus.

I spent some time with Auto FX's Cliff Weems and asked him about Mystical Focus.

What sets this Mystical Focus apart from other options on the market?

Our framework allows us to dynamically render and combine different filters together. We can combine a Focal Plane with a Focal Brush effect then add in a Panning Focus to just a small part of the image. We have robust brush-on / brush-off tools as well as ellipse controls / path controls and focal mask controls that are really easy and fast to work with.

There is another release on the market that seems to have a similar "focus." How does Mystical Focus compare to Alien Skin's Bokeh release?

Jeff Butterworth has done a fantastic job with all the plug-ins at Alien Skin - they are a top notch company and we like all of their products. Our Focus has taken a creative approach to setting moods and looks and combining different filters together to generate new and exciting looks. Bokeh has taken more of a traditional approach to matching the camera lens types that a photographer can identify with.

When Bokeh was launched, the reaction from some parts of the market were "I can already do that in Photoshop." Can people make the same comment about MF?

If you take enough time you can do just about anything in Photoshop - but we have some looks that you'd be hard pressed to duplicate in Photoshop without spending tons of time. You can rapidly (in just a minute or less) combine filters and capture a look - I will stress that Mystical Focus is not a collection of Blur filters - it is MUCH, MUCH more.

What was the toughest part of this development?

Capturing the looks and making it easy to just brush-on / and go. Our customers need a FAST solution that lets them get creative right without spending a lot of time trying to get what they want. I am really anxious to see our multi-core engine come out as that will make much of our software close-to-real time and we want to do this for our customers very soon.

Who's the primary market for this package?

We see this being attractive to photographers who are both novice and looking to capture some high-end professional looks and moods as well as being attractive to the pro who values the artistry of the software and how it can help them in post-production. Even the best photographer / Photoshop artist has one commonality - saving time while providing a superior end-result / work of art to their customer.

That's it for the interview with Cliff Weens of Auto FX.

I've been working with Mystical Focus for a week and a half now, trying out the various filters.

The effect at the top of this posting was accomplished in less than a minute. It uses the Radial Focus, which has a "global effect." An Ellipse can be applied to change the effect of the blur on the image.

The filter applies with lightning speed and I have been utterly delighted with how quickly professional effects can be applied and then customized to suit the precise parameters of the project.

There are eight Focal effects simulating a really broad spectrum of results.

The really interesting options are presented under the Atmosphere Menu. Here are six outstanding options that add the kind of stuff you expect like "Grain and Noise" to stuff you never expected like Highlight Smear and a Vignetting option guaranteed to blow your socks off.

Here is a filter set that hits a home run in areas like ease of use, and application speed. The interface is intuitive and extra Auto FX touches like instant explanation of the control your cursor is resting on eases the learning curve very significantly.

It's a package designed to save you time, vast amounts of it, even as it delivers genuinely clean and easy-to-customize results.

Overall rating: 9/10

You owe it to yourself to take a hard look at Mystical Focus. It's one of the best new filter sets on the market. It's selling for $149. You can get an additional 10% off using a time limited code.

If a rich relative has died, or you are casting about for something worthwhile to "invest" that income tax refund money in, you may even want to consider the whole Mystical Suite, composed of Mystical Lighting & Ambiance 2.0, Mystical Tint Tone and Color 2.0 and Mystical Focus. This suite is marketed for $399.00 and qualifies for the 10% discount.

Auto FX makes some of the most inventive software around for graphic designers and photographers. Take a few minutes to download the demo version. And let me know what YOU think, okay?

As Weems said, the real power of this package, in addition to the speed and specialization of the effects, is in the ability to blend them. Layers can be created within Mystical Focus and then blended and combined with other effects from the Atmosphere menu OR any of the other Mystical Suite effects. As you can probably tell: I really like this whole package.

Find all the goodies at www.autofx.com

A FINAL NOTE ABOUT REVIEWS: I don't make anything for recommending or reviewing the software on this site. I don't get a commission and you will notice there are NO banner ads for any of the software companies -- even the ones I like. I know times are tight for a lot of us in the design/photography field and it's important that you be able to trust someone to tell you what they REALLY think.

For Those About To Rock...

2010-04-24T08:00:00.000-06:00

Sheree and I got up at 4:00 IN THE MORNING.

She wanted to capture a sunrise. I, on the other hand, longed to point out that sunrises happen pretty much every day and that I saw no reason to drag my lazy butt out of a warm comfortable bed for this particular one.

The conclusion, to no one’s surprise was never in doubt. My lazy butt was in the shower and then we were in the car with Sheree chirping on about how GREAT it was going to be to watch the sun come up and how we were going to find the PERFECT place to photograph it from. Her optimism grated on my jagged disposition.

I tried not to sigh too loud, sipping coffee and praying that God would just take me now.

The morning eventually took us to a field of flowers (big surprise) and so there I stood feeling foul(er), glaring at the flowers and their fricking happy colors and apparent inability to understand that sometimes the day just sucks.

Then I saw this little flower in a direct beam of light.

“Hey…over here you floral Luddite,” it whispered.

I ignored it because it is patently obvious to any thinking being that flowers can’t talk.

“Pssssst,” it hissed.

I chanced a glance that way and saw it gently moving in the breeze in a decidedly “come hither” fashion.

I snorted.

“C’mon,” it whispered. “Admit it. I’m pretty. You KNOW I am.”

I snorted. Again.

“Look. It’ll be just between the two of us,” the persuasive petals posited. “You can tell people you ripped me out of the ground after you took my picture. It’s okay. I won’t tell.”

I felt myself wavering. But my testosterone kicked in and, as I considered actually WANTING to take a picture of a fricking flower, my resolve hardened.

“Hey, Daaaaaviiiiddd….take my picture. You know all the other photographers are doing it. C’mon. How can one little picture hurt? Just so you’ll know what it’s like.”

“I’ve taken pictures of flowers before,” I said in my best make-my-day-you-punk-flower growl. “I just never liked it much.”

I raised my camera and took a picture of a stoooopid bench. The picture sucked, but at least it wasn’t a fricking flower.

I concentrated all my attention on trying to turn the image of the bench into something decent. Time passed pleasantly.

Then I heard a soft floral sob from somewhere behind me.

I looked around. Sheree was happily and unselfconsciously intent on photographing a fricking flower some distance away. I peeked back at the yellow flower…and something that looked like dew ran a tragic wet course down its petals. The sound of inconsolable floral grief.

“Knock it off,” I hissed. “I refuse to surrender to a flower.”

It said nothing, simply turning a fraction of an angle toward the sun, which only served to highlight the wetness now running freely down its petals.

I took another shot of the bench. Stoooopid bench.

I turned and looked and saw the yellow flower shining bright in a perfect ray of light.

The flower caught me looking and instantly stopped sobbing. It looked as hopeful as a little flower can look.

“Take my picture,” it pleaded.

I didn’t say anything.

“C’mon. Take my picture. Why not? I’m pretty. Pretty is what I am all about. It’s what I’m for. So why not take a picture? C’mooooon.”

I looked around me. No one anywhere near. No one to see.

“In a few weeks I am going to be all crusty and dried up. Now…I’m beautiful. Take my picture, okay? Justonelittlepictureandyoudon’tevenhavetoenjoyit.”

I crept over and raised my camera. The flower perked right up, smoothing its petals and turning its most flattering angle toward me.

I raised the camera. My hand was shaking. I took the picture.

I think it smiled at me as I took the shot.

Maybe.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMUgmU_Hsjc

Non Conformists Are Often Nuts

2010-04-23T08:00:00.000-06:00

“You go ask,” says Sheree. “I’m shooting pictures.”

I look blankly at her. This is not what I had in mind at all.

“You’re the people person,” I remind her. “And you’re naturally cute. YOU should ask.”

“You’re the husband,” she says. “Go.”

My mental referee calls it “Game, Set and Match.” Sheree has played the Husband Card, which actually counts for double, since today is our anniversary.

We are in an auto wrecking yard near Lamont, Alberta. There is a fence with no nonsense barbed wire. It is festooned with “NO TRESSPASSING” signs. The only thing missing from the picture is a hillbilly in an ancient rocking chair with a shotgun across his lap and an inbred dog with yellow teeth, bloodshot eyes and a nasty disposition lying in a puddle of its own drool.

Sheree has decided we are going to shoot here. Geez.

It’s an amazing place. There are over four thousand cars waiting to be chopped and crushed. I am remembering how often movies link gangsters to wrecking yards, and I am thinking about a scene where a would-be informant was crushed alive in his own car as I cross the dusty yard.

The sun is warm on my skin. I love the sun, I think. I am going to miss it after I am dead, trapped in a cube of crushed metal. I sigh.

I open the office door, and peer into the way too dim interior.

“How you doing?” booms a friendly voice from behind the counter. I cross the room and see a blonde guy with a biker’s nap on his head. He’s standing there like he’s been waiting for me and he’s grinning. At me. Maybe I’m not going to die after all…

“Beautiful day,” I observe shrewdly. I am, of course, procrastinating. I am trying to come up with an excuse for why an apparently brain dead photographer ignores all the “NO TRESSPASSING” signs and is standing in an office in the middle of rural Alberta (where a person could, like just disappear…) about to ask if he can take pictures.

“Yup,” the biker guy booms. Again. “You a photographer, huh?”

I nod, not trusting my voice.

“You want to take pictures, huh?”

I nod again. After all – it’s been working for me so far.

“Go ahead,” he says. “We used to get a lot of photographers out here.”

I decide not to ask where the bodies are buried, since he doesn’t seem to be the body burying type. Instead, I thank him and head back out into the sunlight. Sweet sunlight.

Sheree is engrossed in photographing a broken down tractor.

“So?” she asks.

“Well…it took some persuading,” I say shaking my head wearily. I am the Returning Hero. “But I talked them into it.”

She nods, like she expected no less and turns her attention back to the tragic looking tractor she is shooting. I consider telling her the truth about the biker guy and the fact that they are really friendly after all.

…nah.

So we spent two plus hours of our anniversary together shooting. She goes her way and I go mine and we meet up every once in a while. This seems to fit us way better than a dinner out or a houseful of friends.

I came across these lug nuts on the rusted seat of a tractor. Seizing the opportunity to turn my art to a communication of yet another cosmic truth, I shot this image.

So here it is.

Tuh dum.

Sweet Dreams

2010-04-22T16:41:00.000-06:00

I spent most of my childhood crawling deep into books. The deeper the better.

We moved frequently. Being the New Kid at school, in a class full of other kids who had grown up together, was a thing I expected to endure each September.

Eventually, I figured out I had no more control over whether or not we moved, than I had over whether the Russians bombed the shit out of me. (It was, after all, the sixties…) But one day I realized that I could always choose the things that occupied my mind.

I started light with Dick and Jane – and that wonderfully antiseptic world they lived in where Father always wore a suit and Mother even wore a frilly dress to fix supper. The kids all got along and Spot was a cool dog. Even Sally was mostly okay…vacuous as hell…but mostly okay.

Then I moved over to the Hardy Boys (and Nancy Drew when no one was watching since they were basically the same kind of story…although one was ostensibly for girls). After that I main-lined Doc Savage and Tarzan, Sam Spade and Miss Marple. I ate up AA Merit and Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson. My heroes weren’t actors or athletes. They were Heinlein and Asimov, King and Matheson. On my more shadowy days I read Edgar Allan Poe and the Dark Shadows series. I totally bought into all of it.

Why am I telling you this?

Because remembering my childhood is a little like photographing old cars. They awaken the same sense of longing I used to feel reading fiction. I have this powerful sense that nothing bad could possibly happen in these beauties.

In the world these cars came from Father would always have time to play catch and Mother would bake endless cookies and the house would look like a photographer from Good Housekeeping was expected at any moment. Sally could always be counted on to say something cute. And Spot would never EVER pee on the floor.

There’s something majestic about these regal vehicles, something utterly surreal. They carry in the very fabric of their metal, something wonderful. Simply sitting a car like that would be like breathing magic, right?

In my mind’s eye I can see the whole family cruising down the highway listening to the radio and singing along with Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby. These cars were designed to go out on frosty Christmas Eves and return home with the perfect tree tied to the roof as the snow gently falls and everyone inside is smiling.

They are tough little time travellers because they are survivors, rolling gently into our world from a time when making something beautiful was more important than gas mileage, when designers put fins on their cars because they added elegance and, let’s face it, just looked really cool.

This car was magical to me. I could smell sweet dreams all over it. This image is about trying to infuse that sense of wonder and longing in a picture.

Mystical Lighting and Ambiance 2.0

2010-04-19T02:25:00.009-06:00

Doing a review of Auto FX releases is sort of like trying to count chickens. You think you're done -- but you inevitably see something new. The reason? There are simply too many things to look at and evaluate if you're going to do a thorough job.

Regular readers of this blog (and who isn't...?) know that Mystical Lighting 1.0 is one of my absolute favorite utilities. Often a simple nudge from one of the utilities in Mystical Lighting can be used to make any image really pop.

So I was delighted to get the latest "Mystical Lighting & Ambiance 2.0" just before I left for Florida. It gave me an opportunity to really play around (oops...I mean "Make a meaningful examination of...") this filter set.

It's split into three broad categories.

LIGHTING
This is where 1.0 really shone. (Pun intended.)It's where 2.0 shines as well. There are a number of outstanding "easy to use" lighting effects. In 2.0 you can brighten highlights, infuse the image with wonderful warm sunlight -- a total of 14 different effects are here.

Admittedly, some will be very specific in their applications -- but I think most graphic artists and photographers will find really useful options here. Effects can be subtle or "in your face" splashes of color and light.

I very much like what has been done with my favorite from 1.0: radial light caster. Very simple to use -- and much more easily customizable in 2.0. "Light in the Dark" and "Mood Lighting" are both excellent utilities. They are not as easy to use as other filters in the set. But you'll be wise to spend a few minutes learning them.

SHADING
Here's where the real treasures lie in 2.0. You can create vast mood and atmosphere with the careful application of what's waiting inside this category. Try Black Shade for instant jaw dropping atmosphere...or try Shadow Play to take your images to whole new levels. There are 5 very good shading options here.

AMBIANCE
Here's where I found myself really looking forward to seeing the new stuff. There are eight options here. Add Ethereal lighting...or paint with rainbows and mist. I found it fairly similar to 1.0 in many respects -- although it's a package geared to allow for easier, faster customization of effect.

Some software manufactures issue upgrades with cosmetic changes, but very little little that is actually NEW. Mystical Lighting and Ambiance 2.0 isn't one of those. A lot of thought went into each filter, and how best to create practical applications. Overall, it's a good upgrade. If you haven't had this filter set in your arsenal at all -- you really need to give it your attention.

If you're considering upgrading from 1.0, let me suggest that you download the demo from Auto FX and look it over. There's some great new stuff here which, to my mind, easily justifies the upgrade price. (There are some time sensitive discounts available as well. Check out the interview with Cliff Weems just below.)

Did Mystical Lighting and Ambiance blow me away? Not exactly. But in all fairness, my expectations were so high, and my use of 1.0 so common, I don't know what Auto FX could have done to send me into the "Blown away" zone -- as they did with their outstanding upgrade to Mystical Tint Tone and Color.

As with all filter sets from Auto FX, you really need to sit down and take a hard look at each option, spending a little time on learning how to use it properly. It's an excellent investment of time.

In summary: great creative options here. You can build fabulous atmosphere into your images with just a few keystrokes. Smart designers will really make a study of the many options built into this upgrade to learn how to use them most effectively.

Overall rating: 8.5/10

Auto FX Releases a New Mystical Lighting Package

2010-04-17T18:32:00.005-06:00

Here's Mary Poppins. Okay. She's an actress in the role of Mary Poppins at Disney's Magical Kingdom. I used ONLY filters from Auto FX in the processing of this image. Specifics on this later in the week.

I've been in Florida for nearly a week poking around. Just before I left, I had the opportunity to download the latest Mystical Lighting & Ambiance package from Auto FX.

It's a package I've been looking forward to for months. You'll recall that Auto FX launched the blockbuster upgrade to the lackluster Mystical Tint Tone and Color 1.0 and blew me away.

I've been working with a hands-on copy of ML&A for a week now. My review of the package will be published next week. But in the meanwhile, I had an opportunity to chat with Cliff Weens of Auto FX about their package. Here it is:

1) What are you MOST proud of in Mystical Lighting 2.0?

The photo-realistic, natural way in which our light rendering engine capture the essence of real-life streaming light.

2) What are the three most significant differences between 1.0 and 2.0 in your view?

Number one would have to be the interface with features like the Brush Palette and new brush shapes. Number two would be the new atmospheric effects and the addition of over a dozen new filters in the suite. Number three would have to be the way it is integrated into the Mystical Suite allowing you to combine Mystical Lighting and Ambiance 2.0 with 80 other filters from the Mystical Focus and Mystical Tint Tone and Color suites. This gives the new version of Lighting a vast amount of power as you can add Focal effects and Color and Tonal effects to set the scene up for a photo-realism that is really beautiful to see.

3) Was "ease of use" a key consideration in your development of 2.0?

Absolutely - we wanted to proceed the first version which was released 7 years ago with something worthy of an upgrade ... we wanted to make it as easy as humanly possible so we worked really hard to improve the look and feel of the interface.

3a) Are there significant changes to the user interface?

One of the features we really liked in this release was the larger Before / After presets that let the user select from our instant presets or save their own and see the original then the effect version of the preset. It makes storing the instant presets so much nicer.

4) Has processing speed been enhanced?

By around 30%. We do have a multi-core version releasing this summer that is a free update - it has an extremely fast performance ratio and will improve speeds up to 5x faster on just about every effect and on some it will be close to real-time.

5) You've added "Ambiance" to the title. What are the key package differences that led to this?

When you see how Mystical Lighting can set the mood for the scene you immediately see where the Ambiance idea comes from - the new atmospherics are also a part of this name addition.

6) Which of the filter options do you use most often?

I am a huge fan of Light in the Dark and the Rainy Light / Haze filters as they add lots of drama to a scene.

7) What were the big challenges in developing the new package?

We spent lots of time with studying what we had already done and how it was being used - this meant seeing photographers like Lisa Jane (http://www.lisajane.com/) were using our solutions in their workflow.

8) What's BRAND NEW in Mystical Lighting 2.0?

We added twice as many effect filters. The new Snowy Light / Rainy Light let you stream lighting and rain / snow across your scene so you can really create some amazing looks.

9) Where do you see the primary applications for the filter sets?

Setting the tone and mood for a photo in a post-production environment. Many times studio photographers don't want to setup a fog machine and try to fight with creating real haze in the studio. Or when on an outdoor shoot they can't always control the lighting ... Mystical Lighting and Ambiance gives the photographer the ability to control this aspect of their work in a digital suite of filters.

10) Can upgrades be made on-line?

Sure can ... we have the upgrade priced at $129 and it is downloadable as well as available in a physical copy too.

11) Any purchase discounts available?

Sure are - between now and July 30, 2010 users can upgrade or purchase a new copy with a 10% discount if they use coupon code: P24568

12) What's next for Auto FX?

We're working heavily on the 64 bit Mac version right now (out in a couple of weeks) as well as making sure support for CS5 is rock-solid. We also have a team working on multi-processor support with a new rendering engine that is very fast. So the biggest work we have are the optimizations we're applying across our portfolio of over 150 filters.

That's the interview. The review comes next week, and will probably be composed on a plane in the middle of the night.

Auto FX has also released an interesting little "Mystical Focus" package. We'll have information on that next week as well.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #20

2010-04-06T16:11:00.005-06:00

All detective movies finish in a drawing room. This is where the detective has assembled all the suspects, witnesses and assorted sidekicks into one room. A hush falls over the crowd as he starts to speak and untangle the twisted web of the mystery.

The conclusion of this story takes place in a tiny car…one I suspect Europeans did not design with humans in mind. I was in the back seat with my knees braced to my chest, trying not to look like an accordion…or sound like one for that matter.

“You’re Greta?” I asked, a little wheezy from the lack of oxygen.

Jennifer nodded.

“I’m the voice you heard on the phone. Yes. I needed to bring you into the case,” she said.

I smiled my most world-weary smile. “Because I was the first detective you saw?”

She shook her head. “No. I just said that because I wanted you to stop calling me ‘Toots.’ You have a special quality to you. Something we needed.”

“Oh?”

Pretty much every overweight Dungeons and Dragons player has a genetic predisposition to getting suspicious when a pretty girl tells them they’re ‘special.’ Comments like that are usually followed by ‘So do you want a date?’”

But she was nodding, looking me directly in the eyes. I noticed her eyes, one blue and the other green, were large and round and so very sincere. There was a little dimple that moved at the lower corner of her mouth when she spoke that made me very glad my knees were pressed against my chest.

“When I was looking for help, I simply passed my hand over the phone book and my finger came down on your name.”

I settled back. “I get it. Sure. Coincidence.”

She shook her head emphatically. “No. Guidance. Destiny. You were supposed to be here. Without you, we could never have recovered the coin.”

Gerald was nodding.

“He already had the coin,” I pointed out.

She was nodding too. “Yes. You were chosen to help. Without you, he would never have made it out alive….plus you found the secret door no one else could find. Something happened in there…in the chapel, right?”

I remembered the strange sense of following the music to the keystone. I nodded.

“How did Gerald get in?” I asked.

She laughed. So did Gerald – which was not a pleasant sound.

“He was captured at the end of our fight. We knew we were losing. He surrendered, hopefully to be taken into their lair and very hopefully get the coin. Which he did. But he had no way to get out. Until you came along to unlock the door.

“We agreed beforehand that if the battle should appear lost, for me to meet him here. And I have been here every day since. Waiting.”

