Five mundane scenes photographed this afternoon while driving through downtown Wasilla

This is one of those nights when I feel I must take a little bit of a break from blogging - not a complete break, just a little break. So I am just going to post five mundance scenes that I photographed this afternoon while driving through downtown Wasilla.

Here I am, headed towards the Post Office, directly ahead at the next intersection. I am hoping I will find a check in my box. I will be disappointed.

Here I am, approaching Wasilla Lake. Hmmm... a few hours later... right now, to be precise... I will be overcome with an irresistible urge to return to this place and buy a banana split - or at least a small cone, dipped in chocolate.

I don't know why. But I am now being overcome with such an urge. I had better hurry up and finish this post, so I can go.

Here I am, passing by Wasilla Lake.

And here is a snowplow, keeping the road clear for me.

I needed an orange, so I stopped at Carr's and bought five. On the walk back to the car, I was thrilled to see a train rolling down the track. What could be better than that? Then along came a school bus - train and school bus together - that's what.

How could a man be so fortunate as I?

Update 10:51 PM: You will notice that even though the title says "Five mundane scenes" this scene actually makes six. Earlier, I had left it out, because I figured one school bus was enough. However, I just returned from eating the banana split (I went whole hog) I bought at Dairy Queen. Things look different after you eat a banana split - it makes you feel like there should be two school buses, afterall. 

So here is this school bus, taken when I was directly in front of Metro Cafe.

Lynxton is ill, gets three shots; boys who love trains; January ends in a snowy heatwave

When I drove into Anchorage Friday evening to pick Margie up from her week of babysitting, Lynxton was sick with a viral infection. It was hard on him and we could not explain to him why it was so. It was also hard on his parents, as he needed round-the-clock attention.

So we brought Kalib and Jobe home with us. They brought Thomas the Train and a few of his friends. And yes, we spent some time playing with the electric HO Thomas that their Aunt Suji had given us at Christmas as well, but for some reason, I forgot to take pictures. I shot this and the next few that follow with my iPhone.

Every now and then, as I would be sitting at my computer working, or maybe just goofing around, my office door would fly open and the boys would come bounding in. "Grampa!" Kalib would tug at me. "Your train! Go fast!" So I would have to get up and turn the train on.

Invaribly, by the time I returned to my chair, they had taken it over. Here they are, watching the train from my chair as Jimmy, the black cat, takes a drink from the large aquarium.

Oh, my goodness. The large orange fish in the large aquarium is staring at me RIGHT NOW! He wants to eat. "Get up out of that chair, Bill, and feed me!"

Kalib keeps his eyes fast on the train as it goes around, but Jobe gets distracted by Jim, who has finished his drink and is now looking for a good place to nap.

Kalib continues to watch the train. Jobe follows Jimmy with his eyes as Jimmy jumps up onto a crude cabinet I made from fibreboard. There, he will curl up and take a nap.

This morning, after getting nowhere near enough sleep, I had to get up and drive Margie back to Anchorage to spend another week babysitting. The boys had returned home yesterday, after their parents picked them up from us at the movie theatre.

When we first arrived, Lynxton was not home. He had gone to see the doctor with his dad. I hung around for awhile. Finally, Lynxton returned. He had gotten three shots. Kalib watched Thomas the Train on TV - or maybe Thomas the Train watched Kalib.

So I drove home alone, through a light snow flurry. The temperature had really warmed up. It was 5 above. It felt so warm and balmy. They say it could go up to 20 soon, maybe even warmer. After going down as cold as -65, it also warmed up in the Interior today - into the -30's and -40's.

Yes, I also got my daily school bus picture, my daily raven, and my daily moose, but I am tired and this is enough for now.

I feel like I might be getting what Lynxton has. If so, at least I can understand why.

Margie and I go to the Anchorage Premiere of "Big Miracle." Now I must figure out how to blog it as I saw it

The other day, I visited the website for the movie, Big Miracle, scheduled for national release Friday and in the storyline read this:

"Local newsman Adam Carlson (Krasinski) can’t wait to escape the northern tip of Alaska for a bigger market. But just when the story of his career breaks, the world comes chasing it, too. With an oil tycoon, heads of state and hungry journalists descending upon the frigid outpost, the one who worries Adam the most is Rachel Kramer (Barrymore). Not only is she an outspoken environmentalist, she’s also his ex-girlfriend."

