Katari Taiko performs in Vancouver

Katari Taiko has used two of my photographs on their poster for their upcoming concert! Here is their press release:


KATARI TAIKO, the first taiko group in Canada, presents an evening concert at the "Cultch" on Saturday, March 10th. This concert will feature the eight-member taiko ensemble plus a guest appearance by the virtuosic Vietnamese music duo Khac Chi. The program will feature an eclectic mix of traditional and contemporary pieces, showcasing Katari Taiko‚s energy, joy and passion. Khac Chi will perform the opening set and will collaborate with Katari Taiko in a grand finale piece.

Katari Taiko was formed in Vancouver in 1979 by a group of Asian Canadian activists inspired by performances by the Kodo Drummers of Japan and San Jose Taiko. They began learning and practicing on old tires in a community hall. Since then, they have built and acquired an impressive collection of taiko drums and percussion, on which they pound, tap and sing out their exuberant songs. Katari Taiko has built up an extensive repertoire of both traditional and modern pieces, including original compositions. Their performances incorporate vocals, martial arts, poetry and theatre. The synergy of the group, together with the visceral experience of the drumming, appeals to audiences of all ages and transcends cultural barriers.

Khac Chi features two of Vietnam‚s premiere performing artists, playing music of exquisite beauty. Their rare talents and superb musicianship have won them numerous awards for excellence, as well as many invitations to play across Canada, the US, Europe and Asia. Showcasing rare and unique musical instruments, made of bamboo by the mountain peoples of Vietnam, interspersed with the haunting melodies of Dan Bau (a one-string zither from northern Vietnam), Khac Chi takes you on an adventure in sound. Their concert performances are a rare insight into the sophistication of Vietnamese culture. Khac Chi has released three CDs: Moon Light in Vietnam, Spirit of Vietnam, and their most recent CD, The Sounds of Dan Bau released in 2006.

"Katari Taiko [showed] incredible discipline matched to exhilarating improvisation. The crowd wanted an encore!" Georgia Straight

www.kataritaiko.bc.ca / www.khacchi.com

The Adequate Gardener in South Africa

So there I was out in the velt of South Africa, hot, dispirited, with clouds of bugs sheeting my LCD screen and me like, well, suffocation--up my nose, in my mouth, in my ears, landing on my skin like a new black shirt. The worst of them, flies that looked like honeybees, stung. It was our first day out in the field during Canadian photographer Freeman Patterson's Namaqualand workshops, and there had been, similar to my experience with his workshops in New Brunswick, plenty little information about what we were about to encounter. I would have liked that question answered in advance: Say there, how are the bugs?

I thought I would go plum mad, and so did everyone else, too, trying to hang on but at the last second flailing out instead of pushing the shutter to capture that one great shot painstakingly arranged. We must have been comical to watch--20 odd photographers doing a bizarre jitterbug. It turned out there were several precautions one could take:

1) don't wear dark clothing, to which the flies are attracted
2) soak your safari clothing in premethrin prior to travel, and
3) don't flail, it attracts them

But how could anyone fail to flail?

On the way to our field where I was in Photographer-Extremis, we'd passed field after field of flowers I actually wanted to photograph, blue lupins and swaths of yellow going on forever, only to fetch up here, per Freeman's say-so, in this rocky, ORANGE (did I mention how much I despise orange?) vista, a challenge. Did I mention it was orange? Did I mention it was hot? And noon, thereabouts? Did I mention it was buggy? I forced myself to take the obvious shots. I reminded myself to ˆseeˆ the way photographer Maurice Henri hastens everyone to see. Maurice Henri, man, he rocks my world. He's got a camera programme going with boy soldiers in Sierra Leone, and that takes cajones, huge cajones. Half-heartedly, I took some more shots. Sweaty and miserable, I moved to the shade. I tried an exercise of Freeman's...I stood in one spot and without moving, composed ten unique frames. I couldn't think what to do next.

Finally, bored out of my gourd and desperate, I plucked a few daisies and started spinning them in front of my lens. I'm known for my creative effects with macro work, and have a tidy sideline selling framed flower prints, and flowers for editorial and stock, so I was in familiar territory. I was seeing, finally. I was getting into the zone, which even on a good day takes a while. I was taking some pretty, pretty handheld stuff.