She finished with a smile, a flash of white teeth and something that almost approached shyness.

“So you followed me, and pretended to be Greta, because you didn’t think I could get the job done,” I said.

She thought about it and then nodded. “Well…would you have trusted you?”

Finally I nodded back, smiling.

“Do you know what happened to me in the chapel?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. But I know it was destined to happen.”

I told her about the vision (okay…I felt a little silly using the word ‘vision’ but there was no other way to describe it) of the man of fire.

She exchanged a sharp look with Gerald. Their eyes were talking to each other. In the end she shook her head.

“Strong suspicions. Nothing’s certain.” She stopped talking and looked me square in the eyes. “The driver, this McGee person, was sent by them. The Stokers must have intercepted our message to you.”

“He would have killed you and taken the coin,” said Gerald.

I gulped, which was difficult because my mouth was suddenly very dry. I turned and looked at Jennifer for a long moment and she looked back at me. We both knew something heavy was blowing in the breeze. Finally she spoke: “I hope you will stick around long enough so we can figure it out…together.”

I half laughed, half snorted. “You want me to?”

Her face was suddenly serious. She nodded. “Stay with us. Work with us. Become a Keeper.”

My jaw dropped and my heart was already setting up all the many reasons we should tell her to forget the whole thing.

“You want me to hunt vampires? With you?”

She nodded. “With us.”

I thought about it. My life flashed before my eyes. I thought about returning to an empty office, friendless and client challenged. I though about what an eternity of thinking about her and wondering how things WOULD have been with her. The decision was made.

“Jennifer,” I growled. “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“We’ll always have Glasgow,” said Gerald, laughing and it didn’t so bad this time.

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” said Jennifer.

We all were laughing .I knew I was with my people. The fact that we hunt vampires for a living? That’s just a bonus.

***************************************

So that’s it for Mr. Diamond for the moment. Thank you all for your kind attention, your comments and your patience with someone who insisted on writing a story on a photography blog.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #19

2010-04-06T16:06:00.004-06:00

A pair of students were wolfing down a meal as we staggered out of the chapel into the fading sunlight. It looked strange to see something so normal only feet away from where we had just come from. Had it been only a few minutes ago we’d been fleeing some clawed creature in the dark?

“I have a ride,” I told Gerald. “Greta sent him.”

He stopped and looked at me, suspicion painted stark on his sharp features. “Greta did?”

I nodded. “She sent him to pick me up at the ship.”

“How do you know?”

“When I got off the ship, he was there with my name on a placard.”

“And?”

I was offended. I was sore and my ankle was bleeding profusely from where the minion had clawed at it.

“And what?” I demanded, dismayed to hear the slight whine in my voice.

“Greta didn’t send him,” Gerald said.

“Yes she did,” I insisted. But the look in his eyes and the sense of my heart were sinking the declaration.

We’d been walking. More precisely, Gerald had been walking and I had been limping. We rounded the corner and before us was one of those tiny cars the Europeans favor. Leaning against it was Jennifer.

She watched us approach with interest. As she recognized me, her eyes widened and she rushed forward, nearly knocking me down as she threw her arms around me.

“Sam!” she said. I don’t think my name has ever sounded better.

“Jennifer,” I responded, since that seemed the appropriate thing to say.

Gerald was standing, arms folded, a crooked smile on his lips. He gestured toward Jennifer.

“Mr. Diamond, allow me to present….Greta.”

Danger is Not My Middle Name #18

2010-04-06T16:05:00.004-06:00

We flew up the stairs, Gerald and I. Sometimes we fell and sometimes we collided. But somehow we neared the doorway.

I could hear the beast breathing now. We had rushed. But it had moved with furious feral speed, as though it could taste our blood already. The doorway was three feet away and I allowed myself to hope.

My mind left me at that second, the same way it had when the music guided me to this place. I saw something…the flash of something happening…somewhere. A man of fire becoming something else…and so very calm about it all. There was lighting…and a planet…and…

The vision slipped away into a fog of pain as something closed on my ankle. I felt the pressure on bone and the pinpoints of claws digging deep into my skin.

My moan and the beast’s howl of triumph came at the same time. Gerald paused, framed in the light of the doorway. I and the creature of the shadows were far behind him. He was frozen.

The creature tugged at me and my fingernails scrabbled frantically for a hold on smooth stone. Gerald looked at me a moment longer, then produced a blade of glistening steel. With one smooth motion, he leapt down and drove the blade forward in a smooth glittering arc.

If you’ve ever cut into a watermelon with a cleaver, you would recognize the sound. It was a meaty thunk, followed immediately by a cry of rage blended with the sharp surprise of pain. Abruptly the pressure on my leg stopped and I kicked hard, eager to be rid of the thing.

I staggered to my feet and Gerald threw one arm around my shoulder and manhandled me through the doorway. He let me go as we moved into the determined peace of the chapel. I fell hard to the ground. He spun and drove the point of his blade hard against a stone and the doorway closed.

Perhaps a second later there came the sound of something powerful slamming into the rock. I listened carefully, thinking that I could hear the howls of blood rage from the other side…but maybe not.

“What was that thing?” I asked.

“Minion,” Gerald said, luxuriating for a moment, leaning against the stone doorway.

“A what?” I asked.

“Minion. One of the Stoker’s guardians.”

“Holy crap,” I said. I inwardly noted I had been saying “holy crap” a lot lately and resolved to say something else in the future like ‘Holy Smokes’ or ‘holy….well…something else.’

The assault on the stone door was getting louder as though the thing expected it could claw through stone to get to us.

“It will stop in a minute,” Gerald said. “It’s job is to guard…and ensure we don’t come back.”

It stopped.

Gerald closed his eyes. He was the picture of an exhausted man. I noticed bags heavy under his eyes and for a moment his entire body seemed to sag.

“We need to go see Jennifer,” he said finally. “We have a lot to tell you.”
Comments

Danger is Not My Middle Name #17

2010-04-06T16:02:00.002-06:00

Hands pulling at me.

Painful corners digging into my bones. Slow progress and the steady sound of “Thump Thump” that oddly enough was tied to the equally regular motion my head made as it jounced up and down. And then the dawning realization that it WAS my head, thumping over stairs.

Next came the sound of labored breathing.

I opened my eyes and saw a man’s face. Oddly familiar. I had seen it somewhere before. A racing magazine? Nah.

“You’re awake,” he whispered.

“Unnnghhh,” I responded.

“You fainted,” he said softly.

A surf of indignant sensation washed away the cobwebs.

“I did not,” I insisted.

A rough hand pressed to my mouth and suddenly his face was close to mine. Too close.

“Shhhhh,” he hissed. “You want to get both of us killed?”

Since it sounded like a rhetorical question I didn’t respond.

I looked closely into his face. Both heart and male orbs went into immediate panic mode as realization dawned. I was looking into the face of Gerald – Fitzroy! He was the man I had initially been hired to follow. He’d last been seen about to do mortal battle with the undead Stokers underneath the Unfinished Church in Bermuda. My partner, Jennifer had gone down to help him while I fled…oops…while I made a strategic retreat. Neither of them had been seen again.

I did my best to form a fist and drive it into his jaw. My body wasn’t quite ready to take orders yet, so instead of smacking him, my pinky finger embedded itself in his right nostril.

He looked understandably confused for a moment and then swatted my hand away.

“You’re an idiot,” he said.

“And you’re dead,” I responded.

“No I’m not,” he hissed, shaking me by the lapels for emphasis.

“You went to fight an army of the undead in Bermuda,” I said. “You’re toast. History.”

He shook me again. I was getting a little tired of this.

“We escaped,” he said.

“We?”

My heart skipped a beat. Could Jennifer be alive?

He nodded curtly. “Jennifer is in the car. Waiting for this.”

He produced a small coin from his pocket. It was covered in ornate carvings. One side was gold and the other silver. I could feel power radiating from it.

My jaw dropped.

“And I have been waiting for you. You took long enough, by the way. We need to get out of here,” Fitzroy/Gerald/Whatever his name really was hissed. “Before they realize it’s gone.”

As if on cue there came a high keening wail from somewhere below us. It was inhuman and as it pitched up and down the scale, the emotion it carried moved from grief to fury.

Gerald looked at me, eyes wide with what could only be described as terror and scrambled up the stairs.

Heart pounding, I followed.

Then I heard the sound of claws scratching on stone. The keening wail had become a growl of animal fury. It, whatever it was, was coming up the stairs directly for us, coming fast, panting with the naked desire to rip…to rend…to tear. The doorway loomed in the distance…impossibly small and simply too far away.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #16

2010-04-06T15:54:00.011-06:00

We may be taking a little break in the story over the next few days to bring you up to date on some VCD (Very Cool Developments).

As you may or may not know, Auto FX has just released the latest update to Mystical Lighting. It's available now at www.autofx.com. On the face of it,it appears to be a radical departure from the classic Mystical Lighting 1.0. I'll be taking a hard look at the demo over the weekend.

Good or bad remains to be seen. I use Mystical Lighting 1.0 frequently -- so do a lot of you. It'll be interesting to see if 2.0 is as vast an improvement on 1.0 as Mystical Tint Tone and Color 2.0 was on the "mostly useless" MTTC 1.0. MTTC 2.0 blew us away. Hopefully Mystical Lighting 2.0 will have the same effect. Time will tell.

I'm trying to line up an interview with Cliff Weems, from Auto FX about his latest creation and posting the interview here.

2010 promises a bumper crop of Photoshop releases. We're all looking forward to seeing what Adobe's going to do with the new CS5. Alien Skin is working on a new Bokeh update, which yours truly will be helping them with. We'll keep you posted.

Look for that interview...and a the last three episodes of STOKERS later in the week.

Now: Back to Mr. Diamond:

********************************************************************************

The darkness closed around me like an accountant’s fist and even when the door should have been just a few feet away from me – it loomed what appeared to be miles above.

Pungent scent filled my nostrils and made my eyes water. This didn’t matter a whole lot, I decided, because I could barely see anyway. Bogie would have had a flashlight or simply happened across a richly guttering torch. But this wasn’t a movie and there was nothing. As I moved forward I knew that a single misstep would send me tumbling down these stairs and who knew how far I would fall? Maybe forever. Maybe longer.

“Are you out of your freaking mind?” my heart snapped. “Do you realize what you are doing here? What you are risking here? You are like, going to get us killed, you freaking dumbass moron.”

“What else were we supposed to do?” my brain asked my heart coldly. “We have to know what’s down here.”

“We do?” asked my heart, dripping sarcasm. “Why is THAT?”

“Because we have to know,” explained my brain patiently. “We must experience...”

“Dork,” my heart hissed.

“Chicken,” my brain hissed back.

“Moron,” the heart cried – a little louder this time. “We’re in a black pit working our way deeper into darkness, blockhead.”

“You want us to stay where it’s safe and NEVER know what’s down here?” my brain responded, and then began casting about for an appropriate invective. “Mr. Poopypants.”

“That’s the best you can do?” began my heart.

“We think we should do whatever is safest,” chimed in my male orbs softly, speaking in unison.

It went on like that for a long time. My body parts have a long history of arguing with each other.

I continued down into the darkness, my hand carefully tracing a path along the wall. The light was closer now. I could see it moving on the wall with the oddly flickering dance that a fire throws.

It was then that I heard the first sound. It was a leathery step. Think of the sound two pieces of paper make when you rub them together.

“That’s it. We are like TOTALLY screwed,” my heart moaned.

My mind came to complete attention and began studying the darkness in front of me.

The sound came again. Closer. Coming our way. Definitely.

Very quietly, my male orbs went back into hiding while my heart gibbered incoherently and the figure on the stairs grew closer.

My heart pounded in my ears….and for a second I thought I was going to faint. For a second I stood peering into the face of the Abyss…alive with color and stars and things that moved with impossible speed.

Then the darkness took me and I knew nothing at all.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #15

2010-04-06T15:52:00.003-06:00

I admit it. The red hand scared the snot out of me. I had visions that there was a demon from the seventh level of hell reaching out to drag me into the flames. Okay…so my imagination got away from me…again.

But something happened at that precise moment. First, the hand vanished in a puff of blackened smoke. But it had been pointing at something. I turned to look and immediately I was swept into a river of uncanny perception. I was taken by the sensation of drifting above myself and in that moment I was completely aware of everything. I knew there was an insect scuttling along the floor, I knew the young man in the corner of the chapel who was playing those fabulous praise choruses was chiding himself for not peeing before his shift started. And I knew that there was a secret passageway somewhere in front of me.

Don’t ask me how I knew. I just did.

It looked to me as though the piano music were something I could see moving in an oddly colored line through the air before me and my eyes (even though they weren’t my eyes…exactly) followed it to a nondescript stone directly below a statue of a worshipping angel. The line forming in the air seemed to make the objects along its trajectory shift like looking down a black highway on a sweltering summer day,

The stone at the end of this etherial line glowed with a sickly yellow light.

I walked across the mostly deserted chapel and pressed my hand to the stone.

Nothing.

I moved it gently from the right to the left.

Nothing.

I rapped against it sharply with my fingers.

Nada.

Finally I raised both hands (and no, I could never tell you why I chose to do this, I just did) and pressed each index finger into an opposite corner of the stone.

There was a growling, grating sound and a three foot section of wall slid open.

I stood there, examining the tips of my fingers for a moment. Then I peered into the small opening at a circular staircase, moving downward into the darkness. No. Not darkness. Somewhere ahead was a flickering light…like a torch.

Whenever I watch horror movies, I am continually amazed by dumbass people who go down into dark places where there are more than likely slavering monsters waiting for them. How dumb can you be? I’d wonder aloud.

My heart was pounding. I could feel it pulse in my ear like a high pressure water hose on a firetruck. I’d already made my decision.

Placing my hand against the wall, I ducked into the opening and made my way into the darkness.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #14

2010-04-06T15:43:00.001-06:00

If you are one of the three or four people following my Photostream, you know about this story.

My initial idea was to do a detective serial, where the detecive would be in the same trip Sheree and I just got back from. The concept was that I would write the story day by day. As we went to a port or spent the day on the ship, so would he.

We got too busy and I ran out of steam. (You can go ALL the way back to #1 here if you want to start from the beginning.) But Mr. Diamond has been bugging me, reminding me I stranded him in Scotland.

This Red Hand isn't in Trinity Chapel. It's actually part of a statue in a fountain out front of the spa on the Grand Princess cruiseliner.

So I'm going to work on the story a little more. Here's number 14:

*****************************************
“So have you been a dick long?” asked McGee.

I didn’t like the way he said “dick.” I’d taken to this guy like a mongoose takes to a snake. Something about him was like biting on tin foil.

“Long enough,” I growled, thinking of Bogart in To Have and to Have Not.

“My orders are to take you to Glasgow University Chapel. I am to wait for you for a full two hours and then return you to your ship…and to take a package, which you will give me, to the courier.”

I nodded as though I had some idea what he was talking about.

“You have no idea what I am talking about, do you?” he said, working snide into the comment like Julia Child works warble into her voice.

“Of course I do,” I said.

“You know what package my…employer…expects?”

“Uh huh,” I said, pretending to be fascinated with something going on outside.

“I don’t believe you, Mr. Diamond,” he said finally. “I have no idea why she chose you.”

He made the word “you” sound like the word you’d use for something stuck to the bottom of your shoe after you’ve been tap dancing in a cow pasture.

I shrugged with carefully cultivated indifference.

The rest of the ride was silent and I watched the old streets of Glasgow slide by. Strange city, I thought. So much old and so much new, existing right alongside each other as through they belonged there.

Gradually “old” seemed to be replacing new. Business people rushing purposefully down the street gave way to young people toting books and book bags and, using my keen sense of detection, I realized we were nearing the University…and the chapel.

McGee pulled over and kept his eyes fixed ahead, like looking at me might just make him sick.

“Are we there?” I asked.

“You’re the detective,” he said dryly.

I got out of the car and from somewhere off to my left I heard the sound of classical piano music playing something that sounded old and vaguely hymn-like.

I decided to follow the sound. As I closed the door, McGee put his hand resolutely out to prevent me.

“That package, Mr. Diamond. You will not forget the package.” He paused and looked at me evenly. His eyes glittered. I’m not making that up. His eyes positively glittered. “It would be very, very bad if I see you again and you don’t have a package for me.”

Then he smiled with his lips, but his eyes made me think of a shark or a vulture. They didn’t smile.

I gave him my best “I’m a detective and you’re not” two fingered salute and walked away. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, what I was supposed to get…or how exactly I was going to get it.

The Glasgow University Chapel loomed ahead.

I walked in – and that’s when I saw the creepy red hand reaching for me out of the wall.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #13

2010-04-06T15:38:00.002-06:00

The six days at sea between Bermuda and Glasgow passed uneventfully. I learned three things. First: never EVER adjust the water temperature while you are still in the shower. Second: when on a cruise eat ONLY cooked or frozen foods. (These treatments kill all the calories.) Third: we are not alone. There have been three murders as we cross the Atlantic.

In all three cases, the corpses weren’t discovered for at least two days, since most old people look corpse-like when they are sleeping and there are a LOT of old people on this ship.

The medical officer, a man with suspiciously large ears, believes they all died of natural causes. I was half-hoping for a burial at sea in shark infested waters – but apparently they send the bodies home.

I drifted by the medical office on the fourth floor and casually brought up the topic of the deaths.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked coldly.

I laughed in my most disarming manner. “Curious. Call it curious.”

“None of your business,” he said finally.

“Okay,” I said. I was thinking with lightning speed now. “I am a travel writer. Yeah. That’s it. I’m a travel writer. I am working on a series about why people should avoid cruising because contagious diseases can spread like wildfire, killing all the old people first. I’m calling the series ‘Death Ships of the Princess Fleet.’”

Have you ever seen ALL the color fade from someone’s face? It goes from a healthy pink to a pasty looking white. So when I say that the ‘doctor visibly blanched’ you know what I mean.

He looked at me for a moment and I tried to keep my eyes off those enormous ears. Since he is probably sensitive about it, I avoided all discussions having to do with Dumbo or Prince Charles. That’s why I’m a pro.

Finally he shrugged. “Well, I suppose there’s no reason for you not to know. Their hearts all stopped. But they were old and that is to be expected. Why aren’t you writing this down?”

I tapped at my temple. “I memorize everything as soon as I hear it. It’s a gift. Were there any marks on the bodies?”

“They were old. There were lots of marks.”

“Any…ummm…marks like the ones on that guy who died in the deck chair a while ago?”

The doctor looked away and got intensely interested in a file on his desk.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about Mr….?”

“Smith,” I said. “I am John Smith. Travel writer.”

“Your cruise card says you are “Sam D. Diamond.”

“Pen name,” I responded with a sly wink.

He paused a moment longer, as though deciding whether or not to make a big deal out of this. In the end he just shrugged again.

“If there’s nothing else, Mr. Diamond, I have a lot of paperwork to do.”

“It’s Smith.”

“Of course it is.”

“So no marks?” I said. I was a terrier. A BULL terrier, never letting go.

“Nope. No marks.”

I tipped the brim of an imaginary hat to him. The door slammed almost instantly behind me.

We arrived in Scotland on a foggy morning. I’d taken an internet plan out that had cost me HUGE dollars…sixty cents a MINUTE! Who in their right mind would blow that kind of cash on the Internet? You’d have to be cracked or loaded to spend that kind of dough.

But I used my time at thirty seconds per session, to research the location of the chapel at Glasgow University. I had a vague idea of where I was going.

I was among the first to get off the ship, having used my elbows on several old people in walkers.

I stepped off the ship and saw a terrier thin man in a badly wrinkled suit standing before a tiny car with the words McGee Realty stenciled on the window. He held a clipboard with the name “DIAMOND” scrawled on it. He was looking hopefully at each person with a slight head bob and waggling eyebrows as he asked his silent question.

“I’m Diamond,” I said.

He looked me up and down, moustache twitching like a whiskered rodent.

“Really?”

I held up my cruise card, which he scrutinized.

“We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Diamond. I understand you need to see some angels?”

“Who are ‘we?’”

He smiled, showing really bad teeth. “All in good time, Sir. Step into the car, if you please.”

I needed to fold myself into it, since it looked like one of those cars at the circus that six hundred clowns get out of. But in a few minutes we were off to Glasgow University to meet an angel.

Something NEW from AutoFX

2009-07-05T09:29:00.006-06:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program for an update.

I have been trying to figure out how for nearly a week exactly to write this. I want to tell you about the newest addition to the Auto FX stable: an update to its highly successful Mystical Tint, Tone and Color line.

I have been trying to work out where to start. Why? Because it’s daunting, that’s why.

This is a freaking HUGE program. We’re talking 60 individual filters spanning everything from a “genuine blow you out of your socks” Portrait set, to a single stroke HDR component set.

There are filters that add a perfect blending of light and atmosphere like “Afternoon Sun” to an utterly astounding…and I choose those words very deliberately because I mean STUNNING set of Smoothing filters.

So you see my quandary. Where do you start? There’s no way to cover them all here.

Let me start this way: go DIRECTLY to www.autofx.com and download the demo and play around…oops…I mean make a meaningful examination of these filters. The demo allows you to load your own photos. But you can’t save your work, which is a bit of a bummer. Many companies let you have fully functioning software for a month. I would guess that once you see what this set does you’ll have no problem buying it.

Once you start working with them – indulge yourself and go deep down the rabbit hole to start blending different effects to achieve some amazing graphics.

The image at the top was a relatively uninteresting black and white shot. This shot encompasses several filters. There’s my absolute favourite: “Afternoon Sun” blended with three other filters to achieve a wonderfully lit, perfectly shadowed image.

