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.