See you later, Butch

Paul Leonard Newman

(January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008)

It's a rare and wonderful thing to catch a glimpse of Hollywood royalty. And it's even better to have the opportunity to photograph them.

It makes me sad to hear of the death of Paul Newman.

My sympathies go out to his family, his friends and his fans. My encounter with this man was brief...but memorable.

In the very short time that our life paths intersected, I found him to have Sundance's smile, Luke's cool and Fast Eddie's flash.

He made me smile and he blew a kiss to my wife.

The last time I saw him, he was puttering off into the sunset on a red scooter and waving good-bye over his shoulder.

That's how I will remember him.

It's here on my blog: http://photoshopbasicsin6hours.blogspot.com/2008/06/stalking-paul-newman.html

My sympathies go out to his family, his friends and his millions and millions of fans.

It was good to know you, Paul.

Safe journey.

Secret Worlds

There’s a secret out there. You can find it if you simply take a second to look over an occasional hill. Usually it’s in a place the rest of the world is only marginally aware of, the kind of place people cease to see after a while.

But it’s there.

There are people in these secret worlds as well – but they are the kind of people you only see only out of the corner of your eye as they melt into the background. The years have made them experts at disappearing, and the selective perceptions we (on the other side of the hill) have developed makes it easier still for us not to see them.

Sheree and I went to one of these places last night.

The hill you have to look over is in a neighborhood formerly occupied by the military. It’s at the end of a nameless street. Watch carefully because, as with all enchanted places, you will miss the flash of color it offers if you aren’t watching for it. It’s there for a just a second and then it’s gone.

We were a fellowship of three: Sheree was taking one of her photography students out on a photo safari. I tagged along to drive the car and serve up tasty and nutritious snacks if called upon. The student was Laurie, a sweet young thing armed with a big Nikon.

I’d done a show recently in the neighbourhood and during my ritual pre-event pacing, I’d noticed a burned out building: deserted and old. All the windows were boarded over or smashed. It had the look of a toothless crone. I came to the conclusion that if a place was going to be haunted, this is probably it.

There was graffiti all over it and within it. This building was custom designed as a photographer’s feast. Since I was about to do a magic show, I didn’t have a camera with me – but I was delighted to be reunited with the building again.

I lobbied immediately for stopping there. But my wife suggested we go out to the end of the street. I was chaffing at the bit, but I drove to the end of the street anyway.

There was this hill, you see.

And on the other side of the hill – this. We were, all three, seized by the “OH! OH! OH!” photographer reflex. When this happens, you can’t get out of the car fast enough and even as you’re parking, you’re taking the lens pen to your lens and opening the car door. It’s been my experience that photographers in particular have the ability to recognize an enchanted second or a magical ray of light and they understand what rare and wonderful things they are.

As I crept deeper and deeper into the rabbit warren of fallen walls and cubbyholes, I noticed four people noticing me and immediately starting to disappear. I turned to see if the women were coming, and when I looked back the people had vanished, like a magician had waved a wand and they were gone. There wasn’t even a puff of smoke hanging in the air.

There was a sofa in the middle of a clearing. There was graffiti all around me. Broken pottery, smashed toilets and piles of garbage. The light was perfect and I kept shooting. As I did, I realized that I was actually taking shots inside someone’s home and the fact that this home was outside didn’t matter at all. I could feel eyes on me…but maybe it was just the ethereal-sort-of-spooky feel already there. But there was definitely charged atmosphere.

There were other deserted and destitute buildings we wanted to get to before the light went and we were happily photographing these when a voice came out of nowhere.

“What are you doing here?”

I turned and met Jeremy. He said he was one of the military police and that we were photographing in a restricted area. His credibility was hampered just a little because he was missing two front teeth, pushing a baby carriage and had two really odd looking women in tow.
With thoughts of little dark rooms with naked light bulbs, getting taped to a chair and beaten with rubber hoses dancing through my head, I explained that we were just taking pictures.

It didn’t take long for Jeremy to warm to us. (I used my most charming smile and when my wife and her companion joined us, his heart melted.)

“You saw the shack then?” he asked finally.

“The shack?” I repeated cleverly.