The great thing…I mean the REALLY great thing…about these effects is the way they work together. You can stack them, change their layer order, work with their opacity until you get the precise effect you are aiming for.

If you do Portrait work, you will be fighting to get your wallet out for the Portrait filters alone. These eight filters were designed in concert with working portrait photographers and it goes light-years beyond any other filter set available.

Enhance hair, eyes, smooth skin…even enlarge features on your subject.

This set alone more than justifies the price if you do portrait work. The time saved and the glossy pro effects will pay for the whole set within just a few uses.

As with other AutoFX software, it’s not plug and play stuff. You’ll have to take some time to sit down with the manual and learn how to use it. But we are talking time and money well invested.

Here’s an overview:

COLOR EFFECTS: There are sixteen of these designed to add new dimensions to every photo. The star of the set for me is “Afternoon Sun.” It’s a lighting effect…it’s a mood setter and it will blow you out of your socks when you apply it to a black and white photo. A sample is at the top of this column. It HAD been a relatively uninteresting black and white. Afternoon blew it into a whole ballpark.

TINTING: These are six filters that add subtle touches to your image. Used properly, they will create a professional sheen on your shots. You really have to take time to look these over and learn how to use them properly.

TONAL EFFECTS: These blow contrast magic all over your work. The star of this set is High Key Blast. This trendy treatment is being done badly all over the place. This filter makes it easy to achieve something amazing. Add a little grain and you will be astounded at the effect you can achieve in just a few keystrokes. There are eleven of these filters.

There are two filters: a Polarizing filter and a Graduated Filters.

There are four Sharpening filters.

There’s way too much to summarize in a review or ten reviews.

This is a five star offering, a blessing to working pros, artists and photographers.

It’s not cheap: the full version is $249 USD and an upgrade will run you $129 USD. But these are professional quality effects and if you’ve been kicking around Photoshop as long as I have, you know you get what you pay for.

Is it worth the price? Have a look for yourself. The demo’s free. At least you owe it to yourself to take a look at this set.

Cliff Weems of Auto FX told me they are working on an update to Mystical Lighting which, as I have said before, is one of the most useful filter sets anywhere.

We’re looking forward to seeing this one too.

So go.

Go now.

Download the demo.

Have I ever steered you guys wrong?

Danger is Not My Middle Name #12

2009-06-12T12:53:00.004-06:00

“So what does the ‘G’ stand for?” I asked.

I was sitting in a bar on the ship, the phone pressed to my ear, enjoying an overpriced scotch.

“Who is this?”

“You know who this is,” I said. “I know you know…and I know you know that I know. I think we both know exactly.”

“What?”

“What does the “G” stand for?” I demanded a little more harshly than I needed to.

“Greta,” she said.

It was the same slinky voice I’d heard in my office on Day One of this whole caper. I knew it belonged to the skirt who came in to hire me to follow Gerald. Remember her? Cool manner. Killer eyes. Legs that went all the way to her hips…
“G stands for Greta?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“Is there something wrong with ‘Greta?’” she asked, that familiar pre-pissed tone working into her voice.
“Nah, Toots,” I said.
“Don’t call me Toots,” she said. Then: “How did you get this number?”
“It was on a scrap of paper in a torn open bag under my bed.”
There was a pause during which more than the long distance connection crackled.
“Was there anything else in the bag?”
“No,” I said. It occurred to me that Bogie would probably use as few words as possible in a situation like this, to flush out information. I determined to do the same.
“Where’s Jennifer?”
“Dead. Probably.”
Another pause.
“And your subject? Fitzroy. Where is he?”
“Dead. Probably.”
“What happened?”
“Tunnel. Slimy stuff. Undead creatures. Long sword. Bad bad sounds.” I was kind of proud of that summary.
“Do you mean there was a fight? And that Jennifer and Fitzroy…died?”
“Probably.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“It’s a ‘probably,’ Toots,” I said. I was striving for the right ‘tired hero’ tone. I was thinking of Bogart in the Maltese Falcon. By a sheer act of will, I was able to keep the lazy “s” sound out of my ‘voishe.’
“You’re certain there was nothing left in the bag?”
“Yeah,” I said, working a little more gravel into my voice, since it was all working so well.
“No golden disc?”
“Gee let me think,” I said. It had been a long day spent running away from undead monsters and getting my room torn up and getting chewed out by my room steward. “Wait a minute. You mean a GOLD disc?”
Her voice was eager now. “Yes. A gold disc. Quite ornate.”
“Hmmm….” I pondered.
There was another pause.
“Well?” she prompted.
“Ummm….nope.”
She called me a name that started with the letter “a” and finished with the letter “e” and had an “sshol” in the middle. I will leave the rest to your imagination.
“You’re the only one left,” she said. “It all comes down to you, then.”
She didn’t sound very happy about it. That made two of us.
“Listen carefully,” she said.
“Alrighty.”
“Two things have been stolen. The first is a disc, gold in color. About five inches round. This is an item of legendary power. It’s critical it be recovered in the shortest time possible.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“You don’t need to know that,” she responded.
“Okay.” I said, easing into my tough guy personae as easily as I’d used to put on a cheap suit. “But I want to know. And something else, Toots, If you decide I don’t get to know, I walk.”
There was a pause and then: “In the hands of the right person, it controls the Stokers. We’re not quite sure how exactly. We need to study it. Fitzroy was bringing it to us.”
The tough guy thing was working: “Okay, sister. And the second item?”
“I’m not your sister,” she said, speaking slowly and verrrry clearly.
“Then you’re ‘Toots’ to me,” I told her.
“Sister’s fine.”
“So what was the second thing?”
A sheet of paper with instructions on how to find the companion disc. It says “Seek the worshipping stone angel in a place of learning.”
There was still another pause as I thought this over.
“I hate that,” I said. “They never say: Look at 3425 Elm Road in the brown dresser on the second floor. It has to be all this “Seek the worshipping angel crap.”
“These were written a long time ago,” Greta said. “In the mid 18th century, I should think. They needed to write cryptically so their true meaning would not be found out.”
“Uh huh,” I retorted quickly. “Where is this angel?”
“Glasgow,” she said. “In the chapel at the University of Glasgow.”
“And what am I supposed to seek there?”
“A silver disc.”
“What does it do?”
“I’d rather not tell you. If you don’t know, they can’t make you tell them.”
“Who ‘they?’”
She was silent again and I didn’t need her to draw me a picture. After a moment she said “Good luck, Sam.” Then she hung up.
“Not a problem, Toots,” I muttered into the dead phone. “I always wanted to go to university.”

Danger is Not My Middle Name #11

2009-06-03T22:49:00.002-06:00

“What the hell are you DOING?”

The voice sliced through my preoccupation with the scrap of paper like a knife. I turned and saw Marlon, our cabin steward, standing in the doorway, surveying the damage.

“Huh?”

For a moment, Marlon looked flummoxed. Then he rephrased: “What the hell are you doing, sir?”

(They teach Princess staff to be polite.)

Marlon stood there surveying the damage, quivering with dismay and the keen desire to put everything right. Immediately. I had the sense I was in the presence of a worker ant.

“There was this other worldly creature that drifted through the walls,” I explained. “It was looking for what was under the bed.”

Marlon inched closer to me. I suspected he was trying to smell my breath, which considering the stress I’d been under tonight, wasn’t a good idea.

“A creature, sir?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Drifting through the walls?”

I nodded again.

Marlon looked at me with skepticism, which was completely understandable under the circumstances.

“If you say so, sir,” he said softly. “If you give me ten minutes or so, I can clear this mess up.”

He stood there, looking at me expectantly, almost as though I hadn’t just told him a supernatural being had ransacked my stateroom.

I nodded once and left. As soon as the door closed, I heard many sounds of things being firmly put back in place along with Marlon’s soft but distinctly hostile muttering coming from within.
I went to the only place I could think of where my people resided: the Internet Lounge and collapsed into a chair, all the better to examine the note.

Across from me was the same couple I’d seen at breakfast a few days ago.

The man was sitting behind a closed laptop, eyeing his wife, who was frantically typing on the keyboard, totally ignoring him.

“I thought you said five minutes,” he said. His voice held out no hope at all that this was going to be the actual case.

“I have just a one more comment to make,” she said, without looking up or slowing her typing.”

“You said that ten minutes ago, Sheree,” he replied with a sigh. His voice was full of resignation. No anger. Just resignation. He must be married, I thought.

“Flickr’s like that,” she said. “You know that.”

He said “Uh huh.”

“And I need to buy another 1,000 minutes,” she said.

He said “Uh huh.”

He saw me looking at them and half smiled and winked. I winked back, hoping it wasn’t like some gay thing.

Then I unfolded the note.

There was a sequence of numbers and the letter “G.”

I didn’t graduate in the top 84% of the Ray Hunker Correspondance School of Detection for no reason. I knew what the numbers had to be within just a few minutes. It was the one thing overlooked by the creature. It had to be a phone number – a phone number I was supposed to protect with my life. Why?

WWBD? I asked myself. (“What Would Bogie Do?)

I went to a telephone and dialed.

When the voice on the other line said “hello” – I nearly swallowed my tongue. I knew precisely who it was.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #10

2009-06-03T22:46:00.005-06:00

My body was having a difference of opinion with itself.
Legs: “Holy crap. We gotta get out of here. Let us run, okay? Right freaking now!”
Heart: “Holy crap. We’re gonna die. But I’m up for a run if the legs are.”
Mind: “This makes no sense at all. How can a creature step out of mist? We should go have a closer look and figure this out.”
Legs and Heart: “Are you freaking cracked?”
Mind: “I fail to understand what the problem is…”
‘Male Orbs’: “I’m hiding. You guys just let me know when it’s over.”
In the end no one did anything. I stood there. I don’t think I could have moved if I’d wanted to. My feet, silent because they knew they had the ultimate say in whether we went anywhere, were rooted in one spot, like lead weights.
And the creature moved quickly. It’s feet didn’t touch the ground, although some form of legs still seemed to set it’s course. It moved quickly – but didn’t seem in a hurry. As it drew nearer, I saw that the black was not so much a body as black mist swirling around the creature.
I can’t describe it to you, other than to say it was “otherworldy.” There seemed to be an upside down “U” that kept folding in on itself – and the contents of this “U” and the area immediately outside of it were in a constant state of motion. There was something in there looking out – but I had never seen anything like it before.
My chest tensed and my lips moved soundlessly. Dimly I realized you were supposed to yell at moments like this – or show yourself to be bigger than the ghost…or vampire or…was that bears? No sound came out of me because there was no sound that would have been louder than the pulsing blood pounding in my ears.
Vaguely I was aware that the thing was holding me in place with as much effort as I would exert to keep a baby still. It had no need to hurry. It came up to me and stopped just a few inches from my face. I was aware of a breeze on my face and some dark dread dead smell.
Is this how I go out? I wondered. Is this how I would slide into the Big Sleep? Is this how I would be sucked right off the mortal coil?
The creature paused for a moment and I knew I was again being studied by something much more powerful than myself. Then it drifted past me and through the wall.
How did I know it was making for my stateroom? I just did.
I tried moving my feet experimentally. They cooperated. My mind was excited about this because it thought we were now going directly to the stateroom to have a closer look at the mystery creature. My legs and heart were incredulous that we were even considering something so colossally stupid. They thought with every protesting tensed sinew that we should be going the OTHER way.
But the instant I could walk – I made a bee line for my cabin. I’d already deserted my friends. I’d already run away from one fight. I could feel my loins girding anew (or maybe it was the male orbs peeking out to see if the coast was clear) and I made tracks for my room.
I tugged against the door – but it was held tightly closed, like it was fused to the frame. I considered throwing myself against it, but I knew I would get an owie on my shoulder for no good reason. The door wasn’t moving.
It sounded like there was a gorilla in there, tearing the place apart. Glass shattered, furniture crashed – the walls vibrated with the sounds of violence from within.
Then it stopped and there was the sound like the dying breath of old man and the door was no longer held fast. It opened so easily that I stumbled against the wall.
My cabin had been torn apart, the bed completely turned over and an empty cloth bag…a very old looking cloth bag…lay on the floor, ripped open. A fragment of paper was under the bag. I took it gingerly in hand and read what was written there.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #9

2009-06-03T22:43:00.003-06:00

Jennifer pushed me hard up the stairs. My ordinarily unflappable partner was moaning with something that sounded suspiciously like terror. The stairs felt slick and even smaller than they had been before.
“Holy crap,” I muttered, guiding myself along the stairwell by running my hand along the wall in the pitch blackness. The wall was also covered with that viscous, sticky coating.
“Listen, Diamond,” puffed Jennifer, struggling along behind me. “I need to go help Gerald…otherwise those things will…they’ll…”
“Suck the life right out of him and leave a lifeless husk behind, an unclean thing destined to become another creature of the night?” I offered hopefully.
Pause. “Yes. Something like that.”
I nodded – and then realized there was no way she was going to see that in the darkness so I muttered something like “okay.”
“If we don’t come out of here you need to look under the bed in the stateroom, understand? And you need to keep it safe.”
“Keep what safe?”
“Never mind. And if you see either Gerald or me in…in the night….under absolutely no circumstances are you to let us into your room. You understand me? If it’s me I won’t come to you unless it’s daylight. If I come to you in the night...don’t look into my eyes and don’t…”
Her voice cracked into silence and statement hung in the air between us, crackling with everything she didn’t say.
“Holy crap,” I whispered again.
“When you get out of here – you need to get back to the ship. Don’t wait for me. Don’t wait or Gerald. GO!”
She shoved me hard and I took four steps at once, nearly tripping over my own feet . Arms pin wheeling wildly, I managed to regain my balance. My breath was coming in agonized gasps and I wished I had brought my inhaler. But a private dick with an inhaler? One of these things was not like the other. You never saw Bogie with an inhaler. Or George Raft.
I ran upward. There seemed to be a thousand steps. In the end I ran directly into the door so hard that stars flared in front of my eyes. My hands clawed for the handle. Below me I could hear the sounds of fighting, heated snarls and all too human sounds of exertion. But it was all far away.
What would Bogart have done? He would have gone back down there and kicked some undead ass. Concluding with every step that I wasn’t Bogart, I ran to the bottom of the hill and congratulated myself because I hadn’t peed in my pants. Much.
I waited there for five minutes that felt like five hours. My pseudo girlfriend and the guy I was supposed to be following were probably getting torn to pieces inside there – their lifeless husks would soon be twitching back to undead life.
I suppose I should have felt guilty. If I was in a movie – I would gird my loins, slam through the door and rescue Jennifer from the scuttling advance of the head vampire guy in just a nick of time, feeling her warm body fall into my arms in a surrendered swoon.
But this wasn’t a movie and those things scared the snot out of me. So after several heated arguments between my mind and my heart, my mind (ever the self-preservationist) won. I sighed and made my way back to the ship alone, really alone, for the first time. If they had won or even survived, Gerald and Jennifer would have been here by now.
I made a beeline for our stateroom. I needed to know what was under the bed. I guess I fixated on it, having failed at everything else.
I was walking down the outside deck to our stateroom, thinking that I may have been the only one to survive the night…well…survive the night with actual blood and stuff…when I saw a dark cloud of mist appear half a ship away. Then I saw the creature step out of the mist and start shambling slowly and purposefully toward me.
“Holy crap,” I breathed. Again.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #8

2009-06-03T22:39:00.003-06:00

He came out of the darkness at us like a moving shadow.
As he moved into the weak light I stifled an unmanly sound. The light glinted briefly on something in his hand. The man was Fitzroy, the guy we had been hired to follow.
His face was tight with tension and surprise. His lips were drawn into a bloodless line, his eyes narrowed and in his hand was an ornate but very business-like blade, halfway between a sword and a dagger. As he saw us the sword moved in a blur of motion toward Jennifer’s neck. She didn’t move.
He froze.
“Jennifer?” he said.
“Gerald,” she responded. Her tone made me think of the way you’d greet a relative with a chronic sinus infection who was settling his sweaty butt down beside you at the dinner table.
“What are you doing here?” he hissed.
“Everyone has to be somewhere,” she said.
“Figured that all out yourself, huh?” he responded. Ooooo…hostile, thought I.
There was something between these two, the tension crackled in a way that made me, okay, just a little jealous. Jennifer was, after all, my pseudo girlfriend and I wasn’t at all sure I liked her talking to this sword wielding man of mystery.
But at the back of my mind, okay – and rocketing to the front of my mind – was the idea that we were hundreds of feet underground, in the nest of something undead and really dangerous.
“Maybe this isn’t the place for banter,” I said.
Both heads swiveled to regard me like I was a hairy bug that fell into their oatmeal.
“Sam D. Diamond,” I whispered by way of introduction, since Jennifer was obviously no going to do the honors.
Gerald laughed mirthlessly. “I know who you are.”
“…you do?”
He snorted. Not a good sound. “You’re the worst tail on the planet.”
“No he’s not,” Jennifer said.
“Thank you, Jennifer,” I said, drawing injured pride around me like a cloak.
“Shut up,” she said.
I was about to pierce her with my rapier sharp wit when what little light we had flickered and dimmed. As it faded, I saw a whisper of movement. Gerald’s sword was a blur in that fraction of a second and as the lights went out entirely, I heard a meaty thud on metal sound and a soft cry…then the papery sound of something falling.
Jennifer’s hand was on my back, pushing so hard I nearly fell over.
“We need to get out of here,” she hissed. “And we need to go right NOW.”
There were many sounds. Imagine furious paper, whipping itself into a storm. That’s what was boiling up the stairs. There were snapping, snarling growling sounds too.
I turned and ran, slipping and falling upward, knowing those things, whatever they were, were coming faster than we could escape.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #7

2009-06-03T22:36:00.005-06:00

It stank in that passageway. I won’t even describe what it smelled like in case you’re eating. I’ll just try to explain that it stank like something undead and decaying would stink after three or four days in the hot sun.

Jennifer gagged beside me.

“Breathe through your mouth,” I whispered. “I used to have to change my baby brother’s diapers. It’s the only way not to puke. Trust me. As a matter of fact--”

“Shut up,” she hissed back, coquettishly.

So I lapsed into a sulky silence. If I were Bogart, it would have been called a manly-yet-deeply-injured silence. So I decided to sulk in a manly manner. I was wondering if teasingly asking Jennifer if she had her cranky panties on would help or hurt me when my mind jumped tracks to a completely different train.

Was this passageway designed for humans? It felt wrong. The stairs were too narrow, the tunnel too tight. The angles were wrong in ways I cannot describe to you. The walls were slick with something wet and sticky at the same time.

The light was murky as a politician’s heart, but some things could be made out. I saw a white sphere perched precariously on a narrow step before me. My foot barely touched it and it teetered uncertainly for a second and then, in slow motion, slid off the stair and rolled downward, sounding like two garbage can covers being slammed together by an angry gorilla in the silence.

We stopped and stood very still.

“Idiot,” hissed Jennifer in my ear, still playing hard to get.

We both heard the slithery sound in the living darkness before us at the same time. We froze. Then we heard it again.

Much closer.

Something was coming our way and in the narrow passageway there was nowhere to hide.

Danger Is Not My Middle Name #6

2009-06-03T22:32:00.002-06:00

We watched as our subject came into view. He moved slowly past the front of the Unfinished Church, almost a shadow himself. As he appeared, the creature on the wall froze and it made me think of a huge bug trapped in the light. But there was an alertness about it…a predatory focus…even from my vantage place at the bottom of the hill I could feel intensity rolling off it.
Maybe our subject, the occult investigator codenamed “Fitzroy” felt it because he stopped as well, frozen in place. It was a strange tableaux, the scuttling wall thing was just a few feet above him.
Abruptly Fitzroy moved around the back of the building.
Then the shape on the wall slowly crawled down. When it reached the ground it disappeared from view.
“Holy crap,” I said.
Jennifer was silent.
We waited a few minutes more and then crept around the back of the church.
There was an area marked off with worn looking caution tape, but there was a stench rising from somewhere inside the building. The scent of something undead. As we grew closer, we saw a door slightly ajar.
Jennifer moved toward the doorway.
“You’re not seriously thinking about going in there,” I said.
She paused and looked back at me, her face puzzled.
“Well…yeah,” she said slowly. “It’s our job.”
“Don’t you watch horror movies,” I hissed. “People who follow the creepy monster down into basements wind up with garden trowels in their foreheads.”
She looked at me one moment longer, shook her head, and went through the door.
I thought about it. I am reasonably sure my heart moved into my throat. I could feel it pulsing there. Then, telling myself I was a moron, I followed her down into the dank darkness.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #5

2009-06-03T22:23:00.003-06:00

The beautiful girl and I are on a hill at the foot of an unfinished gothic style church, which looks a little like it has a sad face on it. The wind is a live thing swirling around us. There are only a couple of hours left until darkness – something that really seems to bother Jennifer. We are lying on our bellies and very suddenly I see something so horrifying that I have to suppress a very undetective-like scream.

I will tell you what I saw in a minute…right after I explain how we got to be here in the first place.

There are a lot of things I feel guilty about in my life. But there are three big ones. The first: telling my aging father that if he didn’t keep the lid securely capped on his newly purchased memory stick that the information would fall out. The second involves a burning bag, a misunderstanding about some goats and a small but really annoying Scottish terrier and the third has to do with a girl, a quart of Newfie Screech and the careful application apple sauce.
But I didn’t feel guilty for staring at Jennifer Jonas’ gams. They were long and shapely, the kind of legs that went all the way up to her hips. She was leaning forward, getting ready to do some talking. Her face was serious and she chewed on her lower lip in a manner that could have betrayed nerves…but was starting to look really hot.

“You’re staring at my legs, Diamond. Stop it,” she said.

“…what?” I responded quickly.

