Another day

Cricket is still here. I am so grateful for this run of beautiful days we've had the past couple of weeks. We've been able to sit outside every day for long stretches of time. There's no rain in sight for the forseeable future.

This poem has been on my mind:

Death - by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, be passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Death by inches

My beloved dog Cricket is slowly slipping away. I keep thinking each day might be her last, and yet she keeps on surprising me, as she has all along with her longevity (she's 17).

Waiting for death to come is a profound and holy experience. It has its moments of extreme sadness, but it is also a unique opportunity to observe up close what the approach of death looks like, something which I will one day have to go through myself. There is also a peacefulness about it. She is not in pain, just losing her appetite, slowly losing weight, and spending most of her time asleep. When she needs to pee, she is still walking out the door on her own. She still likes to spend time lying out on the front lawn enjoying the summer breeze, taking in the scents, watching people walk by, barking at the occasional dog.

A friend of mine who is a composer likened this phase, the winding down of Cricket's life, to the coda at the end of a piece of music, which often builds up anticipation for the end so that when it comes there is a sense of resolution. My friend understood why I'd decided against euthanasia. As she put it, "Euthanasia takes away the coda, and jumps you straight to the end without preparing you for it."

I've been reading Henri Nouwen's Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring. He writes of how being in solidarity with those who are dying can heal us of our fear of death. "Only when we are willing to let their dying help us to die well will we be able to help them to live well. When we can face death with hope, we can live life with generosity."

As humans approach death, we become more and more dependent on others and have to let go of our own abilities and receive the gift of others' caring. (I'm guessing it's somewhat the same with dogs.) Nouwen writes, "Through our caring presence, we keep announcing that sacred truth: dying is not a sweet, sentimental event; it is a great struggle to surrender our lives completely. This surrender is not an obvious human response. To the contrary: we want to cling to whatever is left." But when we surrender to this most common human experience, instead of fighting against it, we can have a good death. "If we grow in awareness that our mortality, more than anything else, will lead us into solidarity with others, then death can become a celebration of our unity with the human race."

Cricket seems not to be quite ready to let go. She has been trying valiantly to rally, perhaps because she doesn't want to leave me and knows I'll miss her terribly. But as her body gradually shuts down, she seems to be becoming more resigned to the fact that she won't be living forever, at least not in this body. I don't know if she knows what she'll be transitioning to, but I believe our canine friends will be with us in eternity. I can't imagine the God of love not letting that be so for these blessed creatures who give us such unconditional love.

Production stills

Well, life has been a roller coaster for the past month or so. I was away for a couple of weeks in mid-June (family reunion in New York, etc.), and two days before I left, my dog was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. So I've had my hands full taking care of her and preparing myself to say goodbye. It's been a very precious time. Nothing slows life down like waiting for death. We are taking things one day at a time, as each day could be her last. It's amazing how much more I notice when I'm slowing down like this.

In the midst of it all, I've still had time for a fun new endeavor. I have the privilege of being the stills photographer for a film called "Pop Switch" that a friend of mine is directing, starring Lucia Frangione and Michael Kopsa. Here's an interesting video on what a stills photographer does. Here's a still from the film and some shots I took of the filmmakers at work.

Precious moment

This is Gibbie, the resident border collie at Hunterston Farm, nosing up to Precious, an orphan lamb that was hand-raised. Gibbie also likes to sit near the chicken coop and watch and protect the five chicks, as if he were their father. They run about all over the place, right in front of his nose, and he never harms them. The hen doesn't mind him being near by, but she squawks if humans come too close. Gibbie stays out there all day until the chicks are all safely nestled under their mother for the night, and then he goes home to his house. Gibbie is named after Sir Gibbie in George MacDonald's novel of that name.

Sunset over the Arno

I finally got around to processing all the rest of my Florence photographs from September 2007. Here's one of sunset over the Arno River. You can view the whole album here. I always like to put a sunset shot last in my slide shows, if I've got a good one.

That's what computers are good for

Sign seen near the home of some friends of mine. Now why on earth would you need to repeat the name of the street so many times? Another friend who was with me as we were walking by this sign said, "That's what computers are good for." Looks like somebody went crazy with copy & paste.

Meeting my hero

Unfortunately this can't be included in my SoFoBoMo book, because I didn't take the picture. But it does go down as one of my favorite photos taken on my camera.