He nodded. “If you like stuff drawn on walls, you should go to the shack.”

“Where is it?” I asked – suddenly eager to get there before the light went.

“It’s just over the hill from where you were before,” he said.

“…there’s another hill?” I asked. I had been congratulating myself on looking over the first hill. Finding out there was a second hill deflated me just a little.

He nodded and led us past the first enchanted area into the fabulous treasure that waited just behind.

My eyes rested on what initially looked like a blot on the wall in the corner. As I looked at it, I began to see that the blot of black was actually a body outline. Then it looked like someone forced to stand in the corner…and that the bedspring mattress could be…what? Bars?

Look at this graffiti. It’s not a cave drawing. It’s art. The notion that someone did this in a remote cabin where only a handful of people will ever go is amazing to me. Have a look at the mattress. I was blown away. Then I noticed another painting.

Jeremy was telling me about his tactical handcuffs and that his aunt and uncle are on military tactical squads and I wasn’t even listening. True. It was the kind of talk that would have set off alarm bells in my mind before.

But now?

Nah. I was busy. I was looking at this astounding wall stuff, thinking about the mind that created it, the hands that executed it and the great honor we had to be looking at it. The image on the wall was one of such complete desolation that I couldn't hold back a sudden rush of emotion and empathy for the person who had done this wonderful artwork in this deserted and marked-for-demolition building. The idea of bulldozers destroying this was pretty hard to take.

A brass...thing....had been twisted up in a very specific way and I had the inspiration that this anonymous artist had placed it right where it was and in a curious way, it completed the picture.

When I was a kid, I was blown away by the notion that there really could be an enchanted world you accessed through the back of an ordinary wardrobe, that this mundane world really did have some magic to offer. I am so very glad I was right. And the magic is easier to find that I had originally thought.

You just have to look over a hill or two.

Bob's Magic Horse

Take a second and click on the picture to the left. Look at this merry go round horse. Look at the fracture running down his neck. Look a the amazing detail in the hand carved flowers. (Click on the "Back" arrow when you've finished looking at it and I'll meet you back here.)

Here's how that San Antonio horse came to be here in front of your eyes.

Doug, one of our two traveling companions, did most of the driving on our San Antonio / Houston trip. He’s a little guy who reminded me of a bantam rooster. He drove the streets of San Antonio like Mario Andretti going for the checkered flag but, since he never actually killed anyone, I mostly let him alone except for the occasional sharp intake of breath and soft whimpering sound.

We were on our way to the Botanical Gardens and out of the corner of my eye, we saw an amusement park that looked so completely out of place that all I could do was say “Oh! Oh! Oh!” and point furiously. The long-suffering Doug, who had spent considerable amounts of time in the car with two photographers understood me perfectly. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” in photographer means “Excuse, me Doug. But I see a subject I would very much like to photograph. Would you mind pulling over so we get out of the car and make some photographs?”

To his credit, Doug didn’t sigh or growl. He just pulled over and Sheree and I piled out of the back seat and walked into another era.

The Kiddie Park has been on this tiny strip of land in San Antonio since 1925. I love amusement parks, especially when they are deserted. There’s a very specific feeling that creeps in a place designed to entertain crowds of people when the people are gone. It is a pleasant desolation.

The gate was open so, even though there weren’t any people, Sheree and I walked in. It was the now-familiar San Antonio trick of stepping back in time and listening to the voices and songs of people long gone.

I was standing there, camera limply held in my hand, drinking this in. We’re talking about a place that has entertained children over three plus generations. The rides looked lovingly maintained but so very old. I have no idea why I felt emotional standing there but I did.

“Can I help you?” The voice jolts me back to reality. I see a tall thin man advancing. His arm is in a sling but there’s a manner about his approach that tells me I am about to meet the owner. For just a second I think of him with a striped shirt and armbands. Maybe a straw hat and a bamboo cane. Then the image is gone.

“…the gate was open,” I say. I do NOT want to be sent out of this place yet. “These things are beautiful.”

He looks at me for a long second. I suspect he’s formulating an opinion as to whether I am really a gang-banger cleverly disguised as a genial kinda round Canadian tourist with a camera.

“How old is this park?” I ask. I figure the bestdefense is to get someone to talk about themself.