“I am going to have a conversation with you. Something serious. And you are staring at my legs.”

“Well…they’re nice legs,” I said. Rakish was failing me now. Even my fedora seemed to be drooping – which is not a good thing when you’re a dick like me. I could only see her eyes, her legs, those full lips and my mind was wandering into its happy place.

“…going to get killed. A long and painful death.”

“Huh?”

“I said that unless you focus, you are going to get killed. It will be a long and painful death.”

“Oh,” I responded quickly. “Alrighty then.”

“Are you focused?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, trying to summon a crooked yet charming smile to my lips.

“Really?” Her voice was like silk, with an underlying purr to it.

“You’ve heard of Bram Stoker?” she asked.

“Yes,” I lied.

“Who is he?”

“Lead singer for the Rotting Maggots?” I guessed.

“No.”

“Fullback for the Green Bay Packers?”

She sighed. “No. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. You have heard of Dracula, right?”

“Everyone’s heard of Dracula,” I responded sardonically. “He invented lasagna.”

“No.” She started to speak. But I silenced her with a finger pressed against her lips, so the rest of her words sounded like “yummmfp.”

“Dracula. Transylvanian vampire.”

She nodded. “Yephh,” she said.

“I know who he was, toots,” I said. I took my finger off her lips, even though it wanted to stay and die there.

“Don’t call me toots,” she said.

I shrugged. Was there a club or something?

“Stoker’s book wasn’t fiction,” she said.

I first sniffed and then kissed my index finger, which had been pressed to her lips, even as I waggled my eyebrow her way.

“There are vampires out there?” I asked. “Undead blood suckers?”

She frowned at me and then shook her head. “No. Not like that exactly. Stoker led a very ordinary life. As dull as dishwater. Then one day he comes out with this story. Where did that story come from?”

I shrugged. So she was loony tunes…what was that to me? My heart was having a wild party inside my chest because she had allowed me to press my finger to her lips and hadn’t even thrown up a little bit.

“He was a researcher into the occult. He was a member of a small group of men, determined to find out if occult stories were based on truth…or lies.”

“Uh huh,” I responded, nodding my head slowly. Definitely loopy. That could work for me, I thought as I began scheming.

“He found vampires, Diamond,” she said.

“Sure he did,” I responded reassuringly. “Probably in an old castle, surrounded by bodies and a hunchbacked minion.”

“You’re being a jerk,” she said, refusing to pout, which made me just a little sad. She actually was doing a fairly credible job of starting to look seriously pissed.

“Real vampires aren’t anything like that. But how could Stoker communicate what he had learned to his colleagues? There was no internet…no fast post…no way to publish a text book. So he wrote Dracula and included codes and symbols only his colleagues would recognize.”

“Bram Stoker did that?” I asked.

She nodded eagerly.

“Would that be called the B.S. Code?” I observed wittily.

She sighed again and looked up at me with very tired looking eyes.

“I don’t know why I am trying to help you. But I am going to try one more time. We call the creatures he found “Stokers” since he was the one who uncovered their first nest. They don’t drink blood. They drain life. They must drain human life to live.”

“Like that face sucking thing on Star Trek?” I said. Star Trek, the TOS (The Original Series to the mundanes) was familiar ground. I could hold my own here with anyone. “Everyone thought she was just this hot babe Kirk was going to bag and—"

“Sure, sure. Whatever,” she said with a dismissive wave of one slender hand. “The point is that the Stokers are real. They exist. The group Bram Stoker belonged to, called the Keepers, is real. It exists. The man we are following is one of the key Keeper investigators. His code name is Fitzroy.”

“Uh huh,” I said, slowly processing the information. She seemed pretty level for someone who was totally animal crackers. Hot…but nuts.

“He’s going to a place called The Unfinished Church in Bermuda. It’s a gothic ruin now. We know he’s meeting someone there. Someone or something. It’s the next port we put into. We’re following him there.”

All of which goes to explain how I came to be here, standing on a windswept hill, somewhere in St. George, Bermuda, tracking the undead.

Jennifer was crouched down beside me, her body warm against the cold night and I—

“Stop it, Diamond,” she said.

“Stop what?”

“What you’re thinking. Knock it off.”

I was about to lie and claim complete innocence when we both saw something so impossible we were stunned into silence. We watched breathlessly as a dark form moved somewhere in the murky darkness. The form was big and dark, crawling down the wall of the deserted church, like a large loathsome spider. And I DO mean that it was crawling DOWN the wall of the church toward the ground in complete defiance of gravity.

“Holy crap,” I said softly.

“Yeah,” whispered Jennifer. “Holy crap.”

Danger is Not My Middle Name #4

2009-04-13T14:55:00.004-06:00

The sun is beating down on me like a thousand tiki torches held just a few inches away from my skin. I’m looking around me, making an effort to look everywhere except at the subject – so whenever my eyes would ordinarily pass over him, I shut them tight. It’s the old ‘if you can’t see me, I can’t see you’ strategy. It’s a little something I picked up in the Ray Hunker Correspondence School of Detection of Des Moines.

There’s a guy beside me. Curly hair steadily crawling up his forehead. His chest is covered in hair too (maybe he’s a bear?) and while he sleeps there’s a little trickle of drool running a little rivulet down his chin. He’s snoring softly.

I do what the tourists all do. First I turn down the thirty-seven offers from various service staff to fetch an over-priced drink. Then, I stare at a single twenty-something in a very brief bikini walking slowly around the pool, pretending she doesn’t know every mug in the immediate vicinity isn’t imagining a moving violation with her. She moves like a cat, if this cat had a body designed by teenage boys and a face so beautiful it makes your eyes ache. I cover my interest by scratching my belly, which I suck in as far as possible as beach bunny girl saunters by.

Even our subject is entranced. I see him undressing what little she is wearing and then something happens. Her eyes meet mine and she half smiles. What do I see there? An unspoken question? It’s certainly not the standard “oh…it’s just YOU” dismissal I have come to expect. I look around me casually. Can it be?

Only the drooling sleeper and I are in this direction so there’s a pretty good chance she is actually smiling at me so I half smile back. I hold off on my sexy bedroom eyes because I hardly know her and have no idea how much unexpected white hot desire she can stand.

I need to switch gears here...much as I hate to divert your attention from a pretty girl to cat puke. It’s important. Trust me. I once had a cat (for about four days) that made these wet sounding compulsively belching noises just before horking a hairball onto the carpet. I hear one of these nearby – which I ignore since I am still looking at Blonde Bunny Babe, totally forgetting I already have a girlfriend, which I don’t. Not really. Actually.

A voice near my ear surprises me so badly that I nearly swallow my tongue.

“Do it now,” she says.

She? Who she, I wonder.

“Do what?” I ask through barely moving lips – another skill I have Mr. Ray Hunker of Des Moines to thank for.

“The narcolepsy,” she says. The “She” (in case you haven’t been following this tale) is Jennifer Jonas…a fellow dick, operating under cover of being my girlfriend as we track the mystery man on board the ship.

“…what?” I ask. The Bunny Babe is still looking at me. I am only foggily aware of anything else on the planet. A pretty girl is smiling at me and I’m not even wearing my fedora at a rakish angle. Holy crap!

“Fake an attack now, while everyone is watching .The medical officer just came on deck. He’s watching you.”

“Right now?” I ask. Bunny Babe is going to think I am a geek. No. She’ll KNOW I’m a geek. Damn damn damn.

“Yes. Now.”

I sigh and breathe one word “No.”

“Time for your medication now, darling,” says Jennifer in a way too loud voice.

“Huh?”

“Do it NOW,” she hisses, and spills half a glass of ice water on me. My body wants to jump out of the chair, arms waving, legs jerking. Beach Bunny Babe, who has the body of a goddess and the reaction time of a sloth, is still looking at me. But then so is everyone else. I fall back against the cushion and try to lie still. I don’t make little mewling noises as the ice water passes through the trunks. I am, after all, a pro. Instead I lie perfectly still, like a man in a coma.

Jennifer slaps at my cheeks a little too hard and I make a show of slowly coming back to consciousness. Being a trained observer – I notice three things:

1) Beach Bunny Babe is gone.
2) So is our subject and
3) The sleeping drooling guy is dead.

It is number three that concerns me the most. I can tell he’s dead because he is no longer snoring and the little river of drool has been replaced by a tinier river of blood. His head is at a near impossible angle. I point and Jennifer follows the direction of my finger.

She takes a sharp intake of breath as she puts the pieces together.

Then she reaches down and lifts a wallet out of a bag beside the body. She grabs my arm and together, with a parting nod at the medical officer, we exit the pool area.

“Did you see the…ummm….subject leave?” I ask.

Jennifer shakes her head. The movement is tight.

“Did you see what happened to…y’know…the dead guy?”

Again she shakes her head.

“This just got a whole lot more dangerous, didn’t it?” I say.
This time she nods. She holds her lower lip between her teeth.

“I think now is the time to tell you some things you need to know,” she says with the air of someone who has made a decision to step way over the line. “These are things you should have already been told. Let’s go back to the stateroom. These are things you really need to know, Mr. Sam D. Diamond.”

“The ‘D’ stands for ‘Danger’ you know,” I lie.

“Uh huh,” she responds, trying hard not to be too impressed. “Hurry up. I don’t think we have much time before it kills again.”

“It?” I ask.

She nods. “It.”

Danger is Not My Middle Name #3

2009-04-13T14:53:00.004-06:00

The first thing I feel is some kind of nail being stuck into my temples. The pain is razor sharp, like a cleaver. The next sensation: I feel myself being rocked gently back and forth. Am I in a cradle? I try to re-construct the last few moments.

Stand by bar, hat at rakish angle. Check.
Undress a hundred women with my bedroom eyes. Check.
Watch the subject like a hawk. Ummm…check.
Follow the subject into the night. Check? Check?

I don’t remember anything after walking through the doorway – just this enormous explosion of light in my head. Did I walk into a door…again? Did an astroidette come down from outer space and smack me? Was it one of those damn undead bloodsucking orchids? I thought they were an urban myth.
Something cool is pressed to my forehead. It feels good and it seems to draw the pain out of my head. I try to open my eyes, but they won’t cooperate, so the end result is me wiggling my eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

“Are you awake then?” It is a businesslike female voice.

“Unnnngh,” I respond. It’s the best I can do. My words get lost somewhere inside the fog in my brain.

“You took a nasty blow to the head,” says the voice. Is it English? Irish? I did very poorly at accent identification at the Ray Hunker Correspondence School of Detection, incorrectly identifying a female German prison guard as a rich Italian heiress.

I try to open my eyes, but wind up only wiggling my eyebrows. Again.

“That looks ridiculous,” she says.

“Unnnngh,” I say again.

“You just watch your tongue, mister Diamond.”

I feel fingers picking at my eyes and my instinct is to bat them away. But my hands still haven’t quite caught up with my brain and they simply flap around like birds on a strange street drug.

She, for I am now reasonably certain it is a she, slaps my hands away and pries my eyelids open. Something crusty that you don’t need to know anything more about, falls to the ground and I am looking into soft green eyes, framed in a purely female face direct from some heavenly cloud. My heart does a happy double beat.

“We may not have much time,” she says. “You are on board the Grand Princess cruise liner.”

“Unnnngh?” I ask.

“Oh. Good question. I brought you here. As for as anyone else is concerned, we are lovers, sharing stateroom C327. Stop leering like that. It’s disgusting.”

“Unnnngh?” I ask

“Me? I am Jennifer Jonas. Your…client hired me to follow you in case something like this happened. I told them you have a sleeping disorder – that you can conk at any second. Now that I think of it, you’ll have to remember to do drop to the ground in a dead sleep at least once or twice…preferably in the buffet line or a crowded theater.”

“Unnnngh?”

“No. I didn’t see who hit you. When I came upon, you were already down, lying in a pool of your own vomit.”

“Unnnngh?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake. It’s just an expression. ‘Came upon’ simply means ‘saw.’”

“Unnnnghhh?”

“I am a private dick. Like you. Only much better.”

“Unnnngh?”
“I worked in a dentist office for three years. I understand you perfectly. Now go to sleep. You’ve had a concussion. Rest.”

There’s a matter of fact nurse vibe happening here that I am finding very sort of…never mind. I close my eyes and drift off.

The next morning my girlfriend and I (a thing which excites me tremendously because I have never had an actual girlfriend, although I once held hands with Nancy Antel in a darkened theater for three full minutes because she thought I was someone else) go up to the Horizon buffet for breakfast because our subject does.

We watch him and he has no idea. We’re pros. We are the wind. Breaking.
We are sitting beside another couple. They have the cabin next to ours. He is a dazzlingly handsome man who is looking with patient tired eyes at a drop dead gorgeous woman. Her attention is fixed on a laptop screen.

“It’s still fifty freaking cents a minute,” he says.

“I know,” she responds. “But this is flickr.”

The man spreads his hands wide in a “so what” gesture.

Interested as I am in this discussion, I have to leave. Our subject moves outside to the deck chairs.

I nod once to Jennifer and follow him, taking the chair just a few down from him. I make a show of stretching and laying my towel out…looking around me as I slip off my shirt and suck in my stomach. Once seated, I nonchalantly snap a shot of my feet with my camera – so I look like any other tourist. It’s touches like that that make me a pro.

I have no idea that in five minutes, someone is going to die.

Danger is Not My Middle Name #2

2009-04-13T14:50:00.006-06:00

Fort Lauderdale is full of old people. Fat ones, thin ones. Most of them wear bright track suits – though you only ever see them shuffling. They never jog. The men lean on canes or walkers, looking like slightly confused lizards while their wives take care of the hotel arrangements. Being a trained observer, I see that the men don’t talk much, and when they do, their mouths are usually full of food – with is just gross. I also noticed the women can’t seem to shut up. They all talk at the same time in strident tones guaranteed to make my head ache.

Ain’t that just like a dame? I think to myself with a sardonic grin.

I am leaning with my best devil-may-care abandon against a bar. My fedora is on my head, like I was born wearing it. My trench coat is grey. One hand rests in my pocket. People are probably wondering if I have a gun in there. Nah. Just my tootsie roll.

I look like a private dick because that’s what I am. Like I said: secrets are my business. I am a proud dick. I am a good dick…so good I just heard you snicker. Spooky, huh?

I am standing in the Airport Ramada. I have just finished a half pound cheeseburger and as I study my quarry, I am trying to burp through my nose so as not to attract unwanted attention. Since the burger had onions in it, this is making my eyes water. I am pretty sure this never happened to Bogie.

I’ve reviewed the file given to me by my mysterious green/blue eyed client. My instructions are clear: follow him. Report back via phone or internet each day. Describe exactly who he is with and what he does.

“You want to tell me why you want to know, toots?” I’d asked.

“Stop calling me that,” she’d replied.

“Why’s that, toots?” I asked. I could tell she enjoyed the banter on a level she wanted to keep private.

“I don’t like it,” she said, coyly.

“Whatever you say, toots.”

She’d rolled her eyes at that. Pretty eyes, I noticed.

“Who is this man, toots?” I inquired.

“I’d rather not say,” she replied.

“Why do you want him followed, toots?” I inquired.

“Look. I really don’t like that name,” she said. “I know you think it’s cute—“

“Nah,” I said, exuding with boyish charm like a junkyard dog exudes mean. “I just call them like I see them.”

She waited and I waited. Then I added “Toots.”

She shook her head and opened her mouth. I think she was about to say something soft and tender – but chose not to give in too easily and drew her lips together in a tight pale line…not a good look on her.

“I’d rather not tell you anything about him,” she said finally. The words were like ice. Playing hard to get, eh? I thought. “I don’t want to prejudice your opinion.”

I sighed wearily, like this was an everyday occurrence.

“I’m a pro,” I said. “That’s why you hired me.”

“No. I hired you because you were the first private eye I saw,” she said.

Still playing coy, I thought. Okay. Two can play at that game. I opened my mouth to ask another question but she held up her hand.

“I have a dossier for you,” she said, passing me a sealed eight by ten envelope. You’ll see a picture of the man I want you to follow. I’ll need daily reports. Sometimes two a day. We…I want to know where he is, who he’s with, what he does. I do know that right now he is booked onto a cruise crossing the Atlantic Ocean, with stops in Bermuda, Ireland, Scotland and England.”

“I’m not sure I have the time available,” I started, thinking that two can play the ‘coy’ game.

She was glaring at me openly now.

“Fine,” she said in a voice that sounded as cold as an accountant’s Christmas card. She took the dossier away and thrust it into her briefcase. The check and the cruise line ticket followed.

All of which goes to explain how I wound up here in Fort Lauderdale, a shamus in a trench coat, shadowing a guy in a track suit.

He was not as old as the other people in the room. But he was old At least 40. He got up from his table, wiped his mouth with a napkin and headed for the door. Pulling my hat down over my eyes, I followed him into the night.

As I stepped through the door my head caved in and the pavement came up and smacked me hard in the face. All the lights went completely and resolutely out.

New Ways to Present Travel Images

2009-04-13T14:38:00.005-06:00

I have been trying to come up with a new way to present travel photos. I really hate the old "Aunt Hazel and I went on a tour through the potato fields of Idaho and only took 6,345 pictures. Here they are in no particular order."

The last trip, Sheree and I took through the Amazon -- I blogged every single day. This trip I want to try something different. So here it is: a travel story featuring one photo a day. The only rule: the images all have to be taken on this trip.

So here goes nothing. I present a new project called "Danger is Not My Middle Name."

I’m the guy you bring your secrets to. Dirty secrets and family secrets. The kind of secrets you only whisper to a lover when the lights are out. Secrets are my business.

My name is Samuel D. Diamond. I tell pretty girls that the “D” stands for ‘Danger.’ But it really stands for “Delbert” – which is why I only use the initial. My first name isn’t really Sam either…and my last name is something you couldn’t even pronounce which is why I changed it to “Diamond.”

I’m a private dick – and save the clever comments. I‘ve heard them all.

My office is in New Orleans, a single sweltering box above Ray’s Boom Boom Room on Frenchman Street. The rent’s cheap here because when Ray has a band on, the “boom boom” sounds make it impossible to hear. Ray’s a friend of mine. Even though he doesn’t know it. I paid him his first months rent a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been here ever since...guarding the secrets of anyone who will pay me…even though no one has actually hired me yet.

But when she walked into my office, I could see secrets written all over her. She was sleek like a panther is sleek with blue eyes that invited the unwary to enter them and disappear forever. I could already feel my heart doing a slow fade. So I made a point of looking away with an air of affected disinterest. Make her wait for it, I thought cunningly.

“You must be Mr. Diamond,” she said in a voice that begged for more conversation, just so you could hear it. Just so you could be warmed by it in places better left unmentioned.

I didn’t answer. I just flipped my fedora back so she could get a gander at my eyes. I was Bogie. She was Lauren. She hid her flush of desire well. To a casual bystander, it would have appeared as though she didn’t feel the heat at all. But like I say, she wanted me. I’m pretty sure. .

I fixed her with my number ten grin – which usually causes hearts to melt and underwear to fire through the air…sometimes even someone else’s. But she simply looked back at me with those glittering green eyes.

“You must be Mr. Diamond?” she asked again. She pretended to inject a little irritation onto the question. Coquettish little thing, I thought.

“I am,” I said, keeping my voice several octaves lower than ordinary. I tend to squeak when I am get hot and bothered, which doesn’t fit at all well with the “Danger is my middle name” image. Neither does the fact that I am a recent graduate of the Ray Hunker Correspondence School of Detection of Des Moines – which is why I keep my framed diploma (which was a ten dollar option but I figured what the hell…) in the desk drawer.

Being a dick is still much better than my old job as the assistant to the assistant security director at Cavalcade of Value Shopping Mall in Seligman, Arizona.

“I need your help, Mr. Diamond,” she said.

“Help is my middle name,” I quipped cleverly.

Confusion flickered across her face. Then she shook her head, as though to clear away the cobwebs.

“The job I need you to do is dangerous.” Her eyes flickered over mine and I was glad I was sitting down. “I want you to follow a man. He’s going on a cruise out of Fort Lauderdale. You’ll have to go to Europe, I’m afraid.”

A single tear spilled out of her eye and rolled down that delicious apple cheek.

“Will you help me, Mr. Diamond? Please?”

It’s not often a pretty girl will even talk to me, let alone say “please.” (There was Ingrid Johanssen from my Dungeons and Dragons game several years ago. She asked me once to “Please pass her the attack dice” just before she kicked my butt back into the seventh ring of Argamoth. But she looked like the seventh level cave troll she was playing and I don’t think she ever liked me much anyway.)

Why was I thinking of Ingrid? I smacked myself in the forehead for being so goofy and when my vision cleared, I saw that look of confusion on her face again.

She had placed a cashier’s check on my desk. There were a lot of zeros there…and a ticket for a cruise.

“You bet, toots,” I growled. “Danger is my middle name.”

Marrying Words to Images

2009-04-06T12:22:00.004-06:00

I am getting very interested in the marriage of words and images. Some mediums, like flickr, allow you to take as long as you like to discuss your image. Some people do it with poetry. Some explain the settings of their cameras. Some write stories.

The image to the left was taken at church this past weekend. Kids were doing a "God Rods" presentation -- which involves dance and performance using thin wooden sticks.

They danced to this heart-rending song called "Arise, My Love." It's about God, gently telling Jesus to come back after the crucifixion. I was really weeping at the end of the presentation. (Hey...real men cry, y'know.) I wanted to be able to present something of what I felt using the image and a narrative. So I compensated for the truly horrific white balance in the church and set my shutter speed very slow to capture the motion of the praise the kids were giving. I used Alien Skin's Bokeh to blur the edges and placed the main "character" directly into the upper left Dynamic Point on the Rule of Thirds.

