Recently

Last couple of months I have been quite busy. Gearing up for the Collaborations event on October 5, 2014 and the event itself kept me busy for a while. Here are a few photographs from the hanging of the Ballet Off Stage exhibit at Festival Ballet Providence studios where Jim and Greg did the hanging, I am grateful for their help.

After that I committed to 4 workshops on Lightroom and Photoshop for the members of PSRI on four consecutive Saturdays starting on October 25, 2014. The first two were Introduction to Lightroom and Intermediate Lightroom, and the last two were Introduction to Photoshop and Intermediate Photoshop. They were beneficial to the participants as well as to me since I had to crystallize the ideas into bite-sized chunks. Except for the first Photoshop session, we had all the others in the office of Ted Lawson; a little cozy but worked out well. Thanks to all who attended the workshops and kept me on my toes with their questions. Of course, thanks to Ted for organizing them and hosting 3 of them at his office. I am sharing a few photographs from the second workshop, the framing is a bit tight because, well, the seating was a bit tight but it went well.

While the workshops were under way, I was also preparing for the upcoming exhibit, Sacred Spaces Large and Small. The prints were ready about 7-8 days before the hanging and sat in one corner in the den. On November 5, Jan and I loaded the car with the prints, took the hanging brackets that Greg had made, brought the exhibit catalogs and headed to the Central Congregational Church. The gallery committee members were ready to put them on the wall and since I had already determined the hanging order the actual work went rather quickly. The next couple of days Jan kept busy making three trays of baklava, plain, chocolate, and orange chocolate; humus from scratch, and a few other goodies for the opening reception on November 7, 2014.

On the day of the reception we carefully stacked the baklava trays, the humus bowl, the crackers, chips, etc. in the car and went to the church. With the help of the gallery committee members the set up went quickly again. Jim Scott, one of the committee members brought his projector and computer so that I could present two video shows I had prepared about the Hagia Sophia experience, inside and out. Guests started coming gradually and around 6:10 PM I made my gallery talk, showed the videos, answered the questions for about 20 minutes or so. By the end of the evening about 55-60 visitors came to see the photographs, and even more importantly, to get their share of Jan’s baklava. Thank you all who were able to join us for the opening of this exhibit and thanks to Jim Scott we have some memories of the opening night (all photographs by Jim Scott):

Addendum: My fellow photographer Paul White shared some photographs he took when he visited the exhibit. Here they are from his eye and camera. Thanks Paul.

The next day was another workshop, introduction to Photoshop and then yesterday we wrapped up the activities. On December 3 we will take down the exhibit and place the photographs in the storage shelves in the basement. Then my current projects will take a little hiatus and we will get ready to see our girls coming from Utah for the holidays. I already bought the tickets for the Nutcracker which Mina would like to see and we will make other plans after they arrive. I am sure in short order we will go get a Christmas tree and Mina will take her time to decorate it. I used to put her on my shoulders so that she could place the tree top ornament but she is getting bigger and I am getting older. We’ll see if a ladder can substitute for Dede!!