Photographs from Sicily

Finally I have it. My book about my trip to Sicily in May. It is a 137 page Blurb book designed via the book module in Adobe Lightroom. Now those of you who do not have Lightroom and don't plan to make a book with it, may want to jump right to the end of this blog entry if you just want to see the book and not clutter your mind with Lightroom stuff you are not going to use.

 If you have Lightroom, you really should explore making a book. I'm not saying that because it is easy because there is a learning curve. And the book module does have limitations. I would like more templates from which to choose. I would like an easier way to add pages of text that would flow from one page to the next. I would like that the text didn't disappear when you change the template. And, of course, I wish the cost of one Blurb book wasn't so expensive. On the other hand, I haven't found another source that is cheaper and offers the color management that I've had with Blurb.

I care a lot about color management. I want what I see on  my screen to be the same as what my printer produces or what shows up in my books. Blurb is pretty much spot on with color and I am always watching my histogram to be sure that I do not have any clipping of the whites or blacks so that I also control the contrast.

Another thing I like about using Lightroom is that I can work with my RAW images and if one image needs a bit of adjustment to make it work better with its  two-page spread partner, it is no problem. Just jump back to the develop module and make the adjustment. When you go back to the book module the image is there with the adjustment. It really does make it easier to not have to worry about making the image a certain size JPG to fit an image window, not to worry about margins, gutters and cut lines. I mean, you are aware of them but the module does a good job of managing them for you. I've done a couple of books as PDF's outside of Blurb and it was a lot of work figuring all those measurements out. They made nice e-books on Issuu but I have a lot of MB's on my hard disk with the RAW images, the PS layered images and then the flattened and sized images that finally went into the books.

The Lightroom book module has been working for me but I have a couple of more complex books in mind. Now that I've cut my teeth, so to speak, on making a book, I may be ready to take on a more sophisticated design program.

Here is the link, if you would like to see my book, Sicily.

Sicilian Cooking

While I was in Sicily I had some good meals but overall I thought that there was more potential in the dish than the preparation presented. In the restaurants where I ate, I never had the feeling that there was a chef who was taking the traditional recipes and ingredients and re-interpreting them for today's taste such as we see with some of the innovative chef's in Mexico. 

Sicily is an island so you would think lots of fresh seafood but just about every menu was limited to swordfish, tuna, octopus, squid and prawns. I was surprised because when we were in fish markets there was a wide variety of fish, most of which I didn't recognize from the Italian name nor from the look but certainly more varied than the menus reflected. There was always a dish prepared with squid ink. I tried a risotto in squid ink garnished with a marvelous Sicilian ricotta cheese. It was delicious but so filling that I probably only ate one-third of it.

Another thing about Sicily is that the country has been occupied by so many other countries that I expected more Middle Eastern  and African dishes. There were some items on the menus that included meats with fruits and nuts and if there were others they have been incorporated into our international cuisine to such an extent that I didn't recognize them as different.  

Always on the menu were two salads. One was mostly lettuce with grated carrots, maybe tomatoes and olives. The other might include arugula and romaine lettuce with grated carrots, tomatoes, olives, corn and maybe another vegetable or two. The corn in the salad kind of suprised me but it was good. One day in a Sicilian restaurant in San Miguel I had a salad with oranges and olives and I don't remember what else but when I found an orange salad in Sicily, I ordered it. I was disappointed. It had slices of orange not wedges of orange and lots of olive oil but not a dressing.

I kept thinking about the orange salad and when I went to the Saturday organic market last week and I saw fennel and arugula I knew that I was going to make an orange salad. When I got home I looked up recipes for fennel, arugula and orange salads and found several. So the picture is my version of the salad with a dressing of orange and lemon juice, olive oil, a bit of diced garlic, a 1/4 teaspoon of mustard over fennel, arugala, onion, olive and orange wedges. It was good.    

I'd like to have a Sicilian cookbook and I've been to Amazon to look for one. There are a lot of them but before I buy one I want to be able to at least look at the Table of Contents so see what is going to be included. 

Does anyone have a recommendation for a Sicilian Cookbook?

Don't Just Take Pictures, Make Art

Editor Brooks Jensen writes in the Editor's Comments of the May-June 2015 Lenswork Magazine:

Don't just take pictures, make art.
By this I specifically mean finish things -- be it an exhibition, a Blurb book, a website gallerly, a PDF or whatever else makes sense for your process and your content. The very act of committing to something all the way through to completion is one of the best ways to learn. 

I use to say that putting together an exhibition, especially your first one, was a huge learning experience. I'm not doing shows any more but I need the discipline of completing a project. It is nice to come home from a trip or a shoot and run though the images, mark some as the best of the lot. Maybe process one or two for FaceBook or the Blog. But nothing, absolutely nothing, is like deciding that the product of the project will be an exhibition or a boxed portfolio with an artist's statement, or a book that is designed and laid out with templates and text.

It is fine to say this is a nice image and so is this one. I like this too. But when I have to narrow down the shoot from 500, 1000, 2500 files to 20 or 25 for an exhibition, 15 or 20 for a boxed portfolio and maybe 150 for an affordable self-published book, that is when it starts to become a learning experience. Which images are the best of the best. Which images tell a cohesive story.

Then the images have to be processed so that they will be the very best prints I can make with a consistent look. It tests my technical knowledge but the other thing that is happening is that I am learning where my shortcomings are in making images. From that I learn to make the next project better.

Jensen is right. Don't just take pictures, make a finished piece of art.

The image above is Palermo, Sicily, made from the upper terrace of our hotel. And, yes, it will be in the Blurb book about Sicily that I'm working on.

The Mediterrenean Sea

Sicily sits off the mainland of Italy in the middle of the beautiful Mediterrenean Sea. Mediterrenean Blue is truly a color and it is different from the colors of the Caribbean Sea. You see the blue reflected everywhere in the colors of buildings and boats and often accented with a bright orange-red.

I did not see many sandy beaches. Mostly the sea rolled up at the foot of cliffs with maybe some small rocky inlets.

When you are looking out at the sea it is hard to imagine the part it is playing in the migrant crisis as people try to escape war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa. Many people have asked me if I saw evidence of the refugees in Sicily. I did not.

Photography Tour

I recently spent two weeks on a photography tour to Sicily. It was an amazing two weeks. Our group was made up of six hand-picked photographers. Photographers who wanted to photograph and could roll with the punches which always happens when traveling. Before the tour I knew two people in the group but loved getting to know the others.

We started in Palermo for a couple of days, then to Noto, over to Trapani and back to Palermo and a hundred stops in between for photographs of landscapes loaded with poppies or hilltop towns cloaked in fog or fish markets by the wharf. Elisa Paloschi, our great and wonderful tour guide who is also an amazing photographer and videographer, knows Sicilian towns and country roads so we were in places that I might never have found on my own.

The days were long. Most of the time we left after an early breakfast and returned at dark to drop off camera equipment and head out for dinner. I don't think we were ever back in our hotel room until about 10:00 PM. It was really a great way for a single, 'mature' woman photographer to travel to places unknown and get to locations that might have been way too much to do alone in a car in a foreign country with a different language. I will definitely do some more photography tours. I'll put up more pictures from the trip and tell you more about it over the next couple of weeks.

Okay, that accounts for some of the time I've been missing from the blog. What else has happened? Well, life. All I can say is I've been busy and I haven't been in the mood to write. But now I'm back!