Then I wrote what is below to accent the image:

“So he’s like ‘I’m going to Jerusalem and I am gonna ride through the streets on this way cool donkey, man.’

And I’m all “Cool, dude.”

Then he looks at me and he’s all “But it’s like totally bogus. They are all gonna be waving palm branches and stuff…but in the end they are gonna nail me up on a cross.”

And I’m all “Yeah, whatEVER, dude.”

And he’s all serious like “No. I mean it, dude.”

And I’m like all serious too because he’s like the Absolute Cool Chill Dude, telling people to be nice to each other and love God and stuff.

But he’s all of a sudden looking at me like I am totally stupid.

So I look back at him and I’m like all “Really? Like they are really gonna crucify you, dude?”
And he smiles, sort of sad-like and just nods his head.

I’m all “DUDE! If they are gonna do that to you, like DON’T GO!”

And he just keeps smiling and I’m getting all upset and stuff because I think he’s like talking straight and I’m crying and I’m hoping he’s wrong but this dude is like NEVER wrong.

He’s quiet like and when he’s quiet it’s like he’s all about me figuring it out for myself and whatnot. (Which is something I find like TOTALLY irritating most of the time.)

But I can’t like, you know, figure it out and I’m all “Are you nuts, dude? It's a freaking no-brainer. If they are gonna kill you and you know it...DON’T GO!”

He gives me this kind of hug and I’m like totally fried by now and he holds me close and I like (and don’t take this the wrong way, dude) but I like don’t want to let him go because he’s the Total Cool and he looks all of a sudden kinda small in front of all those other people and I sort of want to keep him safe.

And I’m thinking like “Whoa dude…those big hat guys really hate you. I mean they HATE YOU.” And as I am like thinking that, he looks even smaller and he’s never really looked small to me before and I have been hanging with him for like three years now.

So I hug him tighter because I am like “Someone really needs be totally tender to him right now.” And that like kind of breaks my heart some more.

After a while he lets me go and touches my cheek and my heart is all melty and I am crying and I don’t know why and this whole thing like totally sucks.

“Please,” I say. (Now I’m all soft and blubbery.) “Please. Don’t go. We can still get away, dude. Why are you doing this? It’s like totally bogus.”

And he’s all smiling at me and he looks happy which is total and complete whackedness because like the dude is gonna seriously die. And he freaking KNOWS it.

He says “I am doing this because I love YOU…and because I have to.”

So I go "DUDE! You don't have to like do this for ME."

He just smiles all warm at me and walks away. I am thinking that this seriously totally absolutely sucks.

I am standing there like in a total puddle and I think I should like be saying SOMETHING. But I can't think of like a THING to say not even something that would sound kind of lame like "I love you" but wouldn't actually be lame because like...well...I do.

I watch him get onto this donkey and I then watch all the people waving palms and yelling and whatnot, like thousands of them, like he’s some military biggie or something. I'm all like "He knows they are going to kill him in just a few days and he's like totally cool with it."

He looks over his shoulder at me and waves goodbye. Then, like, I totally lose it.

The idea here was to create a juxtaposition that would allow me to add the myriad of feelings I was having to the image. I hope you enjoyed it.

Sheree and I are headed out to the UK with stops in Bermuda, Scotland, England and Ireland in two days. We're in the frenzy of pre-trip bliss.

I am looking forward to wonderful pictures, great people...and a ton of stories to share with you when I get back.

Be well...and Happy Easter to all.

A Soft Goodbye...

2009-04-01T14:58:00.005-06:00

This morning I stood alone in an empty warehouse and my heart broke just a little.

We, Sheree and I, started our special events company in 1983. The province was in the midst of a recession in the oil patch. Many people thought we were nuts offering a luxury product at a time when most companies were cutting back. But we didn’t know how to spell “impossible,” and so we forged ahead, leaving our secure jobs as radio reporters to start our little company.

In 1983, when we opened our doors, the Police were on the charts with “Every Breath You Take.” Hardly anyone had even heard of the internet and I knew everything worth knowing because I was 25. Sheree and I envisioned an office building perched on some prime real estate with a statue of a unicorn in the courtyard.

That was thousands – literally thousands – of shows ago. We did murder mystery weekends and ran the first murder mystery clubs in four locations over Alberta. We did game shows and medieval feasts and children’s theater. We were courted by Edmonton’s elite. We did casinos and conventions and corporate events. Hundreds of creative people (actors, writers and set designers) have passed through our lives – sometimes reappearing and sometimes sliding off into the abyss of the world, never to be heard from again.

Show business isn’t all that glamorous. Not when you boil it down its essence of the nuts and bolts of details. The audience sees the show. They don’t see the hours of planning and casting, driving and packing, setting up and taking down. They don’t see the late nights or hear the conversations in the van after the show on a long starlit road trip. They don’t know that a cast of performers is always an outsider and that winning the audience over becomes a dance you do over and over again.

The audience doesn’t know that sometimes casts that go out to event after event become tighter than family – and that other casts break apart like a glass ornament on concrete because there is nothing at all holding them together. The great performer’s secret? The audience holds the ultimate power. They can make the performer’s spirit sing with a standing ovation or break you into a thousand pieces that require hasty re-assembly before the next show.

They don’t know that sometimes, after a grueling Christmas season – or a convention where everything has to be PERFECT, that we go into a state that is way beyond tired and is impossible to define other than to say that our spirits ache and throb with complete emptiness because there is absolutely nothing left to give. The stress does damage that requires a literal healing. I guess you’ll either understand that…or you won’t.

So after all these years, Sheree and I decided to cut back on the scope of what we did at our little company. We shut our office, cleared out our warehouse and re-opened in a much smaller place. We kiss high rent, property taxes, soaring insurance bills and killer utility costs goodbye.

We want to travel more. Photograph more. Spend more time together…because who knows when will be the Last Time with the Precious Other?

Still…

As I stood in that empty warehouse, listening to echoes of 15+ frantic Christmas seasons and hearing whispers from the hundreds of people who crossed our paths – I felt my heart break just a little.

Sheree, in typical Sheree fashion, capped our time in our suddenly empty office/warehouse by shooting a stunning image. It seemed fitting somehow that she would end our time here this way, with something creative, sparkly, intelligent and beautiful. (I simply can’t look at it without a lump of an indefinable “something” forming in my throat.) It appears at the top of this blog with her permission. Wonderful, huh?

I just watched her work, very much unable to speak because I had no idea at all what to say. So there I stood with my hands in my pockets, fighting a nasty cold, trying hard to keep out of her way, but wanting so much to be close to her.

“It is just a building,” I tell myself. “It isn’t who you are. It’s just a place where you’ve spent a lot of time.”

Still…

It feels a little bit like a death. And, truth be told, a little like a betrayal, although I would be hard pressed to express who or what I have betrayed. It is a building…only a building. The future looks bright and intensely foggy at the same time.

We’re booked for lots of events right now. We have money in the bank. But what does the future hold?

When I thought about how I would visually portray this mish-mash of feelings right now – I thought of an image I took on Coney Island in New York some years ago.

It is one of my favorites – and I took it on the fly. It spoke immediately to my heart and it whispers softly to me now. There is the aspect of walking away; of being alone and not alone at the same time. I love that the man is old – and still wants to go out on the beach by himself to have a look around.

I hope that will be me: always wanting to have a look…always open to seeing something beautiful and hopefully seeing something remarkable.

And that is what I think about, standing in an empty warehouse, with a heart that is breaking just a little.

Undead Bloodsucking Orchids from Outer Space

2009-03-23T21:07:00.004-06:00

My wife looked at me and asked me if I wanted to go with her to an orchid show.

"Do I want to?" I asked.

Sheree (my much better half) sighed and waited patiently. A hundred excuses came to mind, but when I looked into those clear blue eyes, I realized that an orchid show with her would be much better than sitting at home. So I went.

I hated it.

I don't like flowers and I have seem SO many freaking flower shots on flickr that I could cough up a petalball. But I decided to make the most of it. I took out my camera, sucked on my teeth (a thing I do when I am asking myself what the hell I am doing where ever I happen to be while I am sucking my teeth) and looked around for something that poked the creative muse.

Nothing.

I decided to settle for something...anything...even distantly interesting.

Nothing.

So I sighed and started shooting.

I didn't even cut the images off my card for three weeks. When I did, it was to get at some other pictures I had taken that I WANTED to work on.

Then one afternoon, I started poking at the stupid flower pictures. Have you ever done that? No idea what you were going to create...just...well poking at the things. I took a LOT of orchid images that night. I started thinking about orchids. I started thinking in terms of opposites.

How about vampire orchids? Hmmm...the idea made me smile.

I have been having a wonderful time ever since then playing with these pictures.

The one at the top of the blog is a composite, built inside Photoshop, and was built almost entirely out of plug-ins. The planet is done with Flaming Pear's Lunar Cell, the stem is a photo I took of a flower my wife had hanging around the house. Linking it to the planet is a simple star.

The motion was added using Alien Skin's Motion Trail. The only actual photo is of the orchid. The entire process took me about thirty minutes.

This one was even faster: I shot a close up of one of the fricking orchids and turned it upside down. The trail of dust was done FINALLY using Alien Skin's Fairy Dust plug-in from one of the all time BEST plug-in sets: Mystical Lighting. (This one is difficult to use...but well worth the investment of time.)

I am currently doing a series on my flickr site featuring these images, coupled with shots we took on the trip to Brazil. It's written as a Sherlock Holmes story with a twist toward the absurd. Here's the link if you want to know more: http://www.flickr.com/photos/41659872@N00/

So what's the point of this blog?

Three things, I think.

1) There's always something to photograph, even in places that otherwise really suck.

2) Plug-ins can do very cool stuff very quickly. It doesn't negate the skill of the user. I am all in favor of plug-ins...as long as I can get the exact effect I am looking for. It's true that sometimes you need to spend as much time learning plug-is as you did learning some aspects of Photoshop.

3) You can get wonderful results if you try HARD to look at something from a completely new viewpoint.

I really appreciate the emails, folks. Don't sweat it, okay? Sheree and I are about two weeks away from the next trip (this one goes to England, Ireland and many places in-between) and we are in the process of moving our company from one place to another.

We're very busy.

But I still think about all you folks. Often.

Bad Ideas and How to Avoid Them

2009-03-15T22:18:00.004-06:00

The other day my wife, who ordinarily gives jaw-dropping gifts, gave me a new toothbrush. It was a battery powered jobbie that does the heavy tooth stroking for me. Not only did it clean my teeth with a minimum of effort from me, but it also played the classic Queen hit "We Will Rock You."

It's a clever idea. Each time I bend the toothbrush against my teeth Freddie Mercury starts singing. In my mouth. And since my mouth is usually closed while brushing (to minimize dripping white crap all over my shirt) it sort of sounds like he's singing from a great distance. The words are muffled and there's just this boom boom BOOM rhythm in my mouth.

I am sure some genius somewhere in the vast toothbrush industry rushed breathlessly into a bigger Someone's office with this idea: people could brush their teeth and listen to music at the same time. (I can only assume said genius has never heard of a radio or an iPod.)

It's a cool idea that turned tragically stupid in execution.

There are a lot of things like this. Not far from where I live, the desperate Allies in World War II launched Operation Habukkuk -- an idea to build battleship firepower into iceburgs. This turned out to be a disaster because they forgot that iceburgs melt and there wasn't a lot of combat activity where the polar bears live.

For years the US government was working in a plan for "Dehydrated Water." Think about it.

Why am I talking about Bad Ideas?

We all get them.

Think about the last Great Graphic you were working on. If you are like me (and who isn't?) you spent several hours chopping and selecting, re-coloring and filtering what was essentially a piece of crap to start with -- all the while trying to convince yourself it was, in fact, under all that drool -- an amazing graphic.

Nah. Remember the David's Ten Rules of Photoshop created here in this very blog? One of them is "Thou shalt not attempt to pass off thy poop as art for yea verily, poop is poop."

Here are Five Tips for Avoiding Wasting Effort on a Bad Idea:

1) HAPPY ACCIDENTS are rare. This is why they are called "accidents." We're talking about trying to do something, when something else happens and it's way cooler than your original idea. They happen, of course...but don't depend on them. You'll know with half a second if this works or not. Don't waste your time trying to talk yourself into the notion that it's good when it's poop.

2) HAVE AN IDEA BEFORE YOU START. Every good image has an idea behind it. They are good ideas because the creator and the graphic hold hands and become greater than the sum of their parts. You should have some plan for where you are going. Try doodling on paper, rough out the image and jot down some ideas that might work.

3) THINK ABOUT IT. We are often in situations where the clients or deadlines are hanging over us...or we're putting pressure on ourselves to produce "something." We tell ourselves that as long as we are actively working, this is a good thing. Not true. Take some time to THINK.

If you launch into a visual without clear vision, you are going to get poop.

4) FOLLOW THE TRAIL. Almost without exception, the good stuff I have done is a direct result of getting excited about a GOOD idea and refining it. Photoshop lets you work on multiple layers so if you mess something up, you can delete the layer and try again without ruining your whole image. Like a detective following clues, you need to follow the trail of processes that lead to a finished graphic.

5) GET EXCITED WHILE YOU WORK! Bland people turn out bland stuff , otherwise known as "poop." Excited people create new trails and new ideas. Having been both, excited is MUCH better than bland. Trust me.

You may be wondering why there is a ship's prow at the top of this blog. That ship took us down the Amazon River. And I remember thinking that this ship could take us anywhere. We could see ANYTHING. We were on a journey. In the graphic, I'm not showing any of the surrounding countryside. The journey is the thing.

Jump onto the boat, steer around the bad ideas and set a course for the Cool Stuff.

In the immortal words of one of my childhood heroes, Stan Lee, "Nuff Said."

Stuff I Think About

2009-03-10T14:06:00.005-06:00

Here's some stuff I have considered over my past 51 years and Really Believe Is True:

1) There's no hand signal for "I'm sorry." We have MANY ways of accusing...many ways of insulting with a single hand gesture. But none of them says "Whoops. I'm sorry. My mistake."

2) AC/DC hasn't done an absolutely COOL album since Back in Black.

3) Once musical artists or writers hit it big, they usually sit back and churn out poop for a really long time.

4) Advertisers lie.

5) When children laugh, they REALLY laugh.

6) Most of the photographs I take for no good reason suck.

7) The government ultimately gets its cut of my earnings...no matter what I do. So there's no good reason to lie.

8) Libraries are awesome places. Always.

9) Marriage to the right person is a blessed thing.

10) Most people take themselves WAY too seriously.

"Where Have You BEEN?"

2009-02-24T19:16:00.005-07:00

Thank you all for the emails. I know: I was posting every day and I haven't been on in over a week. I really felt I should be posting every day, since that's what I promised I would do before we left. But it turned out I couldn't do that -- so I came up with a new blog each day.

It was quite a lot of work. By the time the images are processed and I have stopped fussing with the copy, several hours have slipped past.

SO -- we are now in the process of moving our office, shutting down some aspects of what we do and beefing up others. I am busy getting my magic house in order -- and of course, Photoshop, always Photoshop calls for attention.

I had previously posted about six blogs a month. I expect that's what I will go back to.

Sheree and I are off on a Trans Atlantic crossing in early April. I don't know if I can blog that one the way I did the Amazon. But I will keep you posted.

Here's a suggestion: in the upper right hand corner you will see a box called "Subscribe to this blog." It doesn't cost you anything -- but whenever pearls of wisdom drop from my keyboard, you'll get a notification.

Isn't that image cool? It was taken about midnight in Venice...about two spits away from St. Mark's Square. I love travel.

I love photography...and Photoshop.

Travel Blog #21: The Last Morning

2009-02-12T09:12:00.016-07:00

We return to the boat after our caiman hunt. It's well after midnight and we are tired. Time for something quick to eat and then one last sleep in our stateroom.

Our bags have vanished and we will see them tomorrow at the airport. We have kept only the basics: an extra pair of underwear, the iPod, the Palm Pilot and our cameras. Just the same life necessities the settlers had.

We have several hours before we have to go to the airport, so we are off the ship and headed for the Mercado Market. This was reputed to be one of the largest outdoor markets in the world, built when Manaus was a fabulously wealthy city.

It is only a few blocks away from where the cruise ship is docked. We get off the ship and walk through the terminal. A tour guide taps me on the arm. I know what's coming. This guy is going to ask me if I want a tour. Usually the answer is at least a marginally excited "maybe."

"Would you like a tour?" he asks, oozing charm and credibility in equal parts. These are the hallmarks of a really great guide.

I do a quick internal calculation. I sigh. We have only a few hours and there is no way we can make this work. I shake my head. "I'd like one...but we are going home in a few hours."

I had expected to be blown off instantly. Instead he smiles and asks if we need directions. I ask where the Mercado Market is and he gives excellent and detailed instructions. At the end he stops and puts his hand on my shoulder.

"Keep one hand on your wallet all the time," he says softly. "Manaus can be...what is the word? Hungry."

It sounds more sinister than it was. But it still gives me a little thrill.

We venture into hungry Manaus, happily taking pictures.

We learn the Mercado Marketplace had a fire and most of it is being rebuilt. This explains the clustered huts against the fence. There are hundreds of these selling cheap sunglasses from China, knock off purses, t-shirts, fruits of apparently infinite variety.

There's meat and ripped off movies. There are clothes and shoes and nuts.

One lady specializes in selling combs. That's it. Just combs. This image makes me smile because there is something so interesting about the textures and colors...the expression on her face. This image, despite the clutter, pleases me each time I look at it. It makes me think of Brazil, like she knows a secret she's keeping to herself but she doesn't mind smiling at a stranger. That's Brazil to me.

Inside a building is a meat market. I don't think I would buy here. It's like a buffet line for flies. But the merchants watch us arrive with a distant interest and when we start taking pictures, some of them are entertained enough to pose.

Others, like the man working on the grinder wheel, look up for just a second and then, after learning we are not customers, go right back to what they were doing in the first place.

It is an affable indifference, but indifference all the same.

I see a man with the most unusual eyes.

He is regarding me from the side of a stall. I am not sure whether he is a merchant or a customer. But I know I want his picture.

I have found a smile and slight nod to be a great universal language. I wave my arms around the surroundings and shrug in a "Holy Crap this is cool" gesture.

He smiles back and shrugs. I assume this means "Sure, fella. Whatever..."

I hold up my camera. He shrugs again ("Sure. Take the picture. Knock yourself out, Guy.") and I take his picture.

I don't like doing it this way. The poses you get are too stiff. It's much better to talk with a person, get to know them a little and then take some candid pictures that show a little more of the heart.

This man is a fishmonger. He was utterly charmed by Sheree. He looked her straight in the eye and made dozens of little slices into the fish without once looking down or losing a finger.

Yes. He was showing off.

Yes. It was impressive.

When he was done, Sheree smiled at him (this can be a devastating event for the average unprepared male) and he laughed. Here he is.

I am checking my watch. I don't particulary want to, because whatever news it is going to give me will be bad. Every minute drags us closer to the airport and the seven hour flight from Manaus to Miami. It's a cruise boat charter so you KNOW it's going to be cramped and functional.

I allow myself to get distracted for a minute. I stop and photograph a stand selling exotic fruits. The colors are amazing, but the owner walks up and asks me in broken english not to take the pictures. I smile, wondering if he is in the witness protection program or something. But I delete the images.

When I look up, Sheree is gone.

Not good.

About thirty seconds later I become aware of a hostile presence. She is standing by a phone booth glaring at me. We have agreed on at least seventy six previous occasions to keep one another in sight. So she stands there, glaring. So I take her picture. It's entitled "You Idiot." This is her serious face. Could you tell?

It is time to get back to the boat and wait for the bus to whisk us away from Brazil. We arrive in Miami at about midnight and plan to pick up the vehicle we have reserved. The plan is to drive through the night and wind up somewhere near Key West by morning.

I choose to think about Florida. I am not looking forward to the flight and I viscerally resist the notion that our trip is almost over.

But sitting here now with it all behind me, the trip has gotten only better in retrospect. I remember wonderful sunrises and sunsets. I remember people who became good friends as travelers often do, for that precise space in time. I remember the people of Brazil with whom we crossed paths for just a few minutes, from Vincent to the "comb lady." I remember the Amazon and bugs that moved through the jungle. I remember Eni and the hefty guy with stick legs who walked through the jungle with us. I will always remember ziplining...

I hope you have enjoyed taking this trip. I really wanted to share it with you...even though I have no idea who you are or where you live or what you're about. Thank you for reading and thank you for your comments and your emails.

I am now looking forward to April when Sheree and I will make a Transatlantic crossing for the first time. We're going to Paris and Ireland and a number of ports in between. We'll finish that trip in Southampton visiting with a photographer friend and his wife we know from flickr who has offered to show us his corner of the world.

We are relocating our office and wrestling with all the decisions that have to be made. I am painstakingly learning my new BlackBerry Curve and setting the groudwork for a much more efficient company.

Why?

So we can travel more.

Travel Blog #20: Magic. PURE Magic

2009-02-11T21:24:00.008-07:00

Ethereal.

E t h e r e a l. We have eaten and the sun has sunk below the horizon.

Some of our companions will complain that there was no electricity, that the food was prepared over fire – and so is unevenly done.

We’ll skip past these people because I am getting tired of writing about them…and they are not at all travelers. They are tourists. The meal was wonderful. End of story.

As we ride in the canoe, darkness comes so fast, that I have the notion it was there all the time, lying in wait like a silent crocodile. Sheree and I are sitting in a canoe and I can see a struggle on her face. She will begin to lower her hand toward the water and then pull it back. She wants to feel the Amazon. But this is a foreign place. And we know the water is full of life. No one knows what could be in that water. But she wants to touch it.