Good grief! Except for the parts about "can't wait to escape the northern tip of Alaska" and "the one who worries Adam the most is Rachel Kramer (Barrymore)... his ex-girlfriend," it was like I had just read about myself.

In fact, among the real people of this earth, there is no one but me who those lines could have described.

I also read in the Anchorage Daily News about how all kinds of Alaskans, including our Congressional Delegation, had attended the Washington, D.C. premiere. According to the article, just about all the Alaskans there had come in a bit skeptical but had left with praises for the movie.

The article also reported that there would be a "by invitation only" premiere in Anchorage on Sunday, January 29, in the Tikahtnu Stadium 16 theatres. I do not want to sound like a petty person, but I felt a bit miffed. When I visited the movie set by invitation in November of 2010, my book, Gift of the Whale: The Iñupiat Bowhead Hunt - A Sacred Tradition, was everywhere. People kept bringing it to me for autographs and describing it as their "Bible" from everything to creating sets to costumes, and for helping them to understand what actually happened out there.

Yet, they had not sent me an invitation to the premiere. So I sent an email to director Ken Kwapis, who had treated me very well on the set and who I found to be most likable and down to earth. He immediately emailed back, apologized for the oversight, and let me know I should receive tickets online before the day ended.

The tickets came. So here I am with Margie standing in the concession line to pick up the free popcorn and drinks that came with the tickets. She is rubbing her hands together because they are cold. It has been pretty cold lately. In our neighborhood, it was -34 F yesterday morning and, at the warmest part of the day, struggled to break -20.

Of course, it was much colder in the cold parts of the state - Fairbanks, down into the mid - 50's and when I checked last night at 10:00 PM, Fort Yukon was -60.

When we left our house today, with Kalib and Jobe strapped into their car seats, it was -18. In downtown Wasilla, it was -7 and at Tikahtnu it was a pretty warm -2. Still, as we unbuckled the boys and turned them over to their parents, then walked from the mid-parking lot to the movie, Margie's hands got cold.

As we walked down the hall to Theatre 1, I spotted Tara Sweeney, mother of Ahmaogak Sweeney - the young Iñupiaq boy who played in one of the starring roles.

This is him: the young star, Ahmaogak Sweeney, who spoke briefly to the audience before the movie started. In his hands he holds a short message from Director Kwapis, who could not attend. Ahmaogak read the statement for him. I should have recorded it or taken notes, but, without quoting, I can report that Kwapis stated that he had never been to Alaska before the shooting of Big Miracle, but now he is determined to come back. He found Alaskans to be warm, friendly, and hospitable people and was amazed at the acting talent this state produced.

Of the actors, none - not even Drew Barrymore, Ted Danson, John Krasinksi, or Dermot Mulroney - outshone young Ahmaogak. He did great. He added a big dose of warmth and enthusiasm to the screen. I would not be at all surprised to see more of him in future films.

My favorite scene of the entire movie was the opener, where young Nathan sat with his grandfather Malik in the front of an umiak as the whaling crew paddled toward a bowhead. Awesome! In real life, Malik, Ralph Ahkivgak, was a most highly respected and successful Iñupiaq harpooner who brought his talents to a number of different crews. The movie Malik was not the real Malik, but a fictitious character who carried the real Malik's name.

He was played by John Pingayak, a Cup'ik from the southwest Alaska village of Chevak. Pingayak also did a superb job. I respect and admire him greatly, yet I could not help but want to hear an Iñupiaq voice, singing the Iñupiaq way, backed up by Iñupiaq drums.

I just couldn't help it - I wanted to hear those drums. I wanted to hear those Iñupiat voices.

This takes nothing away from John Pingayak. He performed superbly. His character had genuine Native depth and soul. I just wanted to hear Iñupiaq songs in Iñupiaq voice, with Iñupiaq drums. So beautiful. So powerful - These voices and drums should be heard in a movie about Iñupiat people.

Ahmaogak is being photographed by Bill Roth of the Anchorage Daily News. who I first met when he came to Barrow to photograph the rescue effort for the paper.

