Just Beet It

Farmer's markets are fabulous. Anywhere. One of my favourite markets is in Seattle (the Pike Place Market, where they have the first ever Starbucks), but there is always such a crowd I find it difficult to shoot over or through people. I am short and not exactly what you'd call imposing. Lord help me if I don't get front row at a busking event. I always end up with  somebody's bald spot.

But what a great way to get some really colourful photos, right? (At the farmer's market, not some dude's bald spot.) Clusters of vegetables, beans, pastas, flowers, fruits, candies, fabrics, soaps. Oh, the textures. A friend of mine has the most amazing shot of chilies from the Seattle market. I would really love to hit someplace with spices, like India or Morocco, and get some of that on film. If I used film. However, I don't know how plausible or practical it would be to push our giant plastic North American stroller through a sweaty, spicy, vibrant Middle Eastern market and try to take a decent shot. I may be an old woman before I get to explore the off-the-beaten-paths (and even some of the well-worn roads) of the world.



So I went to our downtown farmer's market to grab a few snaps. It's no Morocco, but if you're lucky, there's a really fun candy display or heaps of fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, due to the weather we've been having, there wasn't what you'd call a wide variety of veg. (Or, for some reason, candy. None to be seen. Perhaps next week we'll see candied mosquitoes? More on this later.) In fact, root vegetables seemed to be the only thing available. Beets. LOTS OF BEETS. And parsnips. Time for a good old-fashioned Newfoundland vegetable boil with that much to choose from. So I shot the beets.

And then it got me wondering if it were true if beets make you pee red. Does anybody know? I had a roommate in university who decided to test this to see if it were in fact fact, but he never told me the results of his experiment. Probably a good thing. A friendship has to have boundaries. I have also heard you can time how long it takes your food to go in one end and come out the other by eating beets. I don't know why one would need to know how long their digestive process takes, but it's good to know that there are simple and natural ways to explore this miracle of nature.



In the end, we bought an artichoke. No, not a beet. Being originally from Newfoundland, it was my first non-canned artichoke, and I wanted to cook it. Supposedly, you have to boil them for a heinous amount of time, which, by the by, is the quintessential Newfie cooking technique... I wondered if I had inadvertently come full circle... In any event, after boiling my artichoke in water, lemon, butter, and pepper for about an hour and a half, it disappeared. A few flakes of artichoke heart, not even a mouthful, appeared on my plate when my husband proudly emerged from the kitchen. Alas, after all that wait, he had prematurely removed the artichoke from the burner, deemed it too tough to eat, and chucked the whole thing, save for scraping out a wee bit of the heart. So I still do not know if canned artichoke is superior or inferior to freshly boiled artichoke. Maybe we should have gone with the beets? Again, gentle readers, you will have to let me know.  Or, if you have better artichoke recipes. That, and the beet thing.



But our market adventure does not end here, for it was the innocent, innocuous beginning to a much less enjoyable journey. Stay tuned.

Tanka

Written by a friend and translated from its original Japanese, here is the state of affairs here:

エ ドモントン　 日ごと五箇所は　 蚊に食われ　 掻きむしるたび　 悲しき快感 

In Edmonton, at least five mosquito bites a day--
each time I scratch 'em,
somehow, a sad pleasure

It seemed fitting to show you my leetle friend, for whose digital image I sacrificed several pints of blood in the capture. He, and his dragonfly buddy (affectionately known as The Ham), are both available in the webstore. A fabulous pair with fabulous colour and detail.

Oh Me Nerves

I had a Jonah Day (or perhaps a comedy of errors?) in photography the other day. At least I didn't cram fireworks into the wood stove, but the way I was headed, I'm surprised my Zeiss lens didn't end up in there. If I had a wood stove. Which I don't. Probably a good thing, too.