I understand this, and yet I sit in the canoe and watch her.

Eni is standing at the front of the canoe. He has stripped down to his underwear. Maybe it’s a bathing suit. But I don’t think so. He stands there, legs spread for maximum balance and shines a large handheld searchlight over the water.

He is looking for a ruby glow reflected back in the light. A ruby glow means there is an alligator looking back. I look at Eni and the rapt attention he is paying to the slow playing of the light over the water and find myself thinking, not unkindly, of a terrier, looking for prey.

“It’s warm,” whispers Sheree beside me.

I look and she shows me her hand, dripping with the Amazon waters.

“It’s like a bathtub,” she says. The familiar wonder glints in her eyes. I have seen it so many times in our travels that my heart skips a beat. I was blessed to be here. But more, I was blessed to be here with her.

“Put your hand into the water," she says. "It’s okay.”

She wants me to feel what she has felt. It is a desire that is so completely and uniquely "Sheree." She selected the Amazon, researched it and then drew me into the trip, even as she invites me to dip my hand in the water now. I dip my hand in the water and smile at my mate.

The water is warm. I feel the heat around my skin and find myself thinking of the way coffee is made: hot water runs over crushed beans and becomes something greater than the sum of the individual parts. It isn’t water. It isn’t bean. It is something that is the synthesis of the combination of both. It is a new entity.

Perhaps it is simply my admittedly overactive imagination, but it feels as though my hand is touching a source of life itself. In this water live countless fish and predators and creatures beyond what I can imagine. And it is as warm as a tepid bath.

We cruise along the river and there is that ethereal feeling again. I sit in my place in the canoe thinking “I am on a canoe cruising down the Amazon. We are hunting alligators. And I know, because of personal experience that the Amazon is as warm as bathwater.”

Suddenly we see ruby reflections in the searchlight. Eni jerks his light madly to attract the attention of the driver. The driver obligingly points the boat toward the shallows. There are several “false alarms.” We go rushing into the shallow waters, searching for the ruby eyes. But in the end they always disappear.

Is Eni fabricating these “sitings of alligators?” I wonder absently. I certainly would…the people must feel they are getting their money’s worth. On the heels of that thought: “Does it matter even a little bit? I am on a canoe on the Amazon. The only light is from the searchlight…and that ethereal moon above us. Does it matter at all if we find a single caiman?”

I tell myself the answer is “no” and settle back into my seat, allowing my had to trail in the water, watching our guide standing at the front of the boat, looking for alligators.

I remember that I am flying back to the States and that tomorrow this will all be far away from me. This thought is instantly banished. This is not a time for sad thoughts. It is a time for eternal notions because I am gliding over the place where dreams are born and where life was conceived.

We come alongside another canoe. The guide on this canoe has captured a caiman about two feet long. They agree to share their alligator with us.

I have the vague sense Eni is offended that he was not the one to catch the alligator.

He asks if anyone wants to hold it. I put my hand up. Eni smiles and puts the small animal into my hands. It is passive. I am surprised at how passive it is. There are sharp teeth and a jaw that can exert tremendous pressure…even at two feet.

It is so soft on the underside and so hard on the top. I can feel it’s heart pounding under my fingers. This creature is absolutely still. It is completely aware of it’s surroundings. It’s reptile brain has accepted the fact that it has been captured…and that it’s fate has moved out of it’s own hands and into the hands of strangers. I have the idea that it accepts it’s fate either way.

But holding that small Amazon animal in my hands is mystical in a way I cannot describe.

The animal is passed from hand to hand and examined by wondering eyes and finally returned gently to the water. Eni seemed to understand it perfectly.

I was so blessed to be there.

And tomorrow we fly to Florida for four days on the Keys.

Tomorrow we leave mystical Brazil and the Amazon.

I suppress a sudden wave of absolute black sadness and concentrate instead on the moment. I try as hard as I can to impress on my heart and mind the magic of where I am and where I have been over the past two weeks.

Memories of Devil’s Island and the lovely people of Boca. I think of our tablemates who thought a moose singing “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” was hilarious. I think about the people I have met and the things we have seen moments they have shared. I think about Eni….and the eyes of the people of the river and a hundred other things.

I have been a part of the magic around me. I have entered into it...and it is so impossibly difficult to consider leaving it behind.

The Amazon will be there as it has been for thousands of years and it feels as though it will be here for a thousand more. In a few weeks the Pacific Princess will be back with someone else in our stateroom. Something about that bugs me.

I am broken and blessed at the same time.

I have been there and back again, like Frodo.

Tomorrow, we have the morning in Manaus. Oh, Brazil. I will miss you. But I'm not gone yet.

Nearly...but not yet.

Travel Blog #19: The River and the Village

2009-02-10T06:39:00.006-07:00

If I am to truly tell you about our trip down the Amazon into a real Amazonian village, I need to start by writing about the river. Everything here is dependent on the river. Food comes from it in a dizzying variety. It provides the conduit between villages. The river is as much a part of life here as air.

We were loaded onto canoes, feeling large and ungainly. Actually, in comparison to Eni, who traversed the outer rim of the canoe, I felt like a bull elephant trying to place a china cup onto a shelf, graceless and oh-so-foreign to this enchanted place. I felt every inch a son of the concrete city, a stark contrast to the people of this place. They move with grace. They move with confidence through a land I could never have dreamed up in my wildest moments.

The canoe glides down the river.

The only sound is the soft puttering of the engine. We are all silent. No conversation is possible. Our hearts are drinking it all in: the gathering darkness, the sweet scent rising from the water – the dynamic footprints of life swirling around us like delightful spirits.

I read that paragraph – and think that if I were you, I would snarl “who is this guy? Doesn’t he know when to quit?”

But if I am going to do my job – to truly convey to you the atmosphere of this place I need to use words like “life” and “dizzying” and even “enchantment.” There is nothing in your life experience that can possibly prepare you for the Amazon. Nothing. It defies words and every metaphor I create seems pale and thin in the face of that indescribable something that is the Amazon.

As I write this, I am listening to Etta James sing the songs of Billie Holiday. The music is perfect – the harmony is also perfect and resounds with a lazy passion. It is a perfect complement to the things I am attempting to remember and tell you about. Being in the Amazon is like listening to Etta sing. It is like surrendering yourself to good music, laying back in a comfortable place and letting your spirit dance with the music. You either get that or you don’t.

Okay – enough flowery crap.

We travel down the river for too short a time. We see huts with only the roofs above the water.
“When the river recedes,” says Eni, “These will be used again. For now they wait,” he says with a shrug. The shrug is eloquent. It’s an acceptance of the Amazon and what it does to their lives.
Eventually we come to a landing. It is a landing only in the most generous terms. There is a rough outcrop of wood. We beach the canoes on the land. Caramel skinned people stop and smile and wave and then go about their business. We have arrived in a village. This is not a tourist place. It’s an Amazon village.

Most of the people who live here work in the jungle hotel we have just left. Eni tells us that they were approached by the businesspeople who own the land to build the hotel…and then work in it after the building was done.

Eni is trying to herd the tourists into an open walled shed where a woman is using a large wooden spoon to push a light brown crumbly substance around in a four foot wide pan. Her name is Mary and she is the head of the village.

She nods and smiles as we enter. Then she looks away. It’s not deference. It’s not shyness. It is again a flash of that unique something about the people here. It is just their way, I suppose. Eni invites us to reach into the pan and taste some of the crumbly stuff. All eyes turn to Mary. It is us being non-Amazonians. We are looking for permission. She nods. As she smiles, I notice she is missing some teeth. She’s not an old woman.

The flour tastes like it looks: brown and dry and crunchy like peanut shells under my teeth.
I start moving around the area. There’s an orderly disorder here: items tossed to one side in a manner that sort of makes sense: disparate glass items in a box, tools tossed carelessly into one corner.

I notice we are being followed by two little boys who hang shyly on the fringe of the crunchy flour tasting tourists. I smile and they smile back. I raise the camera and my eyebrows. They cover their mouths and giggle.

I ask Mary if it’s okay to take their picture. She smiles. She shrugs and then nods.

After the images are done, I ask her if I can give the boys a dollar. This time she pauses and I have the very strong sense I have said something wrong. Then she nods and I give the boys some money, even as I wonder if I have offended our host. It’s not like I am worried about getting a curare dart in the neck. I’m not. But I am constantly getting the impression that the people here often never give voice to what’s really going on inside them.

I hear laughter, children’s laughter, and I cross the compound. A volleyball net has been tied to two trees and there are eight children playing a spirited game. Others hang on the fringes watching and laughing. This time I don’t have the sense this is being put on for the visitors. This is just people living their lives and we can choose to join in or not.

Sheree has found a place to shop, incredible as this sounds. Mary has laid out some t-shirts (all made in China) and Sheree is looking at them carefully. I know her interest isn’t so much in the shirts as it is in the interaction and besides all that, you have to admit that buying t-shirts in the Amazon jungle is pretty cool. So is supporting the people who have opened their homes to our visit.

She selects three and pays with one of our three Brazillian bills.

We pile our ungainly selves back into the canoe and wave goodbye. The villagers look up from their volleyball game and wave back. Then life continues as it has for hundreds of years. We float away on our path – and they continue on theirs. I am thinking, as we putter back to the Amazon Hotel for a very welcome feast, that it is pretty cool that our lives intersected for this brief moment and then parted again.

Later on that night I will hold an Amazon alligator in my hands. But that’s another story.

Travel Blog #18: Into the Jungle...Starring YOU!

2009-02-05T13:52:00.014-07:00

There’s something different about this sun, you realize, as the riverboat chugs toward the makeshift looking pier. It’s starker on your skin. Stronger. The heat resonates with a silky caressing power as it coats you.

Ahead, the tourists make their way down the narrow walkway between pier and shore. There are no handrails – just a walkway. To your right a mother and her three children sit by the water. They wave in a happily abstracted way and you wonder at how perfectly they are all four, a part of the jungle, an extension of the water.

“We are going to walk up the path ahead,” says your guide. He’s a little man called Eni, but he seems more at home here than anyone. You’ve had a lot of time to talk to him over the lazy two hour boat ride. He speaks seven languages, he lectures in the university of Manaus – and he is currently in his favorite part of the world: the Amazon jungle.

“The hotel we are going to isn’t like your hotels at home,” he says. His eyes twinkle as they speak. Honest. They twinkle. There’s no electricity. No phones. No television. Cooking is done over an open fire and only fire and candles give light at night. We’re coming back here later for supper. But first we go into the jungle.”

He has told you what to expect. Okay: he has given you an idea what to expect. You need to cover yourself with serious insect repellant. You need to put your pant legs inside your socks to prevent soldier ants from getting in, this requirement illustrated vividly by the telling of a story about another tourist who ignored the clearly stated requirement of LONG pants and WALKING shoes and got badly bitten.

All eyes turn to a balding fat man. His legs stick out of the legs of his shorts and they look like sticks to you. The legs seem impossibly thin – too thin to support the massive body above it. He is wearing sandals. He looks back at the group.

“No one told me,” he says, exchanging a worried glance with his son, who is similarly attired.
Poor bastards, you think. They are meat.

Eni offers them the choice of staying at the lodge and waiting for the jungle walk to return. He tells them that, should they choose to take the walk, they will need to stay close to him.
The man looks uncertain for a moment. Then he shakes his head and declares that he and his boy are going on the damn walk. He begs copious insect repellant from the other travelers and coats his skin and his son’s skin before they leave.

The walk through the jungle begins with no ceremony and as you step into the lush greenness, you realize that civilization has vanished. You can’t see even the rudimentary shelter of the huts. A few steps away from the compound – and you are in the jungle.

You can’t help but feel like an interloper. Strange sounds, sounds you cannot identify are all around you. The air is heavy with the scent of life and decay. You look down at the jungle floor and see why: it’s a slippery coating of fallen leaves and vines and rocks that look so very out of place.

Eni stops beneath a massive cone. It’s twice as large as he is. He strips off his shirt and tells you he is about to demonstrate how to call the ants.

Is he nuts? you wonder. He plans to CALL ants?

Rita, a trauma nurse from Melbourne Australia, gets in close with her camera. You’ve noticed that Rita, who laughs frequently and does not appear to have a shy bone in her body, likes to be at the center of all activity. She’s close – and you wonder uneasily if she has heard that Eni is going to call ants.

He stands directly under the large cone, an ant nest, and claps his hands. He spreads his arms wide and instantly, a trail of black flows from the nest, covering him. The guy is covered in ants. Holy crap!

Rita leaps to one side with a squeal. You notice the man and the boy in shorts take several steps backward.

Eni isn’t concerned. He brushes the insects off of himself and holds out his hands.

“This is the best insect repellant in the world. Smell.”

Dutifully the assembled jungle safari types sniff Eni’s hands. It’s a raw organic scent. Bitter – but not unpleasant.

This is seriously cool you think.

Tramping through the Amazon jungle requires all your attention. It’s so very humid that the sweat pours off your face, burning your eyes if you forget to wipe it away. The ground is slick. You notice that the sounds of the jungle don’t stop. If anything, they intensify. When you look up it is like you are in a building made of green growing things. You cannot see the sun, although you can feel its heat around you and as it rises from the wet earth the heat is intensified somehow.

You come eventually to a clearing.

Eni and another Amazon guide confer briefly in Portuguese and Eni tells you they are about to demonstrate how to start a fire in the wild. First the guide demonstrates how to create friction with a bow and stake. You’ve seen this before. Lots of times – and you suspect that if it ever comes down to you needing to start a fire this way, you are gonna die a lonely cold death for sure.

Next Eni tells you how to build a fire out of two batteries and steel wool – which is highly flammable. The Amazon guide holds the batteries end to end, just as you would load them into a flashlight. He touches the steel wool to both ends of the batteries and there is a tiny whoosh sound and fire erupts. Damn. That’s cool, you think. If you ever happen to be stranded in the jungle and you happen to have a flashlight and steel wool, you will be able to make fire.

You are about to move off when the Amazon guide says something the Eni (who you have started to think of as “Survivor Man”) – and he stops and turns back to the stump they have just used for the firemaking demonstrations. He lifts a block of wood and underneath is a centipede. It is curled, but it must be at least seven or eight inches long.

You look around and see horrified looks on the faces. You smile. This is probably a joke you decide. No way that thing is alive. No way they would have done all that stuff right on top of a venomous centipede. You take a picture anyway.

The guy in the shorts stands behind his kid.

Eni pokes the insect with a stick – and it moves. It moves fast. It scuttles down the stump and up another tree so quickly that it is almost a blur. You have to marvel, even as you hyperventilate just a little, at how those dozens of tiny legs propel the creature so quickly.
Rita is looking a little faint – but she’s laughing louder than anyone. Nerves you think.

You leave the clearing and go deeper into the jungle. Along the way Eni points out other insects, massive termite nests. He shows you cocoa and impossibly red flowers. Wind rustles through the trees and it’s cool touch is welcome on your face.

You decide you could walk in the jungle forever, as long as Survivor Man is with you.

He shows you how the natives rig traps for meat. He shows you an ordinary looking vine, pressing a thorn into it until a pasty white liquid comes out.

“Curare,” he says. “A few drops paralyze the animal for six hours.”

He lets you try a blowgun – which is a five-foot long tube with a dart in it. It seems a highly impractical weapon, unwieldy because of its length. You try to fire a dart at the target and miss entirely. Eni takes the blowgun and the dart is sticking directly into the mock bird – which serves as the bull’s eye.

You move through the jungle and eventually, too soon, you come out again back at the Amazon Village.

The man and his son are scratching habitually at their legs and arms. But they are smiling.
As you wait for the next phase of the trip – a canoe ride to an Amazon village – you notice two glorious parrots watching you and your wife. Parrots mate for life – and their unblinking twin gaze draws your attention.

Your wife crosses toward them. When she walks to the left, the parrots follow, with a strangely graceful waddle. When she walks to the right, they follow and you find yourself thinking of ducks. She laughs and you smile at her with your heart. This woman finds joy in everything.
She takes their picture. You take a picture of her taking a picture of the parrots.

Life is good. You’ve already taken a river ride, been for a “walkabout” in the Amazon jungle. Now you are bound for a real Amazon village – and then you get to eat a meal prepared by Amazonians over a fire.

Does it get any better than this?

Travel Blog #17: Meeting the Meeting of the Rivers

2009-02-04T19:37:00.020-07:00

I keep trying to come up with openings to these blogs that don't sound trite.

I could try something like "There we were, sitting in a mud bog sipping V8 juice with seventeen naked pygmies." But that never happened and I would have to be a much better writer than I am to sell something like that.

But I am trying to convey the feeling that is unique to the Amazon, the sense it engenders in your heart. Simply being there is an experience.

Think of it like a tropical theme "Alice in Wonderland." People do the most remarkable things because this is a wholly remarkable place. It's all a result -- a direct result of the magic in the air, on the water. It reaches out and ignites the magic residing quietly inside your own spirit. It's peaceful and breathlessly exciting at the same time...and it's frustrating because I don't have the words to convey it to you.

Take a look at the opening picture. This guy has put a rock in the back of his canoe so he can sit at the front. I am sure there is a perfectly good reason for this although I have no idea what it might be. I suppose the thing I'm trying to say is that the whole place is different than anywhere else.

There is Amazon magic. I promise you. There’s a certain something that happens in your heart when you are adrift on this river. It fills your mind and spirit with something as unique as the taste of fine dark chocolate. It suffuses your being with a thing both mysterious and mystical.

We got off our Manaus bus, escaping the tour guide who was not even attempting to pretend he wasn't glaring at me, and walked down a short pier to the waiting riverboat.

Our party was herded into the upper deck by a little guy who couldn’t possibly been more than five feet tall. He introduced himself as “Eni” – which he pronounced as “Any.” He crackled with energy and he announced he was going to be our guide for the rest of the day and into the night.

I started up the stairs, wanting to get stake out the best seats for Sheree and me before the greedy people got there.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Up,” I answered, although since I was standing on a narrow staircase, I thought this would be obvious.

“Why?” she asked.

“Well…that’s where we’re going.”

She looked at me with a distantly pitying eye that I always find a little irritating…mostly because it usually means I am acting like a herd animal.

“You’re acting like a herd animal,” she confirmed. “Look around down here. We have the whole floor to ourselves. We can go anywhere. Would you rather be squeezed up there like a sardine?”

I paused uncertainly, wondering if there was any possible way to save face at this point and decided there was not. I stepped off the ladder and sauntered to the wooden bench, like it had been my idea from the beginning.

“We’ll stay down here,” I said with all possible male authority.

Sheree rolled her eyes and for the balance of the trip, we hung out on the lower level.

Just before a second busload of tourists climbed up to the second floor, a man toting an enormous plastic barrel appeared. The barrel was filled with plastic cups and the plastic cups were filled with something that looked like long, tapered potato chips.

"What are those?" I asked, noting the entire riverboat crew had purchased at least one of the containters for an american dollar each.

"Banana chips," he said. "Salted. One dollar."

I bought some. Sheree bought some and they were delicious. So there we were, cruising down the Amazon, noshing on lightly salted banana chips (which tasted like fruity potato chips to me) and in a place of pure bliss. Uncrowded. Downstairs was way "more gooder." Sheree was right. But don't tell her I said so.

Shortly after we left the dock Eni came down and looked at us for a long moment. I had a sense of deja vous. We were being identified as the “problem people” again. I didn’t want that to happen so I looked at Eni and explained that we wanted to be free to take pictures.

He looked at me for a long moment. I could see gears turning in his eyes and then he smiled broadly. “You know something? If I were you, I would stay here too.”

From that second, in that inexplicable way people have, we were friends. It was done. He looked at me and I looked at him and we understood each other perfectly. I smiled a little and so did he. He almost winked. It was a great moment.

And so Sheree and I were left mostly alone on the lower deck of a riverboat cruising the Amazon. It was wonderful. A gentle breeze blew through the lower deck and I had the illusion that we were all alone on the Amazon…exactly where we wanted to be. Occasionally another boat would fly by and we would look at it and maybe take a picture. Then the magic happened.

It was one of those perfect travel moments: one that will live in my mind forever. I have a number of these. In Alaska we rounded a corner and saw bald eagles soaring around the cross on a church, sublime moments in the profound peace of Fern Grotto in Jamaica, midnight in St. Marco Square in Venice – way too many to write here.

But travel magic was happening only a few feet from where we were. Wordlessly, I pointed out behind Sheree. She turned and saw the magic too. Let me explain what is happening in the picture above. I have only adjusted the contrast a little – otherwise it is exactly what we saw: two rivers, two colors travelling side by side in perfectly separate courses. It is called the “Meeting of the Rivers.” Two chemically different bodies of water meet and flow side by side – but never together.

Eni appeared, holding two small bottles of water. One was light brown. The other was blue. He laughed at both of us gaping at the impossible scene unfolding before us.

"Two completely different compositions of water. Different ph balances, acidity. These are two completely different waters one beside the other."

He smiled at us and I started taking pictures.

NOW can you try to tell me we are not talking about a magical place?

I took picture after picture of this impossible thing happening before my eyes. I am a professional magician, and if I could bottle this effect, I would make a Manaus-sized fortune. It’s a complete impossibility, which (in the final analysis) is what magic is all about.

In that instant I felt something strange – something that will offend some of you. But I felt an urge to fall to my knees before the God that had created this impossible thing, a God who built the vibrant life of the Amazon from monkey to “fat little guys” on Devil’s Island. In that instant I felt very small before my Creator and I had an urge to hide my face. Hard to explain – but it’s what was going on inside me. How does a visual of two rivers running side by side invoke that reaction? I don’t know. But it was intense and tender and precious to me.

