It has been a busy few weeks, planning and executing a seven part project for one of my favorite clients and squeaking in other work between those shoots. Between at project and my other responsibilities, I have pulled almost a month (maybe more, who can remember) for 7 day work weeks. So, I am headed up to lake Bruin with a few friends for a much-needed couple of days off.

Before I go, I thought I’d throw a few images up on the site that were outtakes from the recent shoots. It’s been a fun project where I had a lot of creative latitude. I feel extraordinarily fortunate to be able to make a living doing something I really love, namely taking pictures. But, when I am doing client work, I am sometimes restricted in what I can post. Such is the life of the freelancer.

Although I do plan on doing some work on a wedding that I recent photographed, this weekend will be more about play than work. Depending on the conditions, I would like to get some shooting in while I am up there. Readers of this blog won’t be surprised to know that I love north Louisiana and the photographs I am occasionally able to capture from the mystical, empty place.

I hope you all have a good weekend and just to keep this site active (I’ve been slack about posting, I know). Here are some of the shots I took recently but which probably won’t make the cut with the client.

A strong cell of thunder and lightning storms rolled in around 11PM last night. We get a lot of lighting down here during the summer, but very little of it is good to photograph because it is generally accompanied by rain. Rain in the air obscures the clarity of the lightning, gets your gear wet and makes lightning shooting a lot less fun.

Until I find a new and better perch, I like to go up to the top of the casino parking garage that was recently built by the levee. The top floors are generally empty and as long as the rain isn’t blowing sideways, you are reasonably shielded from the elements. One of these days I’d really like to get up to the top on of one of the newer state parking garages closer to the capital but until I find a way to sweet talk my way past security, I am stuck with what the casino hath built.

All the same, this parking garage offers as a near 360° view of the city. And when the conditions are right, you can get some pretty amazing stuff. I shot for about an hour and ended up with many frames that had lightning in them. However, one high cloud burst really illuminated the whole tableau or downtown and sent its twisting bolts all across the skyline. I wish I knew more about the types of lightning because you can see some pretty clearly different forms in the shots shown here. But, I am still very much the layman when it comes to the things meteorological. I hope you enjoyed the show. Word has it that one of these shots will run on the news tonight and may already have run on the mid-day news.

DETAILS

Shot with a Canon 5D MKII on a my fancy new carbon-fiber Vanguard tripod using either the Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM or the Canon EF 28 f/1.4 L USM. Most of the shots were taken with a didymium filter to notch out some of the red tones generated by the city’s street lights. The EXIF data tells the tale but the shots were all at ISO 100 and f/8 with the shutter ranging from 20-30 seconds. I also used a AOE Lightning Strike II to trigger the shutter.

“Sitting in the exuberantly idiosyncratic yard of his Jackson, Mississippi home, it became clear immediately that he felt that much of gardening “wisdom” could be wholly ignored. Felder began his little backyard lecture in iconoclasm thusly: “You know how they always tell you that you need to trim roses back to five leaves? Well that’s bulls**t, you can trim them with a cherry bomb if you want to.”

Felder Rushing’s discussions of plants and gardening, though he adamantly denies being anti-horticulturalist, are flecked with these sorts of mad-hatter jabs at conventional wisdom. He is about to publish his seventeenth book on gardening, but he will happily tell you that gardening is the same everywhere: “You need to know two thing about gardening—how to dig a hole and that the green end goes up. That’s it.” He also has no love for the publishing industry that leads people to think that they need to buy complex tomes and decipher the processes contained within in order to accomplish simple procedures.”

Read the full article in this month’s issue of Country Roads Magazine or online here.

This is Dan. Dan lives in the rooming house next door to me and he needed a ride to the meat store on Scenic Highway. As my week is dreadfully open (because I was supposed to be on vacation), I was happy to oblige Dan. Apparently, the Capitol Meat Store on Scenic sells all the things a mid-fifties fellow from Chicago needs to get through a few weeks of a Louisiana spring. But, more than my casual interest in going places I have never been before, I was interested in playing around with my Lensbaby Edge 80 Optic.

In many ways it functions like a tilt-shift lens, but it is basically like other Lensbaby optics in that it can be moved on a pivot allowing you to place the center of focus wherever you want it in the frame. My crude line drawing below should help explain what that means (fingers crossed). The real advantage of the Edge 80 is that at 80mm you begin to get into portrait lens territory, meaning the focal length serves to seemingly compress the image and stack things in the fore, middle and backgrounds together.