Going into the movie, I figured there was two different ways that I could view it. I could view it as someone who experienced the rescue operation from beginning to end, someone who has spent a lot of time in Barrow, who has come to love the place and who knows what everything looks like and where everything sits. If I were to view it this way, then I knew I could not help but be disappointed.

Or I could just relax, kick back, understand that it is impossible to make a feature film based on a real event that actually unfolds the way the real event did. I could watch it as a movie, made to entertain. So that is what I decided to do. I would not stack it up against what I experienced and what I know, but would watch it to be entertained, to be told a hopefully good story, even if not a wholly factual story. There was one thing that I felt the movie had to do. It might not be able to go deep into Iñupiat culture, it might have many non-Iñupiaq actors playing Iñupiats, it might not get every little thing just right, but it had to show respect to Iñupiat people and culture - their hunting way of life.

The book that served as the starting point for the movie, Freeing the Whales - How the Media Created the World's Greatest Non-Event, by Tom Rose, did not show respect to the Iñupiat. It did not show respect to Barrow. It did not show respect to hunters. It did not show respect for truth. It was a terrible book. It sensationalized almost all that it touched. I say, "almost all," because it did show repect for a Colonel in the National Guard and a woman from the Reagan White House who fell in love and got married.

I'll give Tom Rose that, but not much more.

Early on, I heard that the movie storyline had broken away from the book upon which it was based. That fact, coupled with the fact that my friend Othneil Oomittuk, who I have great respect for, and the open warmth that I found in Mr. Kwapis and that I heard that a young Iñupiat, Ahmaogak Sweeney, had a big role, gave me hope that the movie would paint a different picture than did the book.

Here is Ahmaogak, after the movie, posing with a movie goer.

Indeed, the movie did paint a different picture than did the book. Even with its fictional inaccuracies, it did show respect to the Iñupiat whaling and hunting culture. I think viewers who know nothing about Iñupiat culture will leave the theatre with a warm feeling towards it. It was greatly entertaining and I enjoyed it - but to fully enjoy it, I had to put myself out of myself.

Here is Ahmaogak, after the movie, posing with his mother and with actors Liam Boles and Maeve Blake, who played the Lower 48 brother and sister, Cooper and Shayna Dobler, who watched the rescue on TV.

So I did enjoy the movie and I would recommend it to anyone, especially families - it is good family entertainment. Afterward, Margie and I stopped in at the nearby Red Robin for dinner. As we ate, there were some things that I could not stop myself from going back inside myself and wondering about. 

I won't give anything away, but there was one scene that if it had happened that way would have resulted in many fatalties among the rescuers. That was a little hard for me to watch, because I kept expecting everyone to get killed, even though I knew they wouldn't be.

And there's one more thing that kept bothering me a bit. It is a small thing, and again, it might sound petty. At the end of the film, at the end of the credits, they had a long list of thank yous. They could have listed Gift of the Whale, but they didn't.

One of the most dramatic scenes of the movie took place at night. Again, I will not give anything away, but to a signifcant degree that scene was partially accurate. It wasn't 70 below, it wasn't 50 below, but the whales were, indeed, in dire danger and their fate rested with two fellows from Minnesota. No one in all the media that had come up from elsewhere understood the situation and they were all back on land in Barrow, feasting at "Amigos" - Pepe's in real life. One video team, the same Adam Carlson, played by John Krasinski that I referred to at the beginning and the blond reporter, Jill Jerard had figured it out and got out onto the ice in time to document the event.

In real life, the media had also all retreated to Pepe's, except for myself and Jeff Berliner, a reporter for UPI. When the event upon this dramatic scene was based happened, it was documented by one media camera and one only. Mine. The picture is in Gift of the Whale. Without that picture, the filmmakers would have had little idea what the scene even looked like.

When I was on the set, the filmmakers let me know that they extensively used Gift of the Whale as a guide. So it might be petty of me, but I think that Gift of the Whale, with me as author and photographer, should have been named in the "thank you" part of the credits.

It would have been a very simple thing to do.

When I learned the movie was being made, I came up with a rough plan for this blog: I would dig up my negatives of the rescue, edit and scan them and then, beginning on the day that the movie is released, I would blog it, so that I could show it as I experienced it.

Recently, I had all but given up on that idea. I no longer have a working film scanner. There are cheap ones, but the quality of their scans is cheap, too. Towards the end of last year, I priced the good ones and there was no way I could buy one. Plus, I have been so busy. That plan has seemed impossible.