The boat continued down the Amazon. Sheree claimed the fore deck. I called her “Rambette” because of her sweatband and military look. She didn’t care. Actually I think she kind of liked it.

Eni joined us and for the next hour or so we chatted amiably about his life in Manaus. He speaks seven languages. He loves his area of the world and he loves showing it to tourists. Sheree immediately began talking with him about the option of planning a photographers’ tour of Manaus. He understood right away and started talking about the many options available.

I liked this man more and more. I eased myself off of the bench and settled in beside Eni and Sheree at the very front of the boat. We talked about Manaus. The ship captain produced a package of cookies and we ate and talked and laughed together as though we had known each other for decades. It's just that way in the Amazon. I've noticed time and again the easy way people talk, the way people choose to be together.

We talked about our lives in Edmonton. We talked about the literal beauty as the Amazon showed itself to us. He had grown up on the Amazon, but Eni was still as in awe of what was out there as we were.

I wish you could have been there for only a few moments. You would first notice the scent in the air. It is quite unlike anything else you may have past experience with. It is so very alive. The scent itself is like nothing else: green and pulsing with life. I'll try to give you a better sense of what it was like to be there when I tell you about the walk into the jungle in the next blog.

Along the shorelines are people and animals. The clouds are vibrant and turbulent blues and greys and whites, in constant lazy state of motion as though God was gently blowing on them. And all around you is the sense of life and the loud heartbeat of the Amazon. It resounds in your spirit like a drum. It speaks to your heart and whispers that this is where you came from and that this is the garden of the world.

Flowery? Yes.

But intense and precious.

I would not trade my memories of that river ride for anything this world has to offer. Well. Almost anything.

We were headed for the deep Amazon. We were going for a long hike in the literal jungle. Nothing tourist here. We are talking pure Amazon.

The walk into the Amazon jungle was more astounding still. That story is next.

Travel Blog #16: Manaus Morning

2009-02-03T11:48:00.022-07:00

Have you heard of Manaus?

I hadn’t until shortly before we left and I traced my finger on a map down Brazil’s Amazon River to Manaus with the breathlessly excited thought: “I’m going there.”

Manaus was once the richest city on the planet. Henry Ford wanted to exploit the rubber trade – and business tycoons by the dozen were created here. The expression: "Lighting your cigar with one hundred dollar bills" was birthed here too…because they made a point of doing it.

Not much of that grandeur remains today. There’s the Manaus opera house of course: Italian marble, handcrafted décor. It is said that the small road out front of the opera house was covered in rubber so that the carriages rumbling by with their loads of rich music fans wouldn’t make a sound on the cobblestones and so disturb the patrons within.

Manaus is a place of stark contrasts: there are opulent mansions still – and ramshackle slums of abject poverty. One point eight million people live here in relative peace.

The ship pulls slowly into the port and I stand on the balcony savoring the moment because I know this will be the last time for this trip that I am on a moving ship. We dock here and stay overnight. But tomorrow we leave. Our bags are packed and they sit like 900 pound gorillas in the middle of our stateroom.

I don’t dwell on it too long because it’s not a day for those kinds of thoughts. It’s a FULL day excursion. We’re going to take a tour of the town. We are going to have a look at the opera house. We’re going to take a river ride – and then go on a walk through the jungle to a real Amazon village. We are going to finish the day by going out onto the river in the dark of night hunting caiman – the indigenous alligators.

Who could be sad with all that coming up? (You just shush.)

We file off the ship with bright orange stickers on our shirts. They say “H3” in big letters. They identify us as tour members but they annoy me to no end for reasons I cannot articulate.

The bus is waiting and as we step from ship to bus, I have my first misgiving. We are being handled and I wonder if we will ever be allowed to see the real Brazil. I don’t much want to be insulated.

But I was on my way to a day I will remember for the rest of my life. It was a day when Brazil, in all it’s electric beauty touched me.

Sheree and I pile into a tour bus. It’s an odd bus because it has a locking door between the passengers and the driver. It creeps me out at first – but the guide, a pinch faced little man, explains that the door exists so we can enjoy air conditioning.

…okay, I think…

There are only ten of us on the bus – so I spread out on the back seat. I can shoot out of either window as we travel and I do. Manaus is a riot of color and people and activity. There are signs and cars and bustling commerce. The streets are choked with people and buildings. Music is played loud on every corner and there’s an affable disorder to it all.

It’s raining steadily and I shoot out of the windows and try to make the rain work for me. There are some wonderful bokeh effects that just occur when you focus on the drops and let the background blur.

We arrive at the Manaus opera house and the guide puts on his serious face. He looks at us, every one of us, directly in the eye and raises a finger. I have a flash memory of school field trips.

“We were not allowed to bring tourists into the opera house for a very long time,” he says. My ears have adjusted to his heavy accent and I can actually understand most of what he says now. “The opera house is very par-tic-oo-lar (this is the word, yes?) about people inside. You may take photos,” he pauses to look significantly at Sheree and me – as we have already been identified as ‘potential problem photographers’ – “But no flash photography. They get, how do you say, very irr-ra-tet-ed. The flash destroys paint. If you do not know how to put your flash off, give me your camera and I do it for you.”

He pauses again and looks pointedly at me. I smile disarmingly. My smile says “I know my camera, pal. You may trust me. Besides, you will only be able to get it by prying it from my cold dead fingers.”

He arches his eyebrows, still looking at me. I nod. I smile. He looks away. Finally.

There is a courtyard beside the opera house. It is a complex black and white tile, designed to simulate the ebb and flow of waves on the ocean. The guide drones on and I stop to take pictures of it. Frankly, the mosaic is much more interesting than the talk…and I am feeling a little teenager-ish from the unspoken rebuke. Like I don’t know how to use my own camera. Pffft.

We enter the opera house and it is grand, indeed. There are rooms in this place that took fifteen YEARS to complete. Stone, marble, wood – textiles were brought in from all over the world. There is a rumor that Caruso sang here. The real story is that someone said “malaria” to him, and he took off.

We go through the lobby and into the theater. There’s low light here – and I suppress my flash – and crank the ISO. I start shooting.

There are things that happen with technology that seem too precisely timed to be pure happenstance. This has never happened before or since but as I raised the camera to my eye to take the seventh image, the flash goes off.

There is a collective gasp from the assembled group and the guide is glaring at me. I hold up my hand to acknowledge that I am the Flash Criminal and will take sure and certain steps to correct the situation. The gesture asks for mercy from the Opera House Police. The guide nods tightly and continues talking about something. I suppress the flash again and continue shooting.

Have you ever seen what a camera does when it is trying to focus on something in low light? The flash goes off in tight sharp bursts.

For no apparent reason, a circumstance I have not been able to repeat since that day, a bursting flashing “HEY EVERYONE! Look at me for I am the moron with THE OBNOXIOUS FLASH” screamed into the otherwise hushed silence. After what seems like several years, the panicked responses from my brain, reach my finger and I lift it off the shutter button. The flashes stop, although their presence resounds with echos of light in their wake.

I do not often feel a flush burning my cheeks. But I did then.

“See? You really should read your camera manual,” chides Sheree helpfully. She seems to be enjoying this just a little more than she should.

I am about to respond with something both flushed and cutting when there is a whoosh of air and the guide is standing beside us with a horrified skeletal grin frozen on his face.

“Do you want me to rip that camera out of your hands, you bottom-feeding lowlife stupid tourist waste of skin?” his expression says.

“Can I help you turn off your flash?” he asks through clenched teeth just behind the fake smile.

“No,” I say. “I’ll do it.”

He stands there while I suppress the flash…again. To this day, I have no idea why it was flashing. I change the setting to Shutter Mode and turn the flash off.

He luxuriates in one last “I will feed you your own liver if you continue to embarrass me” fake smile and then he turns on his heel and stalks away. His manner makes it obvious there are far more worthy people who deserve his attention.

I sit in my seat. Low. I point the camera down at the floor and half press the shutter button, just to check. Nothing. It focuses. No problem. No flash. I heave a sigh and remind myself that all technology is inherently evil.

I see a wall ornament I like and I turn the camera toward it. Tentatively I press on the shutter button. There’s a crisp click as the flash pops up, ready to do it's job. No. Not ready. EAGER.

Shit.

Shit shit shit.

Shit.

I mutter something else unkind and wander out of the theater into where there is more light and less intense scrutiny.

Next is the room that took fifteen years to build. I wonder if we will be allowed to actually walk on the floor.

I meant it as one of those little jokes I tell myself -- but it turns out we weren't going to be allowed onto the floor.

See the people here? We were all issued booties lest our unclean feet scuff the woodwork.

Having said this admittedly snotty thing, I must say this was one very cool room. It dripped elegance and money in equal amounts. The bootie things were huge (one size fits all, I suppose) but the result was that if you wanted to get from point A to point B, you needed to move in little shuffling steps. I was thinking of zombies in search of human brains to devour...or vastly overmedicated patients on a day pass from The Home.

If your bootie slipped off, you were screwed -- because you'd have to balance like a stork on one leg until you got your foot back in. I know this from personal experience. Most of the tour group was already conditioned to keep one eye on me for the next entertaining thing that I would do.

I didn't care. I took lots of pictures for the sheer joy of taking pictures. Sheree and I both saw an ornate mirror and seized the opportunity to take our portraits at the same time. Unfortunately we can’t get our booties into the shots.

As we leave the opera house, the rain is falling in a steady drizzle, and I go back to the wave thingie courtyard to finish my pictures. The rest of the people follow the guide.

Sheree is waiting by the bus.

We both wait there. It seems to be taking a long time.

I take a hard look at the bus.

“This is where it dropped us off, right?” I ask.

Sheree rolls her eyes. “Yes, Dave.”

We stand there some more.

“I’m going up this way for a minute,” I say. I have begun to suspect this is not our bus, but I don’t want to say anything in case I am wrong. (I am frequently wrong.)

I walk across the courtyard and peer around the corner of the opera house. The guide is standing there in the steady rain in beside our bus.

Crap.

He has obviously been looking for me because he sees me right away and begins waving his arms wildly to attract my attention. I presume he thinks I am so deep in my idiot stupid tourist fog he must take extreme measures to get my attention.

I wave back in my most carefree manner and saunter toward him.

“We were waiting by the wrong bus,” I say.

His look, of course, says something completely different than what comes out of his mouth. On the off chance children will be reading this, I won't attempt an interpritation. But the visual message was a stark contrast to the words spoken which were: “No problem…sir.”

He decides to have the bus drive around the block to pick up Sheree and we walk together in silence.

I think he probably still hates me.

That’s the morning. We’re on our way to a river ride next. I don’t know it – but we are about to meet one of those Wonderful Life Characters…and lay the groundwork for coming back here one day.

The river ride is spectacular. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

Blog #15: Befriending Boca

2009-02-02T22:19:00.018-07:00

Boca de Valaria didn’t exist thirty years ago. It is a creation of the cruise ship companies. “Boca de” means “Mouth of” and Valaria is the river it’s located on. The cruise ships needed needed a place relatively central that they could build into a viable stop for the thousands of wallet-toting tourists destined for this port each year.

The locals were pleased to accommodate. This is why they come from seven small villages each day the ship comes in.

“Don’t let it freak you out when the kids come up and hold your hand,” declared Hutch, the destination expert on the Pacific Princess. (He has undoubtedly dealt with plenty of freaked out personal space conscious North Americans before.) “They are wonderful people.”

You’d think that with this sort of background that I would hate this place.

I didn’t. I loved it. Honest.

The people there were wonderful, once I got to know them a little. “Getting to know them” means realizing that they are hospitable, pleasant people who make a living by showing off themselves and their village to the tourists. They come up to you, smile and take your hand. You can expect to be gently mobbed when you arrive…and if you relax and remind yourself you aren’t in Kansas anymore, you are in for a wonderful travel experience.

We were, of course, first off the tender boat. The locals were clustered tight at the makeshift pier, almost like someone was paying them to make EVERY tourist feel welcome.

We’d researched this port from home and learned many tourists bring supplies for the local school with them. This seemed a win/win situation for everyone. The tourists get to feel good and the kids get school supplies.

Since Sheree and I entertain kids for a big portion of our living, we decided to make them balloon animals. Balloons pack flat and I have yet to meet a kid who doesn’t love them.
I’d loaded my pockets with balloons and when we got to the end of the “love gauntlet,” Sheree looked at me and said “No time like the present.”

I pulled the first balloon from my pocket. Have you ever seen fish in an aquarium at feeding time? You need simply stand above the waterline holding the tin can and the fish cluster to wherever their little fish brains tell them you are going to be dropping the food.

It was like that. I was immediately surrounded by little people saying “Me! Me! Me!”

I asked them to move back a little and they did – but hands kept reaching even though they had no idea what they were reaching for. The balloon was taken out of my hand before I blew it up. I found myself looking into the large brown eyes of the culprit: a kid of about seven. I smiled. He looked back seriously. I tried to pry his fingers off the balloon. He regarded me evenly and didn’t loosen his grip. I ruffled his hair and pointed to the balloon and then at him. His eyes narrowed with suspicion. Finally, reluctantly, he let go.

I blew the balloon up and made a dog. The kids pressed forward. I think piranha fish learned their techniques from them. I blew on the tail and immediately a bubble of air appeared there. The kids took a collective step backward. There were collective “ooooo” and “ahhhhh” sounds. Then they all pressed forward with renewed cries of “Me! Me! ME! ME!”

I made balloons for about twenty minutes and noticed they were going down far too quickly. I felt something brush my thigh. (It has been my experience from my admittedly limited Amazon exposure that whenever you feel something touching you, you need to investigate right away.) I found a small brown hand in my pocket. The kid had been swiping balloons the whole time.

I closed my hand around his wrist and shook my head. He didn’t let go. I looked up and saw some of the teenage boys standing nearby, laughing and trying to blow the balloons up. No guilt. No one saying “gee, sorry, Mister. I don’t know how this balloon wound up in my hand…”
I was, of course, in their house. If they wanted to swipe the balloons I’d already planned to give to them for free, that was their choice.

I made balloons until they were gone – and kept my pockets zipped.

Boca is a wonderful place to meet people. Parents dress their kids in traditional costumes and you can take their picture. Usually you pass them a dollar for this – which is fine with me, since I usually do that anyway. Everyone will pose for a dollar: the kid with the tarantula, the little girl with the lizard, the man with a jungle pig. These kids handle wildlife with the same ease you would pick up a Coke.

The strange thing is that, while the wildlife is interesting, the real pictures are of the people who live here. Great faces – great clothes. Such colors! And they are literally lined up, wanting you to take shots of them.

While I agree that you don’t get the candid shots you’d prefer – I must also say that the tight crops of great photos are the real gift. For about twenty dollars, I got enough photos to keep me happily Photoshopping for some time.

It started feeling just a little creepy just once. I saw a young girl, maybe fifteen. Very pretty – wearing very little. I saw a number of the cruise ship guys pay a dollar to pose with her. Nothing off color – but it was creeping me out.

Sheree was approached by a lovely older woman who wanted her to take her for a canoe ride for five bucks. She was gone instants later and I didn’t see her again until the end of the day.

She had a wonderful time. On her ride she was taken upriver and shown a couple of villages, one of which had a modern looking school with old but still usable computers. Sheree says she was taken care of like an honored relative.

I took a walk into what the villagers call “The Nature Trail.” It goes about two miles into the jungle. As I stepped onto the trail a young teenager fell into step beside me.

He jerked a thumb to his chest: “Vincent.”

I pointed to myself “David.”

“You want to see?” He asked gesturing to the trail ahead of us.

I thought about it and realized he was offering to give me a tour.

A man tapped me on the shoulder and with a long sideways look at Vincent he spoke out of the corner of his mouth: “They are just looking for a hand-out. Don’t encourage them.”

Instantly I disliked this guy. People forget that they are guests in another country – and there was no way I wanted Vincent to see us all as tourists and not travelers. I believe there is a basic and profound difference between the two.

I nodded and clapped Vincent on the shoulder: “I see.”

“Keep one hand on your wallet,” warned the guy as we walked away.

I doubt Vincent heard or understood the exchange. If he did, he didn't show it. But the hostile look of the man bristled with suspicion in a language that is universal.

Vincent led me down the trail. I gather it was an old riverbed. He stopped every once in a while to show me the cocoa beans, bright flowers and wildlife. He kept pace tied to mine and I was surprised again at the easy hospitality of these people. They treat their guests with respect but there’s such an easy grace to what they do and the way they do it.

I was blown away again by the life all around me. The sweet scent in the air, the constant motion in the bushes -- the lushness of everything. Vincent, walking through the jungle seemed an extension of all that life, whereas I was patently a visitor here.

He stopped in the middle of the trail and beckoned me over: “Simbolah,” he said, pointing to a tiny brightly colored frog. A macro lens would have been needed to get a shot. But it was a glorious creature. I just enjoyed looking at it for a moment.

Vincent looked at me expectantly: “Simbolah,” he said again. “How you say this?”

“Simbolah,” I repeated.

He laughed out loud and I laughed too. I noticed that many Brazilians cover their mouths when they laugh.

“No, no. How YOU say?”

A light dawned. ‘Oh-ho!’ I thought, which is what I usually say to myself when the clouds clear and I finally understand the actual question. You should try it sometime. Just give yourself a hearty “Oh-HO” to promote cognitive function.

“Frog,” I said, deliberately omitting the “oh ho” stuff, since that would only confuse the issue. “We say ‘frog.’” (I will admit, however, that the notion of a young man in the Amazon jungle saying "oh-ho" to tourists entertained me for an unreasonably long period of time.)

He looked at me thoughtfully.

“Frog,” he said thoughtfully. “Frog.”

Then he nodded and continued down the path. Every once in a while I heard him repeating the word ‘frog.’

We came to the end of the trail and turned back. We passed the time in an easy silence, aside from Vincent occasionally repeating the word ‘frog.’ When we got to the end of the trail, I paid him for his time and we shook hands. I walked away thinking how cool it had been that our lives intersected for that brief time. Here he is: Vincent.

But that’s what travel’s all about.

I started getting just a touch concerned about Sheree by now. It's true that my partner in this life can take care of herself. And if anyone gives her a hard time...well..."I pity the fool."

But her one hour canoe ride had been more than four hours ago – and I still didn’t see her. I cleverly decided to stake out the bar, a raised wooden building where weak but very cold beer was two dollars and whoever approached the bar would be inundated with children asking them to buy pop for them.

I was sitting there, sipping my cold beer, looking out for Sheree when two girls came and sat on the table. They were young – and they inched closer and closer. I smiled and they moved right in. One of them had the most marvelous face: expressive eyes and what I have come to think of as “full on” Brazilian features.

I took their pictures – and showed them the LCD screen. Just as it was with the little girl in Tobago, they got very excited seeing the images. Think about this for a minute: these people have made posing for photos into a cottage industry. Hasn’t anyone ever shown these kids what their pictures look like?

This youngster was off to the races. Cindy Crawford never posed so eloquently. She was serious, she was smiling. She was bold. She was shy. And after each pose she’d come and look at the LCD screen and either smile or frown. The session lasted less than a couple of minutes – but it was another moment of contact between someone from Canada – and someone from the Amazon jungle.
She didn’t speak a word of English.

Vincent barely spoke my language – and I spoke only a few words of Portuguese.

But we communicated perfectly.

I love traveling.

We arrive in Manaus tomorrow. I remember looking at its location on a map. Manaus is deep inside Brazil on the oh-so-exotic Amazon. I am really looking forward to getting there. And I am dreading it too.

It's the last port we're going to...and that means the trip is close to being over. I'd rather not think about it. And when I do think about it, I remind myself that following our time in Brazil, we are going to spend four days on the equally exotic Florida Keys.

It makes me feel better. A little.

Travel Blog #14: The People of the River

2009-02-01T14:49:00.026-07:00

They are literally “people of the river.”

There are no highways to connect the tiny towns of the Amazon. People use boats like we use cars and they use riverboats like we use busses. People here seem to be in a constant state of motion.

You see the boats travelling up and down this ancient river at all hours of the day and the night. In Santarem, we dock in a place that serves as a terminal for riverboats. I have no idea how many of them loaded, left, unloaded and returned while we were there. But it was a lot.

Surrounding the river terminal is no-nonsense fencing. The fence is topped with razor wire and there are armed guards here. You don’t get through the terminal without showing ID to the sweaty soldier with the machine gun. I don’t want to think about what it would be like to be a brown skinned person who forgot their ID. Nope. Won’t go there.

The presence of tourists in Santarem isn’t unwelcome – but it’s not welcome either. People are interested in seeing us, partially because our cruise ship is so much grander than the ancient chugging riverboats, all of which remind me of the African Queen from the classic Bogart film.

They watch us carefully. If we catch them looking at us, they smile and wave – but there is the strong sensation, for me anyway, that we are at best a curiosity. At worst? Intruders, maybe. Some look at us like a wary guard dog might eye an intruder who is not quite a stranger…and just may be bearing gifts.

As we glided into the port today, people lined the shore to watch our progress down the Amazon. Cars pulled over to the side of the road. People stood there. Some waved. Most didn’t. They stood silently and watched. Tourism makes up less than 5% of the local economy – so seeing a boatload of us is unusual enough to be considered an event.

We started our Malarone, the anti-malarial drug, last night. We had significant misgivings about this.

We are booked onto a riverboat for a tour down the river. It will take most of the day. We try to avoid long excursions...but considering the storm clouds forming in my head, being on a cool river instead of tramping through the jungle seems like a good idea.