If you don't know what a Jonah Day is, and aren't reading your bible every night (I, in fact, first heard the expression in one of the Anne of Green Gables novels, and believe you me, even without the bible reference in the other hand, it was NOT hard to understand from Anne's experience just exactly what a Jonah Day was.) In the meantime, the uber short version of the story is, Jonah got swallowed by a whale and lived there in its belly for a while a la Pinocchio only without the sprightly Jiminy Cricket until the whale coughed him up. If that isn't an unlucky day, I don't know what is.



I first discover that, because of all the pictures I've been taking (mostly of my son... I do get a little carried away, to the point where one of my colleagues worries that he'll start calling the camera "mama"...) that my computer space is running a little low. Like, really low. Dang. I don't want to invest in an external hard drive just yet. Not yet. There are end of summer sales to hit. So I decide to do a massive cull of all the duplicates, copies, and icky photos I've taken over the last five years. Except somewhere in the cull I manage to delete an entire folder of nice landscape photography that hasn't been saved to my gallery yet. The loss of most of the pictures doesn't irk me so much as losing one particular shot of a grassy field with one of those perfect, poetic trees and a winding path. The sky has sweeping, textured clouds and the sunbeams are bursting through the branches of that tree and streaking across the field like the beams from a Care Bear's tummy. It's gone.



So I decide to go back to where I shot it, hoping that the miraculous lighting conditions are just like they were the first time. I've got my camera around my neck with my new neck strap and the lens hood on, ready to shoot at a moment's notice. Except as I'm crossing the bridge, the neck strap breaks.

Yes.

And the camera and my lens go hurtling towards the pavement, all slow-motion style. Somewhere, Requiem starts playing.

Heart attack.

Except the lens hood, which is already in the go position, takes the impact, and shatters. The camera and the lens make a ten point landing on the pavement, oblivious to the near death experience it just had, and wins the Olympic gold. All systems are still go, captain, for the field shoot.

Except the mosquitoes are blackening the sky like a plague of Egypt and I have to shoot on the run. My husband is pushing the stroller through the field like a bumbling kidnapper, poor Oliver jostling around with a giant grin on his face. Luckily he was strapped in or we would have learned rather quickly if babies in fact bounce.  I told Oliver he had better watch out or he'd end up swallowing half the swarm. I'm flailing my arms like a lunatic to keep the mozzies away from my husband and son and came *this* close to clobbering poor husband in the face with the million pound glass Zeiss lens.



So, perhaps not a Jonah Day in the truest sense, but a series of accidents and near-misses. When I think of all that could have gone wrong, or have gone much worse, I'm in fact quite lucky. I still didn't get the shot that I deleted, but my camera and my lens and my husband are intact. But as they say back home, oh me nerves!

A Feast for the Eyes

Summer has finally arrived, but we're all trapped indoors. It's hot and sunny and perfect out there... well, almost perfect. We're being held hostage by the mosquitoes, who have made their comeback with a bloodthirsty vengeance. The newspaper photogs have had no difficulty capturing images of hapless victims being swarmed by clouds of mozzies, gleaming in the sunshine. Some folks are worried about the fairies or the dingoes spiriting off their babies. Me? The mosquitoes.

The heat, however, inspired my husband to hold an impromptu lunch party. His idea of advanced notice is, oh, 24 hours max. And then he's surprised when only one or two people can come... In any event, he wanted a somen lunch party. Somen is a noodle dish served cold on hot summer days in Japan. Or, in this case, Canada.

Handsome husband made way too much food for the two and a half people that came to lunch, and he's been eating leftovers for days, but hey, I'm not complaining! Check out the foh-tohs that resulted from his meticulous chopping. At least if we can't enjoy the outdoors, we won't go stir crazy hanging out inside.

These, and plenty more food shots, should be available within the week in the gallery. If you're thinking of dressing up your kitchen with some colour and originality, we have lots of images to choose from.

A Must See

Okay, fer real. This will make you smile, and if it doesn't, you're not allowed back here.