The look continues for a few seconds and then suddenly his face cracks into a smile and I realize I’m in.

I have met Bob Astin.

“When I was four,” he says with the air of someone who has told this story before, “I came here with my dad. I asked him to buy it for me. He didn’t. So when I was 27, I bought it myself. Been here ever since.”

I am swept up for just a second in how much I immediately like this man. I recall riding merry-go-rounds as a kid and wondering how we could get one to fit into our living room. I remember the sound of the music and the gentle up and down motion of the horse. I remember looking up and watching myself in the mirror and scrunching my eyes up tight and rocking back in the saddle. Yeah. I remember the magic of a carousel. But I grew out of it. Bob didn’t.

He’s warming to his subject now. He takes me to the merry-go-round.

“These horses here?” he says with a daddy pride, “All original. Each one unique. Each one carved by an artist from wood. No additions. Been here since 1925.”

Is it wrong for me to think that this is so cool I can hardly stand it? I look at these horses. So many of them are cracked and lovingly reassembled. They, like the San Antonio Missions, are time travelers. How many little hands have touched these creatures? I cannot stop my own hand from running over the pitted paint and the cracks.

“Kids,” says Bob. “They climb on the legs. They break them.” He shrugs, apparently deciding that children are a force of nature. He doesn’t seem to mind much.

I am blown away by the thought that most of the children who rode here when it was brand new are dead now. Maybe they grew into men who died on a lonely beach during the second world war. Did some go off to nearby NASA and help put a man on the moon?

As I look at these horses, I start thinking about how I am going to convey their stark beauty in a graphic. These are hand-carved horses. Each one is unique. Each one hand painted. These horses served as templates for their modern counterparts. These are the originals.

Bob and I talk for a while. How long, I do not know. But we are chatting like old friends. I suspect it’s because we both get the whole merry-go-round thing. Neither of us has forgotten the sensation of friendly motion and the wind in our hair and each ride that ended too soon. We both see these horses as utterly wonderful things.

I ask him if he will pose for me on the merry-go-round.

“People always asking me to do that,” he says. “Don’t know why.”

But his tone sparkles just a little and we both know why.

“Look straight at the camera, Bob,” I say.

“I’m lookin’ at ya,” he says. He isn’t sure whether to smile or not so there’s this odd expression on his face. It’s perfect.

I wanted the image to be a little off center to draw the eye. I want the image to be odd because the subject is odd. The background is black and white while he is in color to bring the modern man into the historical context. The flag is a wonderful background component, so I allowed a little color here.

The horses are the stars of the show, though. I cannot stop looking at them.

My wife comes and reminds me that our very patient travel companions are waiting.

I smile and nod at Bob.

He smiles at me and for an instant I see at once the face of the kid who wanted to have his own amusement park…and the man who bought one.

The Missions of San Antonio

I have a picture in my mind: there’s this little Franciscan monk wearing a black robe. He has a fringe of hair around an odd-looking bald spot. The sun is hot, maybe a hundred and ten degrees. This guy is lugging fifty and sixty pound rocks across an empty clearing and piling them carefully one on top of the other. Maybe he pauses to take a drink of tepid water. Maybe he takes a second to wipe his brow. Maybe he prays.

As my “eye camera” draws back from a perspective in the clouds somewhere, I see many of these dark shapes moving across a desolate clearing carved out of a savage desert. What are they doing? Why are they doing what they’re doing?

They are building Missions – churches. They are literally building San Antonio.

There are four Missions here. They were all built in the 1700’s – I imagine by sweaty little guys in black robes with some help from the local Indian population.

These Missions are amazing to me. It’s history you can touch. And it’s history with the magical ability to touch you back. You can put your hand on the same warm rock that some anonymous person placed there over three centuries ago. I defy anyone to say that’s not magic.

Sheree and I packed up the cameras and crept out of our lodgings three mornings in a row to get these pictures. Even before the sun comes up, you can feel that Texas heat the instant you step out of the door of your air-conditioned home. It’s not a nasty heat. It’s an enveloping warmth.

