cosas de vaquero

Back to the Museo de Arte Popular in DF today, this time to introduce Sylvie's parents to the splendors of contemporary Mexican art. Definitely one of our favorite places. One of the displays I didn't really pay close attention to last time was a range of Mexican cowboy (vaquero) staples - pistol holsters, spurs, bridle, and and entire saddle. The leatherwork is intricate but understated and timeless, while the engraving on the metal pieces is ornate and simply gorgeous. It's incongruous seeing such functional beauty in this oft-crumbled and dysfunctional city, and it certainly makes one yearn for the sparseness and minimal life of the cowboy. Taken with the G11, yielding a good bit of noise which I think goes well with the theme - I bled the color out a bit in Lightroom to enhance the country feel - not that there was much other than browns and white to begin with.

testing testing

Aperture used to be my photo editing program of choice until I returned to pro shooting and tried Lightroom while coming to grips with Photoshop. Now that Apple has released Aperture 3, and given Joe McNally's strong endorsement of it, I went back to see how Aperture compared. I'm usually a big booster of Apple goodies, as my multiple Mac purchases attest, but after some playing with the latest version of Aperture I still think Lightroom is king of the hill, combining as it does great workflow and file management with terrific editing tools. There are some bugs in the current beta version of Lightroom 3 that need to be ironed out (in particular importing and slideshows) but I don't doubt these will be sorted in the production release. As such, I think I'll be sticking with Lightroom for the foreseeable future, not least because of its integration with Photoshop itself, which is invaluable when you're pressed for time. Still, here are a couple of pics from Aperture that turned out quite nicely I think - the colors in the gay pride march photo have real punch and there's good sharpness in the volcano pic - but again, I think Aperture needs to learn from Lightroom's importation, workflow and file handling management if it's really going to cause Adobe any problems.

time travel

Just getting around to posting past shoots and linking them more effectively. Thanks to the blog-savvy SylvMilv, I've now got Flickr and the blog a little more integrated, which is tres helpful. Yay, SylvMilv.

Sperryville in the Fall, which I've highlighted on the blog before, is one of the true delights in Virginia. A picture postcard town, seemingly trapped in the years of the Eisenhower presidency, with good barbecue to boot. Who could ask for more? This is the first of several galleries I'll be posting that will highlight just 10 pictures of each location or shoot. It's just nice to edit oneself from time-to-time, I find it helps in composing in the first place.

the evolution of bruno

We're pretty lucky to have a couple of handsome house cats for impromptu shoots in this place, with Bruno definitely being the more challenging in that he's perpetually in motion, and of course completely, wonderfully, silkily black. Even the 5D Mk II has a hard time working out what the heck I'm trying to get it to focus on when he's the target. So good ol'-fashion manual focusing and a wide open aperture usually do the trick. I hadn't grabbed a good picture of the tyke for a while so I used the happy convergence of subject (perched on a couch-bound Sylvie) and camera (handy from snapping snow-capped peaks earlier) to remedy that deficit.

So here he is, about five months of age and getting perkier and more confident each day. Remarkably, the Sassmonster has a ball wrestling and racing him, and both set new records for cuteness each time they curl on or around the napping Sylv's head. That shot to come.

the calavera history of mexico

We spent the past weekend hiding from the daily calamity that is Mexico City by stealthily hiding away in...Mexico City. We slipped into the new St. Regis Hotel at the Diana fountain on Reforma, and enjoyed the double-glazed, room-serviced serenity within. We decided to become tourists for a long weekend and hit a few museums downtown, including the wondrous Museo del Arte Popular. It's four floors of fun but what really grabbed me was the ground floor exhibition of Mexico's history told in calavera dioramas. Artists had focused on a few of the country's most important milestones on its way to independence and made scenes with the skeletal figures familiar from Day of the Dead celebrations. Some of them were intricate, others just hilarious. I was drawn to this one, recounting the uprising against the French of Cinco de Mayo. It's a shame I don't have a James Cameron camera so you'll just have to believe me that this was a really fetching 3D arrangement made of plastic and cardboard. It gets the point across. Pardon the pun.