We were being instructed that day by the uber cool New Zealand photographer, Tony Bridge, who creates awesome landscape pix and has some pretty nifty takes on people, too. He'd spent most of his time helping a beginner who wasn't familiar with any of the buttons on her new digital SLR, but inevitably he looked over and saw me twiddling and spinning and doing every damn thing wrong.

Ask anyone. There are rules to macro photography, tripods among them, cable releases among them, all to prevent that devil camera shake. Any miniscule amount of camera shake is gonna show up in your pic and that's a for-sure. I started out in the biz the way everyone said I should, out in the garden covered in frost freezing my petooties off, fiddling with a tripod, my camera extended upside down from the middle post to make it low enough to catch a spring crocus in situ.

I got some pleasing shots, but being obedient was draining the fun from photography as quickly as juice runs down a funnel. I noticed things over time. Because of camera shake I was waiting like some idiot urban hawk for a moment when the wind died and no cars were going by to vibrate my tripod legs and hence, my camera. I was using all these deliberate, methodical approaches in order to capture nature as it wasn't.

The thing is, nature moves. Watch flowers next time you're near them. They're Cuban musicians dancing salsa; Bahamian dancers bending in a calypso beat; African drummers flashing their hands so fast against their congos you can't make out their fingers.

That's what's happening in the flower garden. Not all this stiff, posed, mannered behaviour that shows up in the perfect, staged photographs. Ever wonder why flowers are so pretty and move so fetchingly? They aren't alive for very long. It's flowers' life's work to have all their sexy bit on display, to do a little hootchie kootchie mambo-ing and reproduce fast. They can't do that standing still. They have to flash and preen a bit to get noticed.

I'm a photojournalist by nature. We don't pose people like mannequins or milk bottles. Me, I want to capture real time.

And why should it be any different for flowers, I ask you? Couldn't photographers take a PJ approach to macro photography?

I discovered my answer accidentally, when I wanted to take shots of magnolia blooms on a busy street and my tripod wouldn't extend far enough. I didn't have a choice but to stand on a footstool handholding. The wind came up, but I was there, prepped, and on a deadline, so I just kept shooting and expected the pix to be useful. To my shock, they were gorgeous. Better than gorgeous. Sexy and vibrant and almost edible. Not all of them, of course. Not many of them. But two or three were the best stuff I'd ever made.

It was a trek from those kind, accidental results to today, where my techniques are pretty out there--plucking the flowers and waving them with my aperture wide-open, for god's sake. It was a trek to a velt in the blooming African desert spinning a South African daisy while clumsily trying to focus and shoot. True, I could have used an assistant to maneuver the plant. True, most of the pictures I made were garbage. True, I could only do what I was doing in the first place because of the advent of digital SLRs with their spacious CF cards.

Tony tapped me on the shoulder. "I gotta say one thing. I really gotta."

"Hmm?" I said as if innocently.

"Jane, your technique stinks."

No way was I going to tell him I had a picture taken exactly this way on exhibit as we spoke at Kew Gardens in London, a winner in the UK Garden Photographers Association Awards. No way was I going to mention how many of these shots people actually bought to hang in their houses. No way was I going to boast. He was trying to teach me something, and it was my job as a participant to learn what he knew.

"Look," he said, "let me show you something." Tony took his tripod and screwed on my camera, then cast around for a pretty flower. He found one smack dab in the killer sunshine, in a little cove between two rocks, and marched me over. I was dying from the heat and bugs in seconds. He manoeuvered his tripod down as low as it would go, got on his knees, fiddled and focussed, and then asked me to take a peek.

Yup. Looked orange all right. Exactly like a still life.

I just grinned. God knows I couldn't argue. There was utterly no question that Tony was right, and I was wrong. Tony was absolutely right, and I was dead-rights to wrong.

What the heck. I blew hard to send flies scattering and screwed my eyes almost shut so they wouldn't divebomb my corneas. I pushed the shutter.

(But the picture below is the one I took the other way...)

SPECIAL OFFER FOR BRIDES!

Vancouver has had a tough winter, more like a winter back east than anything we're used to here, with windstorms and wind damage combined with snow and torrential rains. We missed a month of it being away in the Bahamas and Cuba shooting, but we've still had more than enough!