I was visiting my brother in Atlanta for a few days last weekend. I drove three hours to Plains to attend Jimmy Carter's Sunday School class at Maranatha Baptist Church. I've been wanting to do that for years, since I found out his classes are open to the public, but this was the first time he was on the schedule to teach when I was in the area.

Carter is one of the people I admire most in the world. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, he continues to be involved in peacemaking and humanitarian work even into his 80s. He recently returned from a trip to the Middle East, where he met with Hamas leadership in the hopes of moving things further along towards a peace agreement with Israel. He faced criticism from Washington for his overtures, but I believe his approach is more likely to win lasting peace than what we've been doing for the past few decades.

The Carter Center which he founded is involved in peace negotiations, human rights, and global health (they have almost achieved their goal of the complete elimination of the horrible guinea worm disase, which would only be the second ever disease eliminated from the face of the earth). Jimmy and his wife Rosalynn (which he pronounces with a long o: ROSE-a-lynn) have also worked with Habitat for Humanity, actually on the ground building houses with them.

In spite of his world fame, Carter is a remarkably down-to-earth and humble man. He would not allow any applause for him in the church. He would not sign autographs there. He wanted us to remember we were there first of all to worship. (All of this was announced to us ahead of time by a member of the church, so that he could just come out and be himself.) Yes, there were secret service guys protecting him, as well there should be (we had to get wanded down and have our bags searched at the entry). But he came across as just a normal person teaching in his home church. Which of course he was.

He taught a real Bible lesson, on the book of Daniel. His message was about sticking up for what you believe in, even in the face of opposition (which is what he does all the time with his peacemaking work). He walked us all the way through the major parts of Daniel's story, which was the text du jour in the teaching materials he was using (Adult Uniform Series from Smyth & Helwys). He spoke from his heart, with hardly a need to refer to the notes on his podium. Jimmy Carter is the only president to have ever taught Sunday School while in office (he taught some classes in Washington and back in Plains on visits), and to the best of anyone's knowledge, the only one to ever teach it after leaving office.

President Carter has been a hero of mine for years. His election was my political awakening. I would have voted for him if I'd been old enough (I was 13). I remember getting permission from my parents to stay up late and listen to the election returns on the radio in my bunk bed, and it was very exciting that he won. To have met the man in person is one of my greatest joys.

SoFoBoMo: Editing phase

I'm back from a few days in Atlanta, where I took the last of my photos for my SoFoBoMo book. Still need to go through and select out the 35+ best ones for the book, but once I've weeded out the bad ones, I have decided on my further selection criteria: No theme whatsoever, simply a look at the breadth of (sometimes extraordinary) experiences I have in an ordinary month. I'm going to go for variety as much as possible.

I shot all the photos over a period of 30 calendar days, though I actually only shot on 14 of those days (March 29-30, April 1-3, 5, 6, 13, 20, 21, 24-27). So I am allowing my “fuzzy month” to spill over into the first couple of weeks of May for the editing and layout work. I decided to do the layout in Microsoft Word, since I know it intimately, and it was taking too long to get proficient in InDesign. I will do the front and back covers in InDesign. I've already done a layout for that. All I need to do is plug in the photo I choose for my front cover.

I've also picked a title for the book, written all the introductory material, and thrown together a first crack at the book with one page of text and one photo, just to give myself some momentum. I converted the cover from InDesign to PDF and the content from Word to PDF and combined the two PDF documents into one. All this in about 5 hours this evening. It looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. I've signed up for an Issuu account so I can publish it there once I'm done. Yippee! This is getting exciting.

SoFoBoMo: Day 23

I started a couple of days early, so I've only got a week left of my "fuzzy month." But I am going to be away in Atlanta for most of that time, taking more pictures no doubt. So I'm going to have to make my fuzzy month longer than 31 calendar days. I claim the right to do that because I have had big chunks of time in the middle of this month when I've been busy with other things and have had to put the SoFoBoMo project on hold. I plan to enter full time into editing and compilation mode immediately upon return. I've already been doing some selecting and editing as I go.

Yesterday I went shooting at the A Rocha field study centre and got some nice shots. A Rocha is a worldwide organization of Christians doing environmental conservation work. I'm friends with the couple who head up the Canadian arm of it. They've invited me to do some photography for them, for their website and newsletters. This one shows the farm side of their property. I tend to prefer close-up work, but I think I've been looking at Paul Butzi's photos long enough that the beauty of a wide shot of a rural setting is starting to rub off on me. The small size of this blog format doesn't do it justice, so you need to click on it to see it enlarged.