But now I have resurrected it. I have until Friday to figure out how to do it. Ideas are cooking in my head.

I might not spread it out over two weeks, but I am going to blog the gray whale rescue, as I experienced and witnessed it, as best I can.

On the drive back, Margie and I saw this tipped-over car at the side of the highway. I hope no one was badly hurt. I shudder to think of what it could be like to be driving in a light jacket and then get trapped in weather such as this, which at this place was about -10.

Complete index to the rescue series that followed:

Part 1: Context bowhead hunt

Part 2: Roy finds the whales; Malik

Part 3: Scouting trip

Part 4: NBC on the ice

Part 5: To rescue or euthanize

Part 6: Governor Cowper, ice punch, chainsaw holes

Part 7: Malik provides caribou for dinner

Part 8: CNN learns home is sacred place

Part 9: World's largest jet; Screw Tractor

Part 10: Think like a whale

Part 11: Portrait: Billy Adams and Malik

Part 12: Onboard Soviet icebreakers

Part 13: Malik walks with whales, says goodbye

Part 14: Rescue concludes

Part 15: Epilogue

David Alan Harvey Workshop, entry 21 - final: David himself - his two predictions for me; thank you, John Gladdy, for bringing me to the workshop

This is David Alan Harvey himself, and he was tired when I took this picture. He says he doesn't get tired, but he does. He just doesn't take much note of it or let it stop him or slow him down - or stop him from playing, either. "Work hard, play hard," he says, and he does. Sometimes, I think he does more than any other human being I have ever met - certainly more than any other photographer. In general, I have met no harder working group of people than photographers. I am at a loss as to how he does it. In just the time since the workshop, he has taught another major workshop, finished off two National Geographic pieces - one on Rio De Janeiro and one on what lies just beyond the porch of his Outer Banks, North Carolina, beach-front home - a project which he also turned into an online workshop.

For that workshop, he brought the editor of National Geographic online and also took his readers inside National Geographic to assist in the final selection of the opening image - the first time in National Geographic's history when they allowed pictures that were soon to appear in their magazine to be shown in another forum. He also  finished off the shooting for a personal book on Rio, made that into a very intense online workshop during which he regularly made multiple daily posts and continually responded to the lively dialogue those posts generated. Throughout all this, he kept Burn Magazine alive and flowing with new talent and, again, joined in and stayed current with all the Burn dialogue those posts generated.

Whew!

I am exhausted!

On the surface, especially during the early stages of a critique, he can sometimes seem a little bit gruff, but he makes up for it later and he gives of himself to other photographers more than does any other photographer that I know of. I am one of the many photographers to whom he has given. Of course, I have known about Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey since at least 1978, when he was named Magazine Photographer of the Year. Truth is, though, over the past couple of decades, I have lived very isolated from the larger world of photography.

I once kept track of National Geographic, Life, Time, American Photo, Aperture and other photographic publications studiously and also who was doing what photographically. Yet, I lived a life built around the tiny circulation, photographically-oriented publications that I either created or inherited for a time here in Alaska. I have had very little interaction with other photographers - including the talented photojournalists living and working here in Alaska.

I lived in my own world, occassionally making short forays into the larger world, but never staying long enough to go anywhere in it. I did not lose my larger ambitions, but I had no idea how to focus them and they always seemed to get drowned out by the urgency generated by the demands of the tiny-circulation publications that I have been engaged in.

Then, in June of 2008, I took a bad fall while acting recklessly in search of a better angle. I lost my right shoulder, got it replaced by titanium and then for a year was unable to do much of anything but walk around snapping left-handed photos with a pocket camera given to me by my children. This happened just when I had begun two big projects and was poised to make some decent money and start digging my way out of the economic hole I remain engulfed in.

Unable to do much, I spent more time wandering about on the computer. One day, I wandered onto Burn Magazine. I was stunned by the quality of the work, and inspired by the moving force behind it all... that force being David Alan Harvey, multiplied by the talent and force of all those other photographers - emerging, iconic and struggling; young, middle-aged and growing old - who joined him in the work.