When the snow melted in our yard over the weekend, we were amazed considering the months of low temperatures to find bulbs pushing their tough little snouts out of the chilly earth. We found snowdrops, too, the diminutive harbigers of spring, with their white blooms still tightly furled. I'm sure they'll pop at the first blink of sunshine.

We decided what with all this new hope and new life springing forth it was time to indulge ourselves, and our brides, in an awesome day of studio and street photography, on us! Anyone who books at least a 6-hour contract in February, and who has a wedding gown she doesn't mind getting dirty (spares are available for under $100 on eBay), and who pays for her own makeup and hair, is welcome to a day of fashion photography around the Lower Mainland! Let's see what kind of trouble we can get in. Train station? Bus station? Gondola up to Grouse? Underwater? With urban graffiti? Romantic shots with your honey rolling around in the surf? (Oh, okay, not until summer...) Only limit? Imagination!

Cuba

Havana must be the most photogenic spot on earth. The communist politics since the 1959 Revolution that lifted Fidel Castro into power and US embargoes have forced the island city, formerly a US playground, into a weird timewarp. Colourful crumbling Spanish colonial mansions, classic American cars babied along since the 1940s and 50s, Latin and African influences, and a vital people who love to play music and dance--all these combine into a culture that thrums. You can feel the energy of this city like wind on your skin. Havana is a photographers' paradise! And hands down it's the best place in the world to have bridal photographs taken! All these arches and balconies and decaying castles! That's my new dream, now: to have a gorgeous Canadian bride with a willing wedding party and a day free after their wedding just to spend in Havana making awesome, drop dead photographs. Habana Vieja, anyone?

On New Year's Eve, we snuck out of a boring event put on for tourists to roam the Habana Vieja streets. On Calle Aguilar, we followed the irresistable sounds of salsa, and finally found dancers: lithe dancers, old dancers, child dancers the size of peanuts who are better at moving than I could be with a thousand devoted lessons. We passed over our bottle of Havana Club rum and tried to keep up, our bodies hopelessly spastic. Doors led to courtyards leg to rickety, half-gone stairs climbing high only to stop dead in mid-air. Slatted boards shaped balconies so old and decrepit they looked like they'd plummet with the softest footfall. I remembered there were streets around here where everyone walks down the center in case one of the houses collapses.

We wound our way down to Calle Opispo, ordinarily the shopping street (though its wares are limited), where folks on upper balconies tossed buckets of water down on unsuspecting strollers below, to shouts and screams. We dashed from the protection of one balcony to the next laughing as they caught one after the other of us, and made our way out, finally, drenched, to drink overpriced mojitos at Hemingway's pub, la Bodeguita del Medio. It was 2007, and we were a happy family in a happy country.

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

Look at baby Leif now!

In the midst of Vancouver's cold snap and 2 feet of snow, we got together with Leif, the little tot in my book "Becoming Leif." Look at this little pike now! He's almost 20 pounds at 4 months old and just as cute as a button.

Leif's doing all that cool older baby stuff like tracking people as they move, focussing on his hands (as if trying to figure out how to get them to do his bidding), and well, drooling a lot. He's even sitting up a bit on his own. We couldn't believe how much he loves to laugh, and how good his parents Tricia and Brian are at making the giggles rain out. They're good at getting the laughs, but not so good, apparently, at catching them on film.

I was one proud photographer tonight when I caught this shot.

The Himba

In 2003, when Karutijambja left her village to fetch water at the Kunene River, a crocodile grabbed her and dragged her under. Her dog attacked, and the croc let Karutijambja go, grabbing the dog instead. Karutijambja was flown out to the hospital by the good folks at the Serra Cafema Lodge, and, amazingly, lived to tell the tale. Part of her right breast is missing, and when her daughter suckles, she can use only the left. The attack has given Karutijambja somewhat of a wild reputation, along with the horrible nickname "Krocodilla" among tourists.

Karutijambja, above, wears a headpiece that signifies that she is a married woman.