Weird weather! Snow in April in Vancouver!!!

Usually we don't get snow beyond January. This is a very strange winter indeed. We're expected to get an accumulation of up to 5cm. Lows around freezing through Tuesday. I took this photo earlier tonight:

Meanwhile the cherry blossoms are out and looking spectacular. I took this one five days ago:

Saint Francis of Assisi

Small statue in the garden of the Mission Concepción in San Antonio. I took this from close range with a low camera angle, to make him look a lot bigger. But he was really only about 3 or 4 feet tall. He seems to have lost a hand.

SoFoBoMo: A splash of color

This was a fountain I saw in San Antonio, near the River Walk. The "splash of color" looks like an Andy Goldsworthy creation, but it's got random twigs and dead petals in it, which he'd never do. His works are so perfect. So evidently the petals were formed into that shapely splotch by the flow of water from the fountain.

I'm still not seeing a theme emerge for my SoFoBoMo book, so it might end up being random photos. Today I went out walking with my dog and my camera, like what Paul Butzi has been doing for his SoFoBoMo project. Nothing great came of that. It's hard to take good dog pictures when you've got to keep your dog on a leash, which I do in my neighborhood, since she's going deaf, and there are cars, and she's prone to wandering off and getting into people's trash.

SoFoBoMo: The halfway point approaches

Well, I haven't taken any more photos since the Texas trip. Perhaps I should have arranged a hiatus from all my other responsibilities for the month. (Yeah, right. Tell that to the IRS!)

Here's a photo of my friends' sons (ages 7 and 5) sitting outside the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, looking at a fountain. Smart, thoughtful kids. I have never seen kids behave so well in an art museum. They were actually interested in stuff! I remember back at that age, and even older, my siblings and I were bored silly in them. The only fun times were when my brother set off the alarm once by touching a painting, and when he and I rearranged the letters on a sign to spell naughty words.

Transforming Culture Symposium

As promised, here's my initial summary of the conference I attended last week, along with another photo from it (which might make it into my SoFoBoMo book). I sent this out to a bunch of Regent College friends, hence all the Regent references.



Regent Alumni Enjoy a Great Banquet at the Transforming Culture Symposium in Austin

Perhaps it was the lure of seeing and hearing Eugene Peterson and Jeremy Begbie again, or the desire to support our fellow alum David Taylor (ThM '00) whose brainchild this conference was, or simply the need to get away from the unusually long winter of 2008 in Vancouver. Whatever the reason, 25 Regent alumni and current faculty/staff/students congregated in Austin, Texas, making up about 4% of the 600+ attending the Transforming Culture Symposium from April 1-3, 2008.

The conference -- aimed at pastors, church leaders, and artists, and led by David and his collaborator Larry Linenschmidt -- put forth a "vision of a relationship between the church and the arts that is theologically informed, biblically grounded, liturgically sensitive, artistically alive, and missionally shrewd."

It sought to address six key themes and questions: 1. THE GOSPEL: In what way is art a gift, a calling, and an obedience? 2. THE PASTOR: How is the pastor an artist and the artist, a pastor? 3. THE WORSHIP: How can our actions and spaces be artfully shaped? 4. THE ARTIST: What is an artist and how do we shepherd these strange creatures? 5. THE DANGERS: What are the dangers of artistic activity? 6. THE FUTURE: What is a vision of the evangelical Church in the year 2058?

Food metaphors were in plentiful supply.

We were treated to a tasty smorgasbord of talks on these questions by the six plenary speakers: Andy Crouch (author, editorial director for The Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today), Eugene Peterson (author, pastor, Regent professor emeritus), John Witvliet (director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, former Regent Summer School professor), Barbara Nicolosi (screen-writer, consultant, film critic), David Taylor (writer, arts pastor extraordinaire), and Jeremy Begbie (musician-theologian, founder of Theology Through the Arts, former Regent Summer School professor).

THE GOSPEL
Andy talked about art as those aspects of culture that cannot be reduced to utility. Art is a free response to grace; it is play. Like play, pain is also useless. They both must come together in art. Play that doesn't acknowledge pain can become escapism. Pain without play and grace can lead to sadism. Only in Christ can we make art with full awareness of the pain that exists. Andy also pointed out that art cannot be done alone; it requires community.