When David started Burn, he had been advised by some in the know not to allow comments and dialogue, but he did and so all these diverse and globally-dispersed people became a community, even a family of sorts - myself, Frostfrog, included. As is the case in all communities and families, contention sometimes arises among us, but it almost never drops into that gratuitously mean and spiteful contention common to other dialogue boards. We are all there because we love photography. Those of us who are photographers want to better and advance ourselves, others want to better understand or even to spread love among the Mass of all Civilians of the Audience of this earth. 

And so it was that, in as grim a moment as I have experienced in this life, the head of that family, David Alan Harvey sought to comfort me. At the beginning of this series, I told about the two predictions that he made for me, both of which seemed impossible at the time - one, that he would see me in New York within a year; two, that a new muse would come into my life to fill the void left behind by the suicide of my beloved Muse Soundarya, who chose to follow her husband Anil, who had just died in a car crash, into whatever lies beyond this life.

Obviously, the first prediction came true - in large part because of another member of the Burn family. When I began this series, I told how an individual had clicked onto the Paypal button that I put up on my original blog, Wasilla, Alaska by 300 and then some and had made a contribution to this blog large enough to cover a round-trip ticket from Anchorage to New York. I did not know when I might take that trip, but then it just happened that David scheduled the Loft workshop for one of the rare times when I would have money enough to justify the expense. So I came.

The donor has told me he is okay with me identifying him: John Gladdy, a member of the Burn family and a most talented photographer. His contribution? $666.66. I know this number will horrify some readers, but let me assure all: he may have spent much of his time walking on the hard edge of life, but John Gladdy has a good and generous heart. He is a good person.

Thank you, John Gladdy. I would never have made it to the Loft Workshop without your most generous encouragement.

How about the second part of David's prediction? That I would find a new muse?

No one will ever again step into the place that Soundarya occupies in my life. No one. That place is hers and hers alone. That said, I must say that her sister, Sujitha, whose wedding in Pune, India, I am scheduled to attend in March, did step in to help carry me through to this point. While it goes without saying, but I want to say it, my wife, Margie, has sacrificied so much to allow me to do what I have done, has always been there for me, has always supported and encouraged me and has been often my only sounding board before publishing. When she was young and beautiful (she remains beautiful), she would almost never allow me to photograph her, as a photographer would normally expect his muse to do, but, yes, she also deserves the title of Muse.

There are many definitions of "muse" in the dictionary, both as verb and noun. Among them, these:

...a guiding spirit... a source of inspiration... a muse is a spirit or source that inspires an artist... muses help inspire people to do their best...

As of recent, who has inspired me the most? Who has most pushed me to do my best?

David Alan Harvey.

So, David, you may not be a goddess of Greek Mythology, but you sure as hell have inspired me; you have helped to keep me going when I felt I could not. Every day, you push me to better myself. In this sense, you are the fulfilment of your own prediction. You are Muse - to me, and to how many others?

If any readers wish to learn more about David, the projects he has done, the books he has made, Burn has the links to get you going in all the right directions.

This series is now over. I did spend two more days in New York and, of course, I did fly home and that ought to be a Logbook entry. I may or may not blog something from those two days and trip home. If I do, then I will surely muse a bit about the experience, what I have learned and how it affects me now.

David Alan Harvey Workshop, entry 20: Farewell to those I experienced the workshop with

In this series, I have covered the workshop as I experienced it. I have only showed you glimpses of the other ten photographers that went through it with me. In their own different ways, each went out and had experiences every bit as intense as mine. They were sometimes discouraged, sometimes elated, but they all had a love for photography, a belief in their own ability and the desire to make themselves better. Each persevered to succeed and complete their essays. Each essay went beyond the normal scope of what one would be normally be expected to accomplish in five days.

I came expecting some rivalries to develop among us, as that is what almost always happens when creative, ambitious, driven, people get together to pursue anything. Yet, if any rivalry developed, I did not detect it. All wanted to succeed, but all wanted everyone else to succeed as well. During the critiques, there were no mean nor snide remarks, but even criticism was delivered in supportive ways.

Although our social time together was pretty much limited to lunch breaks, a sense of camaradarie grew among us. I know that cynics will find all this hard to believe, but that's how it was.