The Himba are descendants of the Herrero peoples who live spread across harsh Kaokoland in northern Namibia. Nomadic pastoralits, they are known for having upheld their traditions in the face of pressure to modernize. The women cover their bodies in a paste of red ochre and butterfat, which protects their skin from the sun and desert wind, and from mosquitoes. As well, this scented paste blocks odour; it is often impossible, with only croc-infested waters nearby, to bathe. The Himba women and girls have unique hair and jewellery--pre-pubescent girls wear their hair in two braids spiking forward over the face; pubescent girls wear multiple braids of shorn hair and ash pulled forward and roped back off their faces; married women wear long ochre-bound plaits. The tribe wears few clothes beyond loin cloths; when night begins to fall, they wrap themselves up tight in blankets.

Stay tuned to my upcoming travel site for more. Once it's up, it will feature a slideshow of the Himba people.

International Photography Awards

A cool thing happened on the way to...not winning. This year I was awarded seven honorable mentions.

Wildlife Category: Long-tailed Macaque, Bali
Children: The Child Bride #9
Sunset: Nusa Dua Dawn
Flowers: 3 Flowers, a series
Portrait: The Child Bride #9
Nudes: Nude 4
Landscapes: Mount Batur, BaIi

Above is the entry Long-Tailed Macaque, Bali. I am just now building my travel and fine art web sites and I'll include some of these images there, if I remember. Prod me if I forget. Hope to have at least the travel site up by mid-December, but if not, certainly by the end of January, presuming life doesn't intercede.

Does anyone else feel the way I do about monkeys? I could spend hours and hours and hours observing and photographing them and never tire. I got the best photos of long-tailed macaques both times I was in Bali. They're wild there, but habituated at the temples. They steal people's sunglasses and hats, but sometimes return them in exchange for food or water. They are always so very thirsty, as witness above. It takes them some effort, but eventually they can wrangle off bottle caps from the bottles they thieve, and drink.

When I was young, I vascillated between a career in ethnology, studying the peoples of the world, and primatology. Jane Goodall still makes me gaga. But then, photographing the Himba in Namibia was the most amazing photographic experience I've ever had. Yanking me away from baboons on safari in Africa this September was some hard thing to do. In fact, if you go to fellow photographer Stan Jirman's Tanzania journal you'll see the poor guy was beside himself being stuck in a vehicle with Joy and me, a troop of Chacma baboons just outside the window. Hey, what say we invite him on a baboon-only safari!

As for the rest of the nominees above, all shot on location in Bali or New Brunswick, Canada, except for the nude which was shot in Vancouver, they're indicative of my wild love for travel photography. I leave for the Bahamas and Cuba in a couple weeks and can't wait.

Baby Isaac

Wasn't I lucky this week getting to shoot baby Isaac? Beyond the visual, there's an entire aural symphony with a newborn--all his squeaks and coos and grunts--and I had forgotten how encompassing it is. How do we reconcile, as our children grow, the loss of such basic but extraordinary sensory pleasures? I know I often wished, as our girls grew, that there was a pill to take them temporarily back to that luscious, impossibly sweet size. On my own behalf, because I wanted to brush my lips across the top of a new little skull and its downy cap of hair, but for their sakes, too, because of the comfort a mother so completely offers to them at that age before they grow and we, inevitably, disappoint. Ahh, that age. All its sounds, yes, but all its crazy good smells, too, the milk and the baby powder and the subtle smell of fresh laundry. I was swept right back to the mesmorized maternal rapture that comes from watching a thousand fleeting expressions cross your baby's face, listening to his panoply of noises. Isaac has an incredible amount to say about his world, and plenty of it was grumbles about the photographer--all that hard black camera and the need for him to put up for a few minutes with being laid down unswaddled, when what he craved was the womb-like and endless dreaminess of his mamas' arms.

Baby Isaac arrived early at 33 weeks, a preemie, and he's just home from the hospital. His mamas are so incredibly smitten and proud and stunned. They wanted to remember Isaac just like this, just a bit over five pounds, still in preemie diapers, a trifle baggy-skinned. It's a good thing because, as this photograph I made attests, XS Baby Gap socks that ride up the thighs like hip waders won't look quite so big for long!

I went back twice to shoot Isaac this week, and I found myself wishing this is how every shoot was arranged. A first shoot just to get to know how each of us interacts, to size up expectations and soothe nerves. Then the real shoot soon after. Like an engagement shoot before the wedding, sort of.