I watch the well cared for tourists shepherded from the cruise ship to the new riverboats. I see Brazilians walk rickety looking planks onto their riverboats. I see people lounging on their balcony furniture as the people of the country we are in contemplate the hundreds of hammocks strung from the roofs of the riverboats. I stand there thinking that the difference between us is that I had the good sense to be born in North America – otherwise I might be one of those dark eyed people watching the comparatively fabulously rich herded from excursion to excursion and buffet to buffet.

I woke up with a headache – one of those “behind the eyes but could turn into shooting pains through your temples” headaches. As the morning passes, the pain behind my eyes gets worse, but I try to ignore it. Since I have not had one of this sort of headaches before – I have to put it down to the Malarone.

The boat chugs down the river and the guide chats on. He’s glad to be in a place where he can use his English – which he speaks very well. We go down the river and, as we do, Sheree whispers to me that it feels a bit like a theme park in Disneyland.

She’s right.

On either side of the boat are Brazilians throwing weighted nets into the water. I have the sneaking suspicion that this is so tourists on both sides can get pictures. A little further on, there is a man spear fishing. He waits until the boat is beside him before casting his spear. Then he turns and waves cheerily at the boatful of tourists pointing cameras at him.

We pass by families, conveniently situated by the shore and I have the sudden impression that we are passing through a zoo. Don’t take this the wrong way: I simply mean that these people look too easily available to be real.

We even go piranha fishing. Each person gets a piece of wood and a line. At the end of the line is a hook and a piece of meat is put on the hook, said hook thrown into the water. Again: I suspect this is so Aunt Mazie can tell the folks back in Iowa that she went fishing for piranha on the Amazon.

A surprised woman does catch one and hauls it it.

“It’s a BLACK piranha,” our guide enthuses. “You see silver. Sometimes red. But hardly ever BLACK.”

The woman swells up with pride and drinks in the attention. Shutters click as she displays the still floppy fish at the end of her line. I don’t like this much, I decide. My impressions might be influenced by the steady tightening of everything inside my head, but it really feels “put on” to me.

So, after fishing, I strap the telephoto onto my camera and look for the real pictures.

Let’s look at them together, okay? We’ll pretend you are standing beside Sheree and me and we’ll look at the faces of the people of the river together. I’ll point them out with my camera and you can just pull up one of those white plastic lawn furniture chairs on the riverboat and settle in for the balance of the tour.

This woman stood at the rail of her riverboat and ignored us the entire time.

Our guide told us that the riverboats are full of hammocks -- and the more ornate your hammock, the higher your status. The guide told us that 70% of Brazillians are conceived in hammocks. (They must have very good balance as well as a dogged determination.)

There were dozens of people on the deck looking us over. This man peered at us from behind a window. At first I barely saw him...then I realized he was looking right at me. I'd seen him just a few minutes earlier with some children. Here he was again. What an interesting face you have, I thought.

After a took the picture, I raised the camera to him and smiled.

He smiled back and wandered off into the back of the riverboat.

When we get back to the ship, I find I am having a bit of a hard time walking. My head is throbbing and the pressure in my temples and behind my eyes just makes me want to lie down in a cool place. It is literally a 'splitting headache.' Sheree has one too – but that doesn’t stop her from shopping a little at the kiosks the locals have set up.

We return to the cabin and turn out the lights and try to lie perfectly still.

Is this better than malaria, I wonder?

Several hours pass. Finally Sheree stirs and starts getting dressed. I have found a position where my head doesn’t hurt and I ask her where she is going.

She wants to take a walk – just outside on the pier. I check my watch. The boat leaves in 45 minutes and at first, I decide to let her go without me. Then my desire not to waste this port and the time I can spend with Sheree in it takes over and I get dressed.

The walk is ethereal. The fresh air clears my head a little, but I need to concentrate on the ground in front of me and the world has taken on a certain glow. Fortunately the lights are no longer too bright since dusk is falling over the Amazon.

We walk outside the safety gates, past the guard and past the razor wire. All the tourists are back on-board now and we resolve to stay close to the ship. Again the sensation of being watched is strong. People are clustered near the gates to the terminal. I am not sure what they are waiting for. Most silently look at us as we leave the safety of the terminal. As we walk away, some still watch us. It's not uncomfortable, but the sense of being from 'way out of town' is very strong.

Inside the terminal, laughing workers are taking down all the tourist stuff: the gangplank, the signage and the little huts they sell crafts from.

We pause outside, take some pictures. Then the boat blows it’s horn and we make our way back on board, through the throngs of locals, past the razor wire, and onto the ship.
As we pull away, I have a slightly sad feeling. I never really had a chance to know anything about the real Santarem. I was physically here – but I haven’t BEEN here.

I think I would like to go back one day...without the Malarone.

Travel Blog #13: The Great Shirt War

2009-01-30T09:20:00.012-07:00

Jill R. from Salem wrote in to ask if I was EVER going to get back to Photoshop stuff. Yup. Shouldn’t be too long now – because the trip journal is over half empty. Vacations are odd that way – particularly vacations that start off on the longish side.

We are at sea for two days now. Then we put into port at Santarem – which is the beginning of the actual Brazilian Amazon.

At sea days are lazy days. Sheree and I spend hours on the balcony cutting pictures, talking, playing endless games of Yahtzee on my iPod and watching the Amazon whisper by. We watch the shore with binoculars and through telephoto lenses and get excited every time we see a human on land.

It’s quiet out here on the balcony. You hear the soft whoosh of water as the ship moves. People on shore stop and watch. Many of them are in canoes and they wave their paddles in the air and wait for those on the ship to do what people on ships do best: waving back. I wonder what we look like to them in this relatively enormous boat, floating down the brown water of their Amazon.

Nights here are interesting. Adrian, the deck attendant, told us that at night he goes out with a huge broom to sweep a carpet of beetles off the deck. They are apparently drawn by the light. Sheree and I have been out several times at night in the hopes of seeing a living carpet of writhing black, but have only found a few beetles, usually on their backs kicking their stick legs in the air.

They run the ship with a minimum of light at night for that reason. They’ve also closed off the back portion of the Panorama deck – the outdoor seating behind the buffet – because too many bugs come into the ship when the doors open.

“I hate bugs,” one pudgy woman in way too-red lipstick tells me in the buffet line. She looks to me like I am a kindred spirit in bug-hating. “I just hate them. Don’t you?”

“Well. It’s the Amazon,” I explain. Sheree has made frequent observations about my inability to be social with most people. I agree with her, so I have decided to be social. “Bugs live here.”

“Well I hate ‘em,” Pudgy sniffs and pokes at the corn salad with the tip of the serving spoon. “Don’t much like corn either.”

What happens to otherwise mature people on cruise ships? I wonder. Do they forget what a blessing it is to be on the freaking Amazon River, experiencing things and people they would never have the opportunity to see otherwise? Can a trip like this actually revolve only around corn and bugs?

I smile at her and ladle a spoonful of corn onto my plate. Carbs or no carbs. I am making a point that appears to be lost on her. She sniffs and then waddles away.

The water of the Amazon is a tan brown. Not green. Not blue. Brown. And there’s a never-ending parade of foliage floating on it: tree branches, logs, leaves. The air has become more dense. Humid. Heavier.

We ramble around the ship. We are prepared to gamble about ten dollars a day on the penny slots in the casino – which takes about twelve seconds. I go to the Library room – a place with great leather wingback chairs, listen to my iPod, cut pictures and write. We’ve been to a wine tasting (wine is a great passion for both of us) and we’ve soaked in the hot tub.

Currently we are sitting in deck chairs in the hot sun. I am reading a photography magazine, pretending I don’t know Sheree is looking at me with That Look in her eye.

“You should take your shirt off,” she says finally.

I make the non-committal-but-never-effective sound, like I am simply too engrossed in my magazine to possibly pay attention to anything else.

“David?” she says. There’s a sharp tone now.

“Ummm?” I say.

“Your skin is white. You need to take your shirt off. Get a tan.”

The whole matter of whether I tan or not is of much greater interest to Sheree than it is to me. Besides, I am a big guy and I’d rather not take my shirt off. Really.

“Mmmmm,” I say.

There is a profound difference between ‘Ummmm?’ which finishes on an upward inflection and ‘Mmmm’ which has a downward inflection. The upward inflection says “Pray – please continue.” The downward one signals that I am done talking now. Sheree has chosen not to grasp this yet.

She sighs.

“No one cares, you know.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Take your damn shirt off. Tan,” she says.

I look up at her.

“I don’t want to take my shirt off.”

“Why not? Give me one reason. Just one good reason,” she says. Whenever she says this, I know that no reason will be good. All are destined to be blown out of the sky, poked full of holes and shot down in flames.

“One reason?” I ask, playing for time.

“One.”

“Because if I take my shirt off, Greenpeace could come along and try to put me back into the water, thinking my navigational sense has become confused and I have beached myself. Then the media will come out to cover the story. They’ll run headlines: “Pasty White Mystery Creature Found on Cruise Ship.” Nah. Better to keep my shirt on.”

“That’s not a reason,” says Sheree.

“Nope. But it’s funny.”

“Only to you,” she says.

“Well…that’s all that matters,” I respond, snapping the magazine open again to signal that I am now returning to my reading and she should leave me alone.

Time passes. Precious little time.

“So you’re not going to take your shirt off?”

“Nope.” I don’t look up.

“I think that’s just stupid,” she says. “You look so much better with a tan.”

“Mmmmm,” I respond.

Time passes. She sighs again.

“It’s part of a growing experience,” she says. “You’re the only one who cares.”

I sigh – look around me, and surrender wordlessly. After all: she’s right. I ease out of my shirt, burrowing back into my chair as quickly as possible, holding the magazine so it covers most of me. Okay…as much as possible.

“Was that so bad?” she asks.

“Mmmmm,” I respond.

Time passes.

“Look at that,” says Sheree.

Since I have already lost the shirt war, I have nothing more to lose and I look. She is pointing to an inlaid design on the deck.

“It looks like that thing da Vinci used,” I say. “You know? The one where the perfectly proportioned man stands there with his arms spread wide. You know?”

We saw a da Vinci exhibit in San Antonio last year. I am not only being conversational, I am telling my wife that I did, indeed, pay attention. While no woman has run screaming to her death in the vast ocean at the sight of me without a shirt, I am pretty sure it’s just a matter of time.

“You’re right,” says Sheree. “You should stand there.”

Blood turns to ice. “What?”

“Stand there. Spread your arms. I’ll take a picture of your shadow.”

“WHAT?” I ask. The worst ones are the ones you never see coming. I have this instant image of myself making a spectacle of myself in the middle of the crowded deck. It’s a hot day. Everyone’s out here. People will wonder what I am doing and they will look.

“You’re kidding, right?” I say.

“What’s the problem?” asks Sheree.

I am tongue-tied at the prospect of having to explain something so obvious. Finally I shrug and start to put my shirt on.

“No shirt,” says Sheree. “I don’t want lines of clothes in the picture.”

“What?”

“No clothes lines.”

“Want me to take my pants off too?” I ask. “Cause there is as good a chance of that happening as there is of me standing up in the middle of a crowded deck with no shirt doing an airplane impression.”

She stares at me. I stare back. I think there are sparks flying off in all directions just behind the blue of her eyes.

“Not gonna happen,” I say.

She continues to stare. I return to my magazine. She continues to stare. I have read the same line seventeen times. She stares. What exactly am I so hung up about? I ask myself. So what? She's doing a good thing for me. I am sitting directly in the middle of great steaming piles of personal growth here. I sigh. I think: so I stand on a deck with my arms spread for a minute. What’s the big deal?

Wordlessly I get up and promote my own personal growth. I stand with my arms spread.

“They have to be on the corners of the compass,” says Sheree. “Put them precisely on the corners. And your head in the middle. No! Over to the left.”

She’s talking loudly, which is what she does when she is excited. People are looking. People are studying. I’ve already told you that people will watch anything on cruise ships. Right now they are watching us with great interest. In fact it feels like every pair of eyes is fixed on me right now, a big guy steadfastly telling himself it’s no big deal.

“Take the picture,” I hiss – reaching the end of my personal growth tether for the day.

“Just a second,” she says. “I need to change my settings. Don’t put your arms down.”

Crap. I resist the urge to make sputtering airplane noises and I stand there. If I make stupid noises and actually draw attention to myself, people will think it’s my idea. My profound hope: if that happens, I will be laughing with them.

Seven years later, she has her picture.

And I still haven’t seen it.

We’ll be in Santarem tomorrow.

One other bit of information: We start our Malarone tonight, by the way. Malarone is a “holy crap” expensive pill designed to reduce our chances of getting malaria. It has a long list of side-effects that don’t sound pleasant. But apparently most people never feel a thing. This means, of course, that we are probably doomed.

Sheree and I don’t even take aspirin…that should be interesting. We've been drinking pitchers of lemon water to ensure we don't get dehydrated in this humidity...but not drugs yet.

Hope you remembered your Mararone. You don’t want to go home with a case of virtual malaria, do you? We start tonight, okay? You are supposed to take them on a full stomach. This, fortunately, is never a problem on a cruise ship.

But at least I get to put my shirt back on. For now.

Travel Blog #12: Devil's Island

2009-01-28T17:57:00.019-07:00

An emaciated Steve McQueen stands at the edge of a cliff looking out at a furious sea. As he counts the waves, his lips move. Suddenly he does a little shuffling celebratory dance. He’s figured something out: the seventh wave is always the strongest. He has this plan: to lash coconuts together, fling himself into the sea and paddle his way to freedom.

You saw Papillon, right? It’s a classic movie about a man trying desperately to get off of Devil’s Island. Today we went there…on purpose.

Here’s some interesting stuff: the area we know as “Devil’s Island” is really three islands in a chain called the “Salvation Islands.”

The French penal colony was set up on all three islands: St. Joseph Island, Royale Island and Iles du Diable (Devil's Island). Today each of the two remaining islands, St. Joseph and Iles du Diable have one, that's one guard posted on each. These guys live there all alone twenty four hours a day...seven days a week, rambling around deserted prison islands. There's a great short story in that somewhere.

Prisoners were told they were being taken to Devil’s Island because if they were told they were about to be imprisoned on Royale Island in the Salvation Island chain, it didn't sound nasty enough. We went to Royale Island – where the main prison was located. But it became, and remains, Devil's Island to me.

When we arrived, the sun was hot – like warm fingers on our skin. The scent in the air was green and humid and the ground was littered with coconuts and leaves that moved wetly under our feet.

The last time I was in a place that had such a strong atmosphere about it was on Route 66. There's an undefinable something here. It's a thing you can't quite describe (at least I can't) but it's there all the same. Palpable. It’s exotic and wild and you fancy you hear a hundred voices rising up from the past, each one whispering something different.

There were a lot of people imprisoned here. A lot of people suffered here. It may just be my overactive imagination, but they seem to be here still, standing silently watching us pass by. Yeah, yeah. I know it sounds overly flowery...but that's the way it felt to me. We arrived on this island, fat and happy, from a cruise ship. We have five hours here and then we leave. The prisoners were here for four long years. Most of them would die before being released.

The only business on the entire island is the hotel, which puts guests up, primarily rich French tourists, in the buildings the guards used to occupy. They come here for two weeks at a time. The prices, apparently are higher than St. Barth's, but what a place to spend time! What a place to sit on a rock by the sea and let your imagination take you for a ride. What a place!

The Destination speaker, a guy named “Hutch”said something in his talk that I latched onto, body and soul. He said there was a children's graveyard on the island. A children's graveyard. It's the place where the children of the guards and staff who died on Devil’s Island were buried.
The idea of a children's graveyard on Devil's Island fires my admittedly over-active imagination and makes me sad at the same time. It makes me think of images from the old horror comics I consumed as a kid where whispy-white weeping ghosts in period costume come to lay their children down for the last time.

What is it about graveyards that interests me so much? It may be the fact that they are peaceful…and the older I get, the closer I come to a grave of my own. It may be that I find the things written on gravesites so awfully interesting. What exactly do people write as “lasting testimonies” for those who have died? The most commonly written word on those lonely tombstones was "Regrets" -- but I am getting ahead of myself.

There was also talk about monkeys – lots of monkeys on the way to the graveyard. These are monkeys who appear in the expectation of bananas. Yup. Monkeys are cool – but it was the children’s cemetery that fascinated me.

I admit it. I photographed the monkeys because, c'mon, you have to photograph monkeys. But I was obsessed with getting to the graveyard. I just knew there was something there for me to find.

But I am ahead of myself again. Let me go back to the "getting onto the island" part. As we got off the tender boat all the rest of the people headed left toward the building compound. We turned right on the pathway that ran alongside the sea.

Ruined buildings, many reduced to simple facades by the twin ravages of time and sea, dot the pathway. They appear at random times out of nowhere.

Sheree and I were together, creeping along pathways, until we got to the aforementioned monkeys. She loves monkeys. I think they're cute and all...but there's an actual graveyard here somewhere. No contest.

I saw Hutch, walking up the trail toward us. I asked him where the graveyard was and he jerked a finger over his shoulder and muttered something about it being behind him.

I muttered something to Sheree about going onward and she muttered something back as she concentrated on photographing the monkeys. I don't think either of us actually heard the other one as our brains were otherwise engaged.

I walked on down the island path and eventually I came to a tromped down area in the bushes to my right. Was this it? The sunlight was playing on the trees and a shadowed archway of foliage within like an invitation. My heartbeat quickened. Honest it did. I walked into it.

For a few moments, and yes I made them last as long as possible, I was living in the pages of a novel. The air was vibrant and green, full of the promise of adventure. Green plants crunched underfoot and the idea that there might even be a snake lurking inside them just an inch from my sandaled foot was as intoxicating as it was frightening.

I was alone on Devil's Island and there was a by God real children's cemetary just feet away from me. It doesn't get better than this.

I passed through the trees and saw ancient wrought iron gates. Written upon them in French were the words "Cimi..... Des enfants." (The picture is at the top of this blog.) There was sunlight dappling the graves and the far off sound of insects and the thrum of tropical life. And I was alone, for a precious ten minutes, in the graveyard of Devil’s Island’s dead children.

I walked into the cemetery, my camera hanging unused around my neck. I paused there, with my eyes closed and breathed deep. I thought about the parents – guards and their wives – carrying their children to their last rest. Maybe they wept. Maybe they stood stoically while their children were put in the ground.

Think what you want – but the magic of this place was here for an instant…a magical fragment of time. I fancied I could hear the sounds of voices long gone and the grief they must have felt.

I couldn’t keep it to myself and I re-traced my steps to find Sheree – who was still photographing monkeys.

“Come with me,” I said. “The light…the colors. You need to come with me.”

My wife trusts me and she stepped away reluctantly from photographing monkeys. I really wanted her to feel what I'd felt. I took her through the pathway I had found in the trees. I prayed the place would still be silent and crackling with atmosphere so she could feel it too. Of course it is sometimes hard for me to know what she is feeling, because Sheree lives in the moment, regardless of where she is.

This time the graveyard wasn’t the same. A man and his family had arrived while I was gone. He leaned casually against a gravestone. He chatted with his family and made jokes about the dead people planted there. His harsh voice and the braying and forced sounding laughter of the women threw a new and unwelcome atmosphere over the graveyard. Dignity fled in the face of those sounds and we were standing in a place with tourists. I sighed.

Sheree photographed gravesites…and I did too. But there was a different feel here now. It wasn’t precious and private anymore. I so wished Sheree had been with me the first time.

We spent time here and the minutes started to slide away. They became "lots of minutes" – and by the time we moved up into the Devil’s Island compound we had only an hour to make the tender back to the ship.

The difficulty was that we had no idea where the tender boat was. We'd struck off in the opposite direction upon arrival. All the instructions had been given using the building compound as a reference point and, to be honest, I had been concentrating on getting to the graveyard and hadn't really paid much attention.

We had no reference point. We had only 25 minutes to find the tender boat...not enough time to re-trace our steps around the coast of the island. Sheree was photographing what she called “cute fat little guys” – which were huge rodents native to the island. She paid no attention to the time and I had noticed there were no other cruise ship people around. Everyone was long gone. Everyone.

I went to the hotel, the only remaining business on the island, and asked the woman behind the bar for directions. She spoke only French. Despite being Canadian, the only French I know has been gleaned from examination of cereal boxes. My sense of isloation grew.

I tried showing her with my hands what a ship looked like. I tried talking very loud and slowly. (I don't know why I thought speaking slowly would make me any more understandable, but I did.) She didn’t understand. Finally she went to fetch an old guy who came around. He spoke a smattering of English. He pointed down front of the main building and then jerked his thumb sharply to the right.

We had twenty minutes. Sheree went off to pee.

I looked down the path and was reasonably certain this was the right way. I waited for Sheree and when she finally re-appeared, we had twelve minutes.

I walked down the pathway – but an old french guy called out: “De boat?”

I nodded eagerly.

He pointed down a different path and we went that way, after profusely thanking him.

We walked down a cobblestone pathway, thick green trees on both sides. It was unfamiliar territory, but we spoke reassuring words to each other anyway.

I saw the tender boat some distance away. Sheree paused to make a picture of the Pacific Princess moored some distance away. I went to talk to the irritable security guy, Allen, while Sheree finished her pictures.

As we went away on the tender boat, I felt a profound sense of loss. There were so very many places on Devil’s Island we had no chance to see…to explore – or just sit and be quiet for a long moment in.

I loved Devil’s Island. I really wanted to stay there for at least another couple of hours. But that would have ended in a very long swim through apparently shark infested waters -- so I got onto the tender boat. It's not often a place speaks eloquently to my spirit, but this island spoke to mine.

It would be guilding the lilly to say that as the tender boat chugged away from Devil's Island that I thought I saw two ghostly children standing on the dock, arms around each other watching us leave with somber dark eyes. So I won't.