I have told you about the artistry of Edite Haberman, talking here with Michael Lloyd Young and Tracie Williams. Hopefully you have seen her beautiful work of art in the class slideshow on the Hassidic community of Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. It was a vastly different piece of work than was the essay on a Latin American slaughterhouse that she used to introduce herself to us at the beginning of the workshop.

Originally, she presented the slaughterhouse as photojournalism, but by the time David finished removing the ones he thought ought to go, what we saw was an artistic rendering of a slaughterhouse - at once horrific and beautiful.

Edite is a nightowl like me and on a couple of ocassions we have found ourselves shooting emails and photographs back and forth at 2:00 and 3:00 AM for me - 3:00 and 4:00 AM for her in San Francisco. She participated in a team documentation of San Francisco on winter solstice and recently finished hanging a solo show at the World Affairs Council, where she is slated to speak at the same podium where Madeline Albright and Barbara Boxer have spoken.

I have already written a fair amount about Zun Lee (here posing for Carolyn Beller) who I got to spend a bit more time with during the workshop than I did with anyone other than my apartment mates. Zun has also left a number of comments. Anyone who has followed this blog knows that as the workshop drew close to the end, I seemed to be irreversibly careening down Humiliation Road.

As I careened, I kept thinking that even if I did not pull out of it, then I could console myself with the knowledge that, without trying, I had encouraged Zun, who had been ready to back away from shooting his powerful essay on black fathers, until he saw my introduction essay on my own father.

On the final shooting night, Zun and I rode the subway together from Brooklyn to Manhattan. As we parted, he stated confidently that I was about to go out and shoot something good. I was not certain, but took confidence from his confidence.

His essay has caught a good amount of attention. He has built on it since returning to Toronto and has undertaken new projects as well. My gut feeling is that Zun is going to far as photographer.

In my entire series, I posted only one image that spoke to how painful the workshop experience can be when a photographer goes out, shoots her heart out, brings her images to class, feels she has little to show and then sees most of what she did show fail to survive the critique.

As we saw, Tracie Williams recovered strongly from that and produced an exceptional essay of flash portraits from Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street.

She is still there, covering the movement. I received an email from her the other day. She said she had "been living some crazy ass nomadic Occupy lifestyle, which, needless to say is a bit unstable."

What we saw at the workshop was only the beginning of her essay. I look foward to seeing the completed work - in a book, I hope.

I have no idea what Isabela Eseverri has been up to since the workshop, or where she is. I did receive a note from her the other day, to give me her ok to run her work in the slideshow, but she did not say anything more than that. I checked her blog, but it has not been updated since September.

Her Latina essay was superb and sexy and so my hopes are high that, wherever she is, she is shooting something good.

Mark Bennington, whose essay caused us to wonder just what secrets are hidden behind the faces of beautiful women, has spent most of his time since the workshop in Mumbai, India, working on a book project he calls, Living the Dream - a documentary look at the world of Bollywood actors. He is currently back in the US, but he believes he will be back in Mumbai when I go to India for Sujitha's wedding to Manoj. The wedding will take place in Pune, about three hours from Mumbai and I will fly home from Mumbai.

We should get a chance to hang out.

Sarah Baker - I wrote about our post-midnight conversations at the apartment, and how she started out shooting a color essay on a black barbershop in the neighborhood of our apartment and then switched to black and white.

One night as we visited late, she showed me a certain lens she had and I don't even remember what she called it, but it did different kind of things with focus. She handed it to me and told me I could play with it and borrow it if I liked.

I shot exactly one frame with it and this is it.

Sarah is in Myanmar right now. I am not exactly certain what she is doing there, but she does want to be a travel photographer and she also works to combat the sexual slavery of children, so I suspect that whatever she is doing, it is good work to do.

I received a group email from Jen Zeil Klewitz (left) a couple of days ago. She just landed a job in the Kimberly region of the Australian Outback. "That's the far northwest corner," she wrote, "one of the world's last, untracked, great remaining wildernesses." She will be working with Aboriginal women. In the past, she spent three years there, so she is not a novice to the area or a stranger to the people.

"This will certainly open doors for me to work with indigenous people all over the world -- a lifelong dream of mine, and a door I've been waiting to open for me for a long time, combining my expedition/wilderness/conservation skills, documentary work, and art/dance/music background to help extraordinary people often overcoming extraordinarily difficult circumstances. I dream that this work specifically will continue to take me to Africa and back into Latin America."