Unlike the other focal lengths that Lensbaby makes (35mm and 50mm) the Edge 80 is less likely to create blurred streaks when adjusted to its far edges. In short, the Edge 80 lets you really isolate portions of your subject that would simply not be possible without either post-processing or a very expensive tilt-shift lens. After just a few minutes shooting with the Edge 80, I think I have found, in this lens, the right balance of selective focus and clarity, the later of which was somewhat lacking in some earlier Lensbaby designs.

The Edge 80, and its sister optic the Sweet 35, are a bit more expensive and refined (they have the aperture incorporated into them for one) than the standard 50mm Lensbaby optical family, but the Edge 80 really shines when it comes to focus and resolution. Of the Lensbaby products I have used, it is the easiest to achieve predictable results with and the easiest with which to pull sharp focus.

From what I have seen so far, it is a heck of lens. Like a tilt-shift, you can change the plane of focus from a vertical plane a given distance from the photographer to a triangle that extends from an ever-widening point wherever the camera happens to be. Again, the crappy drawing may help explain what this all means.

I could go on about my love of hand-painted sign and peculiar optical effects achieved in-camera, but I need to play around with this lens a bit more. So, thanks Dan. Thanks Scenic Highway. And thank Capitol Meat Store. It was a pleasant little drive past the chemical plants.

“As family, friends, some readers of my blog and anyone within earshot for Baton Rouge’s Ryan Airport are aware, I was supposed to travel to Mexico this week. My destination was Oaxaca, considered by many to be the birthplace of much of what is considered distinctively Mexican cuisine. But, after three successive days of flight cancelations I had nothing to show for my South-of-the-Border aspirations except for a much more intimate acquaintance with the inside of our metro airport.

So, what is a disappointed and frustrated food writer to do under such circumstances? Close the weekend down by attacking a bottle of fine tequila for one, but also visiting one of the more interesting retail spots to open in Baton Rouge in a long time, La Morenita.”

Red the full article over at Country Roads Magazine’s The Good Feast.

United Airlines’ flight out of Baton Rouge was canceled yesterday and thus my trip to Oaxaca was shortened a bit. But, I did take the time to repack and lighten my load somewhat. It was also a good time to dig out a 12 year old guide book to the ruins in the area around Oaxaca city and do a little reading. I have a bad habit of reading guide books after I get back from a trip, but yesterday’s forced delay left me with some unexpected free time.

So, I plotted a potential itinerary that takes in not only the major structures at Monte Alban and Mitla but also several other pre-Aztec sites as well as some craft villages and maybe a night over at one of the lessor ruin sites. My hope is to get some good night photography of the ruins and staying in a little guest house on the property might facilitate this. It also looks like the “petrified waterfalls” at Hierve el Agua, built up by millennia of mineral spring deposits, are more accessible than I thought. This is really going to be a photographic dream trip.

Oaxaca is also known for it’s food. It is sometimes referred to as the Land of the Seven Moles (as in sauces, not the semi-blind rodents that tear up people’s lawns). And I have every intention of trying all seven. That’s all for today. I will be posting lots of shots over the next week. Adios.

In all the recent dustup over food trucks in Baton Rouge, it might be easy to forget what a great sense of community they are able to generate. A local councilman (and brick and mortar restaurant owner who has been a general obstacle to progress over the years) tried to pass a series a ordinances that would have made it more difficult, if not impossible, for food truck operators to sell their fare.

Thankfully, his efforts were seen for the transparent, self-interested ploy to regulate competition out of existence that they were, but it still goes to show that a certain sort of politician loves to talk about doing away with the burden of regulation until that regulation helps him win one over on his competition. The best, last-ditch effort to defend the ordinance was that food trucks didn’t have the expense associated with a brick and mortar so… no real argument was offered beyond that, just so they should be controlled before they got out of hand and did something productive, like giving people what they want. This is a bit like a buggy whip maker complaining about cars because they went faster than horses and therefore should be made illegal.

At any rate, many of the local food truck operators were instrumental in raising awareness among the public about the upcoming legislation and successfully had it removed from the council agenda. I suspect that this is not the last we have heard from the unmentioned councilman, but it was a heart-warming victory all the same.

Some of the food trucks have been regularly gathering at various locations around town to allow the increasingly culinary-aware citizens of our little burg to taste the variety of foodstuffs for sale at the different trucks. They call these get-togethers “round-up” and one such event was held last week, a day prior to the council vote, outside of the local brewery, Tin Roof.

