This was really a Garfield Monday — between dealing with dead computers, staff panics, kernel panics, intermittent mice and funky variables, I think Bruce and I managed to get a little bit of work done. I drive by the window in the last photo almost daily, and never really paid much attention to it, until tonight when I noticed it looked like an aquarium.
Beautiful women and beastly cats.
After we finished the studio portion of our photo session, I took Nicole out to the river to do more photos on the Rio Grande with the Sandias in the background.
Cindy Lauper sang that “Girls just want to have fun” and Nicole Larson and I had a lot of fun with our photo session this weekend.
The last phase of Laurie’s hair style experiment was to put her hair up in a bun. She tried a couple of different styles of buns, and I used our mirrored wall for the background, and a single studio flash with an umbrella for the lighting. I’ve noticed that high key exposures seem to be all the rage in Laurie’s fashion magazines, so I pushed up the exposure to where the highlights are beginning to washout, which allowed me to get fairly good exposures in the mirror.
I helped out in three of the five services at Central United Methodist Church yesterday: I played accompaniment for Silent Night at the 1:00 pm service and discovered the fuses were missing from the spotlights when they wouldn’t come on for Jerri before the service. One of the maintenance men called around and found fuses, and ran out and purchased them, so the spotlights were working for the evening services. I ran one of the spotlights and took photos for the 8:00 pm service, and then ended up running both spotlights at the 11:00 pm service. Jerri got the idea to add guitar and castanets for a Spanish song the men’s ensemble performed at the 11:00 pm service, so I also played guitar and Laurie played castanets with the piano on “From a Distant Home”.
A different couple played Mary and Joseph for each service, and Jerri or someone else who knew how to dress the couple got them in costume for the first 4 services. I was in the chancel area when Ronzel, the sound tech, came up to me looking quite desperate and asked if I had photographed Mary and Joseph in costume in an earlier service, because he was trying to get the couple playing Joseph and Mary for the 11:00 pm service dressed and he didn’t remember what all they had on. Fortunately, I had photographed one of the couples in costume, so I ran back to the dressing room with Ronzel, and we were quite a pair looking at the screen on my camera, finding all the pieces of the costumes and getting the couple properly costumed.
We got them ready about 4 minutes before the start of the service, then the couple asked me when they were supposed to start walking up the aisle with the elements for communion — since I didn’t know (all the services were different) I ran up and asked the pastor, ran back told the couple, then dashed up the stairs to the balcony to run the spotlights for the candlelight portion of the service. After the lights came back on, I walked around to the front of the church and slipped in with the choir, and acted like I was singing on a couple of the hymns before playing on “From a Distant Home”. Then I slipped back out, helped Mary and Joseph out of their costumes, and then hung up the costumes and accessories. Laurie’s brother and parents commented after the service how they thought it was funny how I kept appearing and disappearing during the service.
Since we never got a new set of tiny lights for the bonsai, Laurie made an arrangement with candles and the candy she will be using in cookies for some decoration, lights and color. Tristan thought it looked like an altar to candy. Be that as it may, Laurie has baked some fantastic cookie,s so if her decorations please the gods of confectionary and the spirits of cookies, that makes it all the better.
Kat sang in the choir this morning, and asked me to photograph her in the choir robe. She looked great in the robe and the colors are very appropriate for the season.
Jerri made almost 100 copies of the recording of Handel’s Messiah performed on December 9th by the Chancel Choir with the NM Philharmonic Orchestra. I designed labels for the CDs and inserts for the jewel cases, and spent yesterday afternoon printing labels, stamping them on CDs, cutting inserts and stuffing the whole lot into jewel cases so Jerri could give them to the Chancel Choir before Christmas. Laurie and I listened to the recording this afternoon while cooking and working on photos, and it’s fantastic. The recording is raw, exactly as it was performed with no post-production editing, and it is really well balanced. the choir, soloists and orchestra sound animated and full of life. This was the first time Laurie had heard the choir outside of singing in it, and she was quite surprised, and thought the recording sounded better than the “professional” version we currently have (I had been telling her how good they sounded for weeks before the performance, and she just thought I was being nice. Me be nice? Like right!). After listening to the CDs I was really happy I took the time to put them together yesterday so the choir members could have this wonderful gift of music for Christmas, especially after all the hours and work they put in preparing for the performances. The quality of the performance also speaks for what a great director Jerri is. She takes anyone who wants to sing in the choir and gets amazing results out them.
Tristan and David had their annual Solstice party tonight where we all sat around waiting for the end of the world and then reflected on it — it didn’t happen — AGAIN! The end of the world and all that is getting to be a bit of a bore — Firefox, Cat’s yellow kitty, was mad about it, Gia thought she saw it, but was mistaken, and Firefox gave me an appropriate “Blah!” Cat celebrated, Gia consoled the kitty, then she peeked around the corner and gave me a nice smile. After having a lot of fun we all finally had to go on our merry ways until the end of the world comes again.
I can’t think of a better way to spend a lunch hour than photographing a beautiful woman. Meet Tiffany Paleo, make-up artist, actress, singer, wife and mother. She’s as sweet as she is beautiful, and delightful to work with. For you women who like to be pampered, Tiffany is available at Katharoz Boutique to help you with all your skin care needs — 505-227-1224.
Laurie and I attended the annual holiday party for the Friends of Medieval Studies at UNM tonight, which featured a concert by Música Antigua de Albuquerque — they were wonderful. Música Antigua de Albuquerque will be performing “Stella Nuova” on Saturday, December 22th at St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church, 601 Montaño NW in Albuquerque.
Mark April 15-18, 2013 on your calendars. The 2013 Medieval Spring Lecture series is “Medieval Myths and Monsters”. This promises to be a superb lecture series not to be missed.
Off Center & Not Even 