THE PASTOR
Eugene was quintessentially Eugene. He told us stories. Stories of three artists who had shaped his pastoral identity by teaching him the difference between a vocation and a job description. There was Willy, the painter, who made a prophetic portrait of Eugene looking gaunt and grim, as he might look in 20 years if he insisted on being a pastor; Willy said "the church will suck the soul out of you" (Eugene didn't take his advice, but kept the portrait as a cautious reminder).

There was Gerard, the architect who came and worshiped for a year with the newly forming church community in Eugene's basement, so that he could listen to who they were and what they needed in a new church building (simple, honest, beautiful).

There was Judith, the weaver, who felt "lucky" to hear the story of David preached for the first time in her life (she had a "beginner's mind, a child mind" as the Buddhists say). She would weave Eugene tapestries of things she'd heard him say. She eventually became a Christian, but none of her artist friends could understand what she saw in it.

THE WORSHIP
With many beautiful projected images, John introduced us to three spiritually nourishing and culturally crucial constraints on art for use in public worship assemblies. 1. It must be corporate, resisting isolation and elitism. 2. It must help people pray, resisting both sentimentality and the temptation to make the art an end in itself. 3. It must aid in perceiving the glory and beauty of the triune God, resisting idolatry.

THE ARTIST
Barbara, the only Catholic on the panel, and by all accounts the "spiciest" (she had us in stitches with her hilarious and sometimes irreverent quips), spoke first of some of the functions of beauty: its wholeness brings rest, its harmony brings joy, and its radiance brings fulfillment. The beautiful makes us feel small and humble. We have a responsibility as the church to provide art so that people can get in touch with their creatureliness and be okay with it.

Barbara told us how to recognize real artists: their artistic talent shows up early; their work has emotional power; they connect personally to the audience/viewers; their work has a freshness, a prophetic voice; and they are obsessed with details of form. She countered the common misperceptions that artists are crazy or lazy.

Finally, she outlined the "crosses" artists have to bear: loneliness, rejection, instability, entrepreneurism, having to collaborate with people, and the burden of success.

THE DANGERS
David talked about his passion to see artists as fully integrated persons, mature, and alive to God. To that end, he discussed six dangers of artistic activity in the church: bad art (e.g., cliché, melodrama, impersonal), super-saturation (too much of a good thing), the stubborn ossification of tradition (which he called "estancandose tercamente" -- Spanish for "getting stuck stubbornly"; also known as "the dead faith of the living"), the utilitarian subjugation of art (to worship or evangelism), art as a form of distraction (escape into feeling, entertainment), and immaturity (lack of self-control, manipulation, being ruled by fear).

David gave us three qualities of healthy artistic growth: it is relationally ordered (pastors relating to artists, older to newer generations, home culture to distant cultures), contextually relative (artistic excellence is when a work accomplishes the purpose for which it was created, as Nicholas Wolterstorff said), and organically rhythmed (seasonal, balancing "festal muchness" with "cleansing simplicity").

THE FUTURE
Finally, Jeremy was charged with predicting what the next 50 years of art in the church would look like. He treated us to an amazing tour-de-force in his typical style, a combination of lecture and performance (he's a fine concert pianist, in addition to sharing initials with J.S. Bach). Using the final movement from Prokofiev's 7th Piano Sonata, and bits of other works, Jeremy demonstrated "hopeful subversion," starting not with where we are now, but rather with a vision of God's future and working backward from there.

His main points were: 1. The Spirit unites the unlike (e.g., people hearing one another in their own tongues at Pentecost). 2. The Spirit generates excess (the same "festal muchness" David talked about; the New Creation is not merely a restoration of balance to the world but vastly exceeds the Garden of Eden). 3. The Spirit inverts (the rich become poor, and the poor rich). 4. The Spirit exposes the depths to which Christ has gone and the depths of who we are (as opposed to sentimental solipsism which avoids darkness). 5. The Spirit recreates (the Resurrection was the first day of the New Creation) 6. The Spirit improvises (the new heaven & new earth is surprisingly, endlessly new). For many, God is dull because he seems so "ordered" -- all word/logos and no spirit. Jeremy invited us to embrace "non-order" (as distinct from disorder), which is the realm of laughter and the Spirit.

Bryan Brown and his team led us in worship that reinforced the principles being espoused in the conference. There was beauty, simplicity, and honest grappling with darkness. The unifying theme was the colors of the rainbow (a work of art by the triune Creator). Each day of the symposium, the lighting was changed to highlight two different colors from the spectrum. We sang some very Regent-ish songs, including Eugene's favorite "St. Patrick's Breastplate" (complete with all the weird rhythms and versification). Visual art, music, dance, and drama were all interwoven with excellence.