When the sun starts to come up, the air fills with this wonderful energy and the sky is painted with such vibrant colors you can hardly snap the shots fast enough. (Photoshop users can make a dramatic sky much moreso by going to Image> Adjustments> Contrast and Brightness and working with those “Oooo” and “Ahhhhh” inducing sliders. A good rule of thumb is to move them only a little. Remember that you are simply trying to enhance the sky…not make it look like Armageddon.)

Sheree, being an intrepid sort, suggested we go back to one of the Missions for sunset.
I wasn’t getting anything that night that made my heart flutter until it was almost dark. Green lights from the trees nearby came on. They bathed the Mission with this other-worldly glow. I set the ISO on the camera to 100, set it on a concrete block (I don’t carry a tripod) and used the Self Timer feature to eliminate any camera shake. The exposure must have been thirty seconds or more. But when the shutter finally clicked closed, I had a wonderful image.

There’s really no way to capture what the Missions feel like at night or in the early morning. When I look at these images, I remember the peace drifting through the air around them. You can feel that these Missions have been here for centuries…and they will still be here long after we’re gone.

I remember the multitude of cats that crept out in the early morning hours to keep us company. I remember the excitement we both felt, standing in the middle of a field, watching the sun slowly creep along the stonework.

And I remember, most of all, thinking of all those little guys in black robes, sweating under an unforgiving sun to build a monument to their God in the middle of a desert.

Peering Near-Sightedly at the REAL Texas

What is it about Texas?

Something gets under your skin here. It’s an infection you want to get. Maybe it’s the wide open spaces. It could be the casual beauty of the cities or the pleasing Tex Mex blending of pastel colors. It might even be all the history you can touch at the Alamo, the Missions – all the famous faces and all the legendary places.

But I think the real secret of Texas isn’t the people. It’s not the history.

It’s the Bar-B-Q.

Texas Bar-B-Q is one of man’s great creations. Forget the wheel. The internal combustion engine? Pffft.

I invite you to give Texas Bar-B-Q just a few seconds of your consideration. Think about a plastic plate loaded down with enough glistening meat to make a vegetarian run screaming the other way. Think about savory sweet sauce, the kind of fatty juicy pork ribs that give your doctor nightmares. Consider thick slices of melt-in-your mouth brisket. Think about sinking your teeth unrepentantly into meat that falls off the bone…and being surrounded by other unrepentant carnivores doing exactly the same thing as you think to yourself “These are my people.”

I love Texas Bar-B-Q.

I love that the napkins come right off the paper towel roll and they expect you to help yourself. I love that the meat is heaped up on plates until they strain under the weight. In short, I love Texas Bar-B-Q…and I especially love Texas Bar-B-Q served up at Bob’s Cook House in Weimar (which is pronounced, with flagrant disregard for the English language as “WEE-mer”) Texas. (I’m pretty sure this is where the Queen eats when she’s in town.)

You’ll have to hunt for it. And when you find it, you’ll only see the sign that reads “Bob’s Cook House” if someone remembered to prop it up against the building. But wveryone in Weimar knows where Bob’s is. Just ask.

Treasures like Bob’s are worth looking for. They are worth hunting for. They are worth flying thousands of miles, renting a car and traveling through 104 degree heat for.

Chances are that Bob himself will be on hand to greet you with a big smile and a completely unaffected Texas drawl. (That's the aforementioned "Bob himself" to the left.) Both of the times we went there (yes…we went back…you betcha!) he told us about something that was on the menu that they were out of. Who cares? Bob’s is about food. Lots of food.

If you time your arrival right (and you HAVE to time it right because Bob now closes shop at 2:00 in the afternoon “due to football season”) you’ll see various members of the Weimar football team arrive for lunch. I stand to be corrected, but I think roughly half the team is related in some way to Bob. These guys look like they stepped out of a “small town Texas” movie. They are polite, they nod affably to a table full of strangers from Canada, and chat in muted tones with sweet looking cheerleaders and each other. They don’t throw things. They don’t swear and they tuck into the food with almost as much gusto as I do.

A policeman was chowing down when we got there the first time and warning Bob that the Bar-B-Q was making him sleepy and his crime-busting instincts would be dulled – which may or may not be a big deal in Weimer.