It was the first round-up I had attended but the cross-section of folks who were there as well as the general feeling of bonhomie among the business owners who conventional wisdom would indicate are all in completion with one another was encouraging in the extreme. Just as food trucks seem to be changing the way we think about eating from (sadly) out of a sack in the car, in a sit-down restaurant or at some location within a person’s home, they also seem to be changing the way we think about business. People who share a common business model can often be found banding together to try to multiply their voice and power, but this seemed to be something more. Of course, all the food trucks are in some form of competition or another but it is an encouraging sign when businesses who’s core market share overlaps see an opportunity for cooperation rather than one for pure, market-driven competition.

Baton Rouge, if you love or even mildly appreciate the convenience and diversity offered by our nascent food truck scene, I encourage you to remain vigilant in their defense. Hopefully these pictures will do a little to dispel any lingering doubts people might have about the popularity, threat or outmoded view of food trucks as steaming, solitary purveyors of egg-salad sandwiches and sodas idling in front of a factory come lunch whistle tooting time.

It is a sad but obviously evident fact that if we want to continue to enjoy the boon brought by developments in new eating and cooking styles that we will have to occasionally fend off the parochial interests of the small-minded but politically powerful. Perhaps the message might be made a little more clearly if we all eschewed dining at the still unmentioned councilman’s establishment and instead went for a porchetta sandwich, a tasty salad or some gelato at these mobile eateries.

There is a small number of quintessentially Louisiana things-to-do that I have yet to tick off of my list. That probably sounds pretty grandiose but it is sort of my job to ferret out and explore the treasures of our riparian state. This is not to say that I am not interested in hearing about new things to do or am at all jaded by the cultural offerings to be had. This is really more of a backdoor excuse for never having been to the Zydeco Breakfast at Café Des Ami is Breaux Bridge.

For years, years I say, I have been hearing about how you have to show up at the crack of dawn, shod in your best dancing shoes and are then treated to a visual and auditory assault that can only be created by spoons on a washboard, the accordion and hundreds of tooled leather boots slithering around a wooden floor in unison.

Well, consider the Zydeco Breakfast officially checked off of the list of things I am ashamed to say I have never done. My friend and dutiful traveling companion, the gelato maker, Luca and I left Baton Rouge at about 7:30AM and made our way west, a summer sun catapulting us towards we knew not what.

I have spent a respectable amount of time in Breaux Bridge, had some lovely meals there and browsed the amazing (and amazingly pricey) antique kitchen and dining room store around the corner from Café Des Ami, but I just never could seem to rally myself for the early morning voyage to the Zydeco Brunch.

Because five paragraphs is where current blogger wisdom tells me that people’s attention span begins to fray, I’ll just go down the list quickly. The cover is very fair at $5 (and you get it back if you order a decent sized breakfast). The food is wonderful, on this morning I had a boudin omelet with a side of Andouille cheese grits and the music is get-you-up-dancing-when-you-should-be-sleeping amazing.

A variety of zydeco acts play though Café Des Ami and I’ll have to leave it to those with a more specialized knowledge of the genre to tell you who the really good one are but Terry and the Zydeco Badboys are no slouches. So, what are you waiting for? The line forms early, the coffee is cast-iron strong and they make their bloody mary mix from scratch. The Zydeco Breakfast is simply a blast and I am poorer soul for having waited this long to go. Get to it already.

“George Herbert Mallory, a British mountaineer from the early 1920’s, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest responded that he was doing it “because it’s there.” Mallory was probably wryly praising the adventurous nature of the human spirit rather than making a cryptic statement about life, but he did die on the peak a few years later. So, there is that fly writhing in the risk-taker’s ointment.

Having seen Everest and its mistress peaks from a plane flying into Lhasa, Tibet, I can assure you that the parallels between the most storied of mountains and Louisiana’s highest point are simply that they happen to be higher than anywhere else around. There is no adventure in summiting the generously named Mount Driskill. However, its 534 feet of altitude, which is incidentally the third lowest peak in any state, does still beg the question, why would you climb it? Well, you climb it because it’s there.”

Read the full account of our existential and literal ascent at Country Road Magazine or pick up a copy around town.

“Eggs are the sort of thing that everyone knows how to cook and generally has strong opinions on. There are tricks for making your scrambled eggs fluffy, incantations to say over your frittata and secrets for getting them to hard boil without the yolks turning green. But, a really good omelet is all about patience and restraint. You have to be patient and let the eggs firm up before you flip it, and you have to exercise restraint when filling it or you will end up with a mass of un-cooked ingredients at the heart of your delicate egg dish.”

Read the full article and see the recipe (with prep shots) for a Oaxaca Cheese and Asparagus Omelet over at Country Roads Magazine’s The Good Feast.