Junkanoo is postponed!

The weather here in Nassau is delightfully muggy and hardly hot; for Christmas, we feast on a dinner with turkey, port and Cuban cigars sponsored by the Graycliff Hotel, then play games, while every few minutes a horse-driven carriage clops by under our white balcony. Each horse wears a straw chapeau; it's hokey, but still somehow charming. In the past days, I've photographed a wedding, a cigar factory, and some of the fine and old local architecture. But after the work is done, this is a family vacation, with our children here, and we spend a lovely, slow Christmas day opening stockings, playing games, and eating. In the distance, massive cruise ships blow sonourous horns. We stroke lazily through the pool. We sleep intermittently, all keyed to wake at midnight for the Junkanoo Festival set to begin at 2 a.m. It will be the only festival we've attended at night, and the challenges of photographing a parade in low light will be many.

But then, thanks to a storm coming in from Florida, Junkanoo is postponed. After coming all this way and timing everything to catch it, we're frankly disappointed. But it's off to Cuba for us...

Greetings from Small Hope Bay

The school I attended in Calabash Bay on Andros Island in the Bahamas has long since morphed into a fundamentalist church, and the kiwi trees we kids used to sit under for lessons have been backhoed away. Still, the core interior is mostly unchanged, and it's easy to see past the altar to the principal's desk which hulked in middle of the room, punishment strap coiling like a cobra. Grades 1-6 attended here, with no walls between the classrooms. It was all so new for me, a Canadian kid used to snowpeople and sleds and toboggans. We sat on benches and pulled slates thumbtacked to the backs of the benches in front towards us to work our sums; grade four kids had to spell the word "epidermis" which I believed was hopelessly grown up and wonderful. When we sat outside for lessons while yellow chicks pecked the rocks around us, I thought I would expire from delight. It was a time of firsts for me-first sight of the ocean, first choking taste of salt water, first scary hammerhead shark prowling the bow of our rowboat, first sea turtle swimming like a green mirage, first three-speed bike manoeuvered barefoot, first time having my mother all to myself. First kiss, in fact, in the dark on the beach at Small Hope Bay Lodge. The boy, I learn, is now a lawyer in Nassau.

I find my old friend Margo Birch Blackwell again, and the disappointments no longer matter-not the incessant wind, the curtailed dives, or the fact that the Games Room doesn't bring back the deja vu of yesteryear. I adolized Margo when I was a girl, and I find she's grown into a kick-ass woman currently running the Bahamas Environmental Research Center on Andros.

I'm lucky enough to shoot an island legend named Miz Ophelia Marshall up in the island's northern community of Red Bays. She has goiters the size of one of the sponges the fishers pull out of sea corrals. She is 89 on Christmas Eve-born when the last century was new, in 1917. She used to be the community's midwife, but now she makes baskets, some woven so tightly they'll hold water.

We shoot pans in the pine forests, lovely blurred landscapes, and more photos at the Androsia factory where the renowed batik fabrics, the soft blues and pinks and yellows, are fabricated.

On the last morning, quietly, out past the sunbathing solarium, we shake my mother's ashes into her beloved Carribean Sea and watch, tears streaming down our faces, as she joins the green blue waves forever.

Such good news!

I'm delighted to tell everyone that following the launch of our new portrait site at www.janeeatonhamiltonphotography.com/portraits, we have now officially rolled out our new travel site at www.janeeatonhamiltonphotography.com/travel. It'll go live sometime this week. What a bundle of work it was to put together! And now, beyond the showcasing of our favorite travel images, we have added the coolest site for fulfillment.

So all those times I'm overseas and more or less unreachable, you can still go ahead and order the prints or the rights-license you require without even involving the studio. Even if you need a signed giclée, you can go ahead and order it, and the studio will fulfill it when I'm back on terra firma. Make no mistake about who is getting paid here...just as with Pictage, our continuing site for portrait and wedding clients, your funds come right back to us (minus, of course, a cut). Just as with Pictage, we determine our own prices.

The other news is that the studio shut down last Friday December 8 for the holidays. Well, not holidays so much as happy days working in the Bahamas and then in Cuba. We'll be shooting in Nassau for Christmas, and Havana for New Years. Can't beat that with a stick, I say! I can't wait to raise a glass at the Hotel Nacional, and I'll be toasting all of my clients, those I met this year, and those to come next year. You brought me many pleasures, and I appreciate the chance to have come into your lives.

Oh, and while I'm thinking about it...we are only doing 15 weddings per year these days, first come, first served, and only working with clients who fall in love with our photography--for whom hiring us is a special dream come true. We're almost filled up for 2007, so if you're in a hurry, do send an email even though we're away; we'll do our best to pick up periodically. If not, check in again mid-January and if your date is still free, we can facilitate getting you finalized. Sorry for the inconvenience.

While we're gone, both the house and studio are being warmed by colleagues and friends, as usual, and we'll be thinking of them huddling around the strobes/fireplace while we throw off clothes 'cause we're too hot. We'll try hard to blog from location (you know, rubbing it in), but reception could be spotty. If not, we're back mid-January and will catch back up then. Happy holidays to everyone, with hopes that 2007 will see some resolution of world conflicts and a big lightening of loads for the burdened.

Jane