I know what he was talking about. Somewhere between the last morsel of brisket and the final scrapings of potato salad, a happy little “meat sweat” broke out on my cheekbones. This is the direct result of being unwilling to throw any of this feast away…but also not quite having enough room inside me to put it all.

In Houston and San Antonio, I had the sense that many of the people we met were “putting Texas on” for the tourists. Does that sound strange? Let me put it this way: it felt like a lot of the people we met were trying to act like they thought we expected Texans to behave.

Exaggerated accents and an almost annoying determination to work the word “y’all” into the conversation as often as possible made me suspect that most of them were really from New England.

But there’s no pretention at Bob’s. They took the time to get to know us, they greeted us like old friends upon our return and they fed us more than any mere mortal could be expected to ingest at any one sitting.

You see this woman to the right? It was a week between visits. She not only remembered us. But she also remembered what we ordered.

I don’t think Bob’s has a website. I only have their email because they wrote it on the back of a business card and asked almost shyly if we would send them copies of the pictures we took.

If you want to spend a few minutes having the kind of authentic Texas experience you were hoping for when you booked your flight…you would be nuts to pass by Weimar and not take your tummy to Bob’s Cook House.

Just make sure you get there before two if it’s during football season. I understand football season is a "Texas thing."

So is Bob's.

Picturing Faith

I am a Catholic in recovery. When I was a kid, people thought Mass had to be said in Latin. (Apparently God spoke only one language back then.) I sat through many a Latin Mass on insufferably hot afternoons, looking out the window, tugging at my collar and telling myself stories set far, far away in lands where things were much more interesting. I was only ten, but I clearly remember wondering how it could possibly be worship to God if I didn’t know what I was saying, what the priest was talking about or what the congregation was singing. If I didn’t know what I was saying why would that mean anything to God?

I believe in God and Jesus and I know exactly WHO my Lord is. I get all that. But the whole Catholic thing is a life long source of fascination to me. This fascination only grows stronger here in San Antonio where they take the whole thing very seriously.

The Jesus you see depicted in the Missions and the churches here isn’t calmly looking heavenward with impassive eyes as spikes are driven into his bloodless hands. This Jesus suffers. The depictions of him being literally tortured to death show bone and blood and pain. Canadian church ladies would faint dead away if they saw what the Spanish have created here. I've decided against posting the really bloody pics here since kids might be seeing them. But they could have been drawn out of a Stephen King novel.

The Spanish Jesus isn’t white either. Going back one more time to all those years in Catholic school, I could never figure out why Jesus had blue eyes. I could see no reason why he had the same skin color as me either, when he wasn’t born anywhere near Canada. The Spanish Jesus can be brown or white or even a little on the yellow side. I like this a lot.

San Antonio is full of churches. And the churches are full of art and people and interesting pictures just waiting for some guy with a camera to come along and shoot to his heart’s content. Just do so with a little respect and there is a very good possibility some frustrated but hulking paritioner won't pound you into the ground.

So I did.

Shooting inside churches, regardless of your religious beliefs, calls for a few changes to the way you (or I) would ordinarily do things.

1) You need to be gentle in the use of your flash. A flash can be disruptive to people who are praying and I think photographers have to realize that, on at least one plane, they are guests in someone else’s house. Most cameras have a museum setting that allows you to take shots without using your flash. Yours may be called “candlelight” or “night portrait.”

2) Since churches often have really low light conditions, you may want to set your camera on a jam or the back of a bench, and use your self-timer. This allows you to set your aperture as narrow as you like. You don’t care how long the exposure is since the self timer means you don’t have to worry about camera shake. Remember that flash often blows detail and atmosphere right out of a subject.

3) Think about how other people have photographed the same thing you’re after…and don’t shoot that way. Try very hard to see a statue from a new angle. Look at it from the floor or above. Change the angle radically. Try skewing the picture, try messing with your White Balance settings to get new and wonderful effects. The picture to the left is a good example. With a straight on shot, the boy is a very minor component. Changing my angle allowed me to show a boy contemplating spikes as an out of focus Jesus is murdered in the background.

4) When shooting statues, try to use one facet of the artwork: a hand or a smaller component of the overall picture. If your intent is to take a good picture of a complete statue, you are simply taking a picture of someone else’s artwork. Try taking a new view of what they have done to create completely new art.