In between the keynote lectures and worship times, there were testimonies by practicing artists. There was also a cornucopia of breakout sessions covering everything from The Care of Artists, to Drama, Architecture, Cross-Cultural Mission, Forming an Arts Ministry in the Church, etc. (Recordings of all the plenary lectures and many of the breakout sessions will be available on the conference website at some point in the future.)

In addition to the four plenary speakers with Regent ties, there were also Regent connections with several of the breakout session leaders: Dal Schindell participated in the session on "Seminaries & the Aesthetic Formation of Pastors." Luci Shaw (writer-in-residence and alum) presented "Called & Completed: A Vision for the Vocation and Maturing of the Artist of Faith." Sandra Bowden (whose work has been exhibited in the Lookout Gallery) spoke on "Visual Homiletics: How Can We Preach to the Eye as well as to the Ear?"

As David clarified during one of the Q&A sessions, the title of the symposium meant not that we aim to transform the culture by our art, but that God is in the business of transforming culture, and we are blessed and called to participate in that. What an awesome privilege it was to participate in what I truly believe will be looked back on in generations to come as a key moment in the growing renewal of the arts in the evangelical church that God is in the midst of accomplishing. A tasty morsel indeed!

SoFoBoMo good for blog stats!

Cool! I just noticed that the number of visitors to my blog has shot up since I started my SoFoBoMo posts. That's a mixed blessing. It's always fun to get more traffic, but it puts the pressure on to keep posting good stuff. I have literally no time to be doing this right now, but I can't keep from looking at the photos I took in Texas. I've selected one that can stand with no post-processing. Oh, sure, I could do stuff to it, like lighten up the shadows at the bottom (or maybe not -- I've just come from the TCS where we heard about the importance of grappling with darkness in art, to avoid glib sentimentality -- not that this photo would be in danger of that without the blackness). Or maybe I could extend the sky a bit on the top to make up for my having been so fascinated by the patterns in the fence rail that I perhaps framed out a bit too much of the environment. Well, I'd better not write more now, or I might just as well have spent this time tweaking photos.

SoFoBoMo: Out of the gate, limping

Sorry again for the long hiatus from posting. I've been in Texas attending the Transforming Culture symposium (I'll be posting more about that here and/or at Iambic Admonit when I have some time). My first day of SoFoBo occurred while I was gone. I'm accepting Paul's allowance that we start our fuzzy month a couple of days early if we have good reason to (I arrived in Fort Worth on 3/29), because I can't pass up the opportunity to take photos when I'm on a trip! And I'm really busy this month (as I will be next month, no doubt), so SoFoBoMo is going to have to fit in somehow in the cracks. I have a feeling this 31-day period is going to be more like an intense 9 day period, followed by nothing for a couple of weeks, followed by another intense 4 day period when I go to Atlanta to visit my brother. I can't seem to get out of all the other obligations that pull at me when I'm at home.

Naturally, many of my photos were of friends I was visiting and of the conference itself (such as this one of Jeremy Begbie playing the last movement of Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 7). Those are not necessarily going to be excluded from eligibility in my SoFoBoMo book. In fact, I've been thinking of writing up a book-format report on the conference and making that be my submission for SoFoBoMo. It could do double duty that way (I'm all about killing two birds with one stone when my life is overwhelmingly busy).

A bit sheepish about SoFoBoMo

Got some logs you need the bark stripped from? Nobody's better at it than sheep! These guys were busy at their task at Hunterston Farm the last time I was out there. Even the new lambs were joining in, and climbing the heap of logs was no impediment for one of the older ones.

Others have been commenting on how quickly the start of SoFoBoMo is approaching (I'm starting April 1) and how daunting the task seems for one reason or another. My problem is that I'm scattered all over the map in the themes that I like to photograph. I thrive on variety. I get bored working on one project for any length of time. So I will find it hard to photograph for a straight month on one subject. Maybe I don't have to. But doesn't a book of photographs need to have some sort of unifying concept that ties it together? I was thinking of doing the funky colored houses in Vancouver, but even that could get tiresome after several days of shooting. Basically just driving up and down all the streets where I suspect these cool houses are (though I could do the site scoping ahead of time and write down addresses to save time during SoFoBoMo month).