She said the workshop "pushed me to 'dig deep' in a way I hadn't expected, and that experience for me yielded a lot of necessary clarity and focus about my path, my work, and my vision. Has been an interesting few months (re)shaping that vision...and voila!! All my paths have collided into a beautiful little gift of a new life Adventure."

When we spoke at the workshop, she had been planning to come to Nome later this year. Maybe that's out now. 

Don't worry - I've got a few sentences for Andy Kropa and Milli Apelgren coming up, too.

Carolyn Beller and I friended each other on Facebook - which pretty much the whole class has done - and she has stepped up to be a friend. She leaves me encouraging comments just about every day that her situation permits. It does not always permit - she just returned to her home in Chicago from a prolonged trip to India. She kept her camera in action and is posting the results day by day.

I just wish that she had stayed in India a little longer, so that maybe our paths could have crossed when I go there. What a kick that would have been, to get together with two of my workshop mates in India.

Uwe Schober is the one workshop mate that we worried about for a bit, as he disappeared for awhile. We worried that he had taken a David Alan Harvey critique a little too hard and personal, but if so, he rose above it - as you can see in the superb portraits that he did in the place he had disappeared into - Zucotti Park.

I do not know what he is doing now or if he is back home in Germany, but I did get this very short message from him just the other day:

"not much online these days and travelling quite a bit..."

Throughout my career, I have followed an almost hard-and-fast tenet that Andy Kropa, standing at left next to Sarah, has given me cause to rethink. So has David Alan Harvey. When doing photojournalism and documentary work, I never use flash. I always use available light - even when there is almost no light available. My rationale for this is that I want to depict things in the light that I find them, not in the light that I bring to the scene.

I took this picture on the stairway to the roof during the party that followed the final night's slideshow presentation. It is available light - and there was not much light available.

Earlier, I mentioned that Andy had taken a lighting workshop from David on the Saturday before the workshop began. The early critiques began with David starting out to scold Andy for messing up the off-camera flash lighting techniques that he had used at Occupy Wall Street - but suddenly David would stop - a brilliant picture, brilliantly lit, had appeared.

At one of those critiques, a picture came up of a pigeon walking on a sidewalk near the face of a sleeping Occupy protester. David stopped, and we all gazed at that picture. It was excellent, we all agreed. David marked it as a keeper. Then, the next picture popped up - the man still slept, but instead of the pigeon, three men in suits walked by, one after the other.

The image was stunning and one of things that made it stunning was the way Andy's light had struck the walking men and the sleeper. So David stopped and we talked about it for awhile. David then told Andy that it was going to have to be one image or the other - the pigeon or the men walking.

"I think I like the pigeon best," Andy said. "I'll go with the pigeon." This was clearly one of those cases that Sports Illustrated Photo Director Steve Fine had referred to when he said photographer's make their own worst editor.

Fortunately, David, and all of us rose up against that decision. It had to be the men walking.

Life Magazine agreed - they included that image in their special "Best of 2011" issue. Here is a picture of that image in Life along with a letter Andy wrote to David.

Since the workshop, Andy has been getting much work, including an assignment to cover the New Hampshire primary debate.

As for me, I told myself I would undertake regular flash lighting exercises - but I haven't. I have continued to shoot all available light, except for Aurora's wedding. It's just a feeling I have. I like to shoot things in the light in which they present themselves to me. Maybe tomorrow I will grow out of it. Maybe I never will. But Andy's got me thinking about it.

I will close with the final scene I shot at the workshop. We had returned momentarily to the Loft after sharing lunch together on the day after our presentation. It is Milli Apelgren - who felt so distanced from the "cool people" in high school that she shot her Loft essay on cool people in New York City. Whenever I visited Milli, I found her to be extremely cool - and the photos in her essay, Entangled, are all cool.

Milli is back home in Austin, Texas, doing her work at the Blanton Museum of Art of the University of Texas at Austin.

We parted company right after she waved this goodbye in the little graffiti-covered shack atop the building that houses the loft. I have not seen her, or any of my workshop mates since - but I sense them every day.

I have one more post to go in this series. I will begin work on it as soon as I post this, but, given the hour and the fact that I feel I should leave this post at the top of the page for awhile, I think I will wait until tomorrow afternoon to post it.