5) Take LOTS of pictures. I say this a lot. But it’s really important. Who cares if you take a hundred shots to get one good one? You still have that good one. It’s digital. Relax. Delete the rest.

Houston? We Have A Problem...

If you want to get out of Houston (and believe me, this morning we were MOTIVATED) you have a couple of options. You can either take a really expensive bus tour to NASA…or you get on a city bus, take a fifty minute ride and get there for about a buck and a half each way.

We opted for the bus. We nearly always opt for the bus. Yup. It’s a whole lot less expensive. But it’s also a great way to see the “real” city. When we get there we aren’t tied to some tour director’s schedule. (Sheree and I are nearly always the last ones back on the bus since we are taking pictures and chatting to people and stuff. We have survived many a steely gaze from tour guides.)

When we go on our own, we can take our time and take as many pictures as we want.

I remember reading about the “Number One Way To Annoy Your Traveling Companion When You Go To NASA." You are supposed to get yourself lost and keep repeating the phrase “Houston…we have a problem” until your pal punches you.

Still there’s no ignoring the fact that this is where history was made. It’s incredible that a bunch of people decided their goal was going to be to put a man on the moon and they did. They were using computers with a tiny fraction of the power in this Dell laptop I am writing on right now. They communicated with vacuum tubes and did many of their calculations on slide rules.

And they put a guy on the moon.

Amazing.

NASA is well aware of its historical significance. Everywhere there’s John Williams-like music playing. It’s stately and full of self-importance. At first, it’s pretty cool. After a few hours it gets annoying. After a few more hours you are inwardly wondering what would happen if you crept into the control room and switched the John Williams stuff for Bavaria Bob’s Oompah Band.

There’s a tram available to take you around "private" NASA places. You go through a security check that makes no sense at all. Here’s why: you remove your belt, empty your change and make sure there’s no metal anywhere. In order to do this, you need to put your backpack on a table. No one looks at this. No one opens it. No one looks inside it.

Once I passed through the metal detector, the round bored looking security guard handed me my bulging backpack and pointed the way to the tram upon which I would shortly be heading for the very heart of NASA. The fact that there could be twenty pounds of explosives and ten semi-automatic weapons in that backpack instead of camera equipment apparently never enters anyone’s mind.

Ah well.

The tour is interesting. We get to see the places where they try to make astronauts in training puke (otherwise known as a 'mission simulation') and we see real rockets and pictures of endless astronauts. There is a point in the tour where the bus stops in front of a pretty ordinary looking clearing with a few benches surrounded by trees. They guide explains that this place is a monument to people who died while in the space program. There are a lot of trees and for once John Williams is taking a break and the silence actually feels much more reverent to me. Say what ou want, but these people believed in something and they died for it.

We see genuinely historic places. Here is the room they used when the first man on the moon. It was RIGHT here that they ran the mission from. It feels like something out of the sixties: old furniture, all light orange. A bland room is in front of us behind a big glass wall. There's a bright red phone that probably connects to Someone Really Important. It is full of old looking computer equipment. When you look at the equipment you can almost imagine tapes spinning on reels.

As the presenter ensures we are absolutlely positively "no doubt about it" aware of the history that was made here, I stand at the back of the room. I become aware of a rough texture under my fingers. It's that wallpapery crap they used to put on walls. And great strips have been torn off.

My wife is a believer in the "Super Conscious." That is the notion that ideas occur to multiple people at the same time. I realize with a start that hundreds of tourists have stood here and torn little pieces of wallpaper off so they can take a bit of Mission Control with them.

I look around me. The security cameras are facing other directions. The guide is looking the other way. I tear a tiny scrap of wallpaper crap off as I look intently at the guide, nodding attentively. I have someone in mind who will be really excited to have this.

NASA makes for a great three hour visit, we decide as we wait for the 24whatever under one hundred and ten degree heat.

When we get back to the hotel, the news is full of dire warnings from New Orleans about Gustav. We get a message that our Amtrak train has been cancelled. We have two options: stay in Houston or rent a car and drive to San Antonio.

We leave tomorrow morning.