And then there's the same issue Paul Butzi is worried about -- won't the resulting book be kind of boring? Just pictures of a bunch of houses, funky-colored though they might be.

And do I really have the right to publish photographs of people's private homes without their permission? Probably, because they are all viewable from public streets. But it still would feel kind of voyeurish driving around taking pictures of people's houses. I might be suspected of being a criminal preparing for a break-in or something, especially if I linger around each house long enough to get an interesting composition.

Argggh! I think maybe I need to go back to the drawing board for an idea for a theme.

Piano (four) hands

This photo, titled "Piano Hands" is currently one of two photos that I have in the (almost) Annual Regent Community Exhibit at the Lookout Gallery at Regent College in Vancouver, BC. When I title a photograph, if I think it's likely to be a one-off, I just give it an obvious title like this. But if I think I'm likely to do others which would naturally have the same title, I will title the first something like "Orchids I" (in anticipation that there will be an "Orchids II" someday).

However, what to do when I've already titled one "Piano Hands" and then along comes another nice photo of someone's hands at the piano? Do I rename the first one "Piano Hands I" and call the new one "Piano Hands II"? Or once I've titled a photo, should the title remain forever? Should I call the second one "Piano Hands II" without having to have a "Piano Hands I" (the "I" is implied)? Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, I know, but it has me wondering.

Actually, fortunately (or not), it's a moot point for now. The resolution of the latest one is so bad that it will only ever see the light of day on this blog (I took it from a distance with my Canon G9, handheld, at 24x zoom (6x optical + 4x digital), at ISO 800. So it had all things going against it. The only way I can get away with it not looking like crap is to show a very tiny version of it here.

Update: It just dawned on me that if this latest photo were exhibit quality, of course I'd title it "Piano Four Hands" (for obvious reasons). In case you're not a music afficionado, "piano four hands" refers to works written for two pianists to play on the same keyboard (as opposed to a piano duet with two players at separate pianos).

Red-breasted sapsucker; SoFoBoMo update

I saw this red-breasted sapsucker (a kind of woodpecker), doing what its name implies, on Friday on Galiano Island. I hadn't been looking for birds, so I wasn't really prepared. But I did what I always do in such situations: start shooting with the longest lens I have available, no matter how far away I am, and then gradually move closer, continuing to shoot as I go. I figure any photo at all is better than none (if the bird should fly away as soon as I start approaching). But this time I got pretty lucky and was able to pull off some pretty nice shots from about 15-20 feet away, using a 200mm lens. I was delighted to catch him with his beak in the hole.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm teaching myself Adobe InDesign in preparation for Solo Photography Book Month (SoFoBoMo), which for me will run form April 1 to May 1. I've been working through the tutorials on a CD-ROM called Mastering InDesign CS, by BDG Publishing (appears to be available for free + shipping here). It's a bit outdated (I have CS2, so some of the menu commands aren't in the same places) and not as scintillating as the training DVDs from Software Cinema that I've used to learn Photoshop, but at least it's helping me to dive in. I am using a photo directory for my church as my learning project. Another photographer who is participating in SoFoBoMo pointed out that InDesign is pretty daunting, which it is. But I figure it's worth learning, as it will come in handy for other things in the future.

Just to show that I'm multifaceted

I went to a Barenaked Ladies concert tonight, as the guest of a friend of mine who knows the wife of the owner of the casino-theatre where the concert was held. If that doesn't make you chuckle, I've already chuckled enough for both of us. First, the idea me of going to a concert in a casino is pretty incongruous. And that I'd be listening to a band with a name like that is amusing. But don't worry; the name is just silly. They are all men, in fact, and they wear clothes. It's a popular Canadian alternative rock band. They have a wacky sense of humor and they support the World Wildlife Fund, just to give you a bit of an idea of what they're like. Anyway, I brought my little Canon G9 along, as it goes everywhere with me in my purse. I took pictures throughout the whole concert, and got some pretty nice shots. That made me enjoy the concert even more, though I think I would have liked it even just for the music. The words were funny (when I could make them out). Thankfully, it wasn't ear-splittingly loud, as the two other rock concerts I've been to in my life were. But to be honest, I'm still more of a classical music lover.

The first photo above is of an enormous disco ball that was hanging from the ceiling in the theatre. The photo below is of singer-guitarist Steven Page. Not a bad zoom shot on that G9 (compare with the middle photo which was taken with no zoom). 6x optical zoom compounded with 4x digital gets me up to 24x.