It is such an honour for we photographers to be with our clients at such special times in their lives. We really have extraordinary access. I want to thank Isaac's moms for trusting me, and say to them: Your family rocks!

Fun Things Happened in England

I loved, loved, loved going to Kew Gardens when Joy and I were in England last August, since we had, beyond its usual delights, the opportunity to search out the garden photography exhibit called 'Imagine Yesterday...Today." And such a surprisingly sweet thing it was, too. The curators of the Garden Photographers Association 2006 competition had done a wonderful job of hanging 98 masterful garden images; printed and framed and up close, the images fulfilled the promise of their small thumbnails on the contest site. My image, "Agave 1", a shot I made in the private garden of Phoenix Perennials' nursery owner Gary Lewis, and part of my exhibition series of thorny plants called "Hurt Me," won an honourable mention, and it was a lark to watch people enjoy it.

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

Started by co-founders Sandy "Sam" Puck and Cheryl Haggard, the US non-profit organization Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep provides photography for infant bereavement sessions. We photographers volunteer our services in order that parents might remember their new little sweethearts through fine art photography long into the future.

If you know of families needing the services of a NILMDTS photographer, or of a hospital where you'd like to see the program start up, please pass along the web site link, where local photographers are listed, or if the need is for someone in Burnaby or Vancouver, have them leave a message for me at 604-435-9581.

From the NILMDTS website:

"Pregnancy and Birth is a miraculous journey. This amazing time of life is full of mystery, anticipation, joy, hope, and wonder. Feeling the powerful energy of birth and new life, watching as a new family is born unto each other. These things humble and amaze. These are the things that we celebrate when a baby is born

But there is another aspect of pregnancy and birth. There is an unexpected place in this journey where some families may find themselves. When a baby dies, a world is turned upside down. There is confusion, sadness, fear, and uncertainty that cannot be explained. There is sorrow where there should have been joy. During this time, it might be impossible for families to know what they might need in order to heal in the future.

This is the place where NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP gently provides a helping hand and a healing heart. NOW offers a vital service to our community. For families overcome by grief and pain, the idea of photographing their baby may not immediately occur to them. Offering gentle and beautiful photography in a compassionate and sensitive manner is the heart of this organization. The soft, gentle heirloom photographs of these beautiful babies are an important part of the healing process. They allow families to honor and cherish their babies, and share the spirits of their lives."

How cool is this?

The baby book I made for clients Tricia and Brian was chosen by its publisher, Asukabook, for its Book of the Month. It's the August book, but the announcement just went live today! It's called 'Becoming Leif.' Go and have a peek. I often make books for my wedding and portrait clients, but this one was a special delight since I'd grown so close to the family after spending so many sessions with them. They chose my 'Blue Line Package' which involves several shoots. It was crazy! We photographed them on the beach at dawn. We photographed them in the studio. We photographed them underwater at a pool. We photographed Tricia in her bathtub under 12 dozen (fridge-cold) eggs.

I stepped out of my usual box a bit by telling their pregnancy and birth book as a bedtime story for their son. I remembered when my girls were little, and how much they loved fables about themselves as babies, and how much they would have loved a picture book about how they got here, and how much they were loved and anticipated when I was pregnant. I just knew Leif would love a book about himself just as they would have.

Anyway, I'm pleased and so proud of the family. They are such awesome parents! They were an utter delight to work for, and I was bereft when the job finally came to a close six days after the baby was born. I hope they have me back to do future work for them!

Shi Shi

I was delighted to shoot Katari Taiko's character "Shi Shi" last evening. It's a bit of a challenge shooting dancing in the studio, limited as I am to the unexpansive edges of the seamless, but I still managed to catch the excitement he brings when he explodes into life. Jan Woo, who plays Shi Shi, says there is nothing like the expression on kids' faces when Shi Shi jumps into a classroom. Can't you just imagine? Last summer I photographed Katari Taiko, and Shi Shi's six-minute number, at Vancouver's Powell Street Festival, as I have for several years running. I caught two photos of kids reacting to Shi Shi, and Jan's right, it was out of this world. Just everything that is magical about childhood--big, oversized, fantasy characters who can pop you right out of your universe and into a new world.