Lets try not to Bucket-Boy this up now....

Had a great day off, spent almost all of it doing photo stuff.  Generated some new work that I'm excited enough about to preempt working on Luxor stuff.  so without further ado...

This morning I woke up w/ the urge to mess w/ my old, somewhat maksur tripod, I figured out a few weeks ago that I could take the central column out and reverse it to get the camera to hang very close to the ground.  Today I did that and went looking for something to shoot.  Ive been very intrigued by the ants here, and I found one of their nests and went to town using a 60mm macro lens we have here for the project.  after spending a fair amount of time on the ground, this was the result.

A photo I had Amanda take of me while I was using the new rig to photograph the ants.  God her lens is great....not to mention her eye.

Left the front gateway this morning to find two of our guards on camels.  I for one feel much more secure knowing that the terrorists have no chance of facing down a camel-tank...

 Up until last week, the photo-studio had no doorknob.  you could lock it from the outside with a latch and padlock, but god forbid the wind blew it shut when you were in there...the preferred methods of extrication were either pounding for someone to let you out or getting your fingers into the door crack to pry it open.  However, the carpenter came on tues or wed and installed the snazziest door handle that I have seen in a long time.  I had to show it off.  This was also done with the 60 mm macro; I really got to get me one of those...

One of the cool things about living in the desert is the occurrence of dust storms.  They can blow up pretty quick, but you still have warning.  Last week we thought one was coming, ran around sclosing windows and unplugging and storing electronics and then all ran to the roof to get a good view.  As it usually goes in Ægypt, not much actually materialized, and a good 20 mins was spent standing around doing nothing (also Ægypt appropriate).  Jen however was uber prepared with her scarf and also looked really cool, hence the photos.

Prior to last week, we had been in the wadi (basically the entrance to the high desert through a dry riverbed, you can see the entrance in the "Desert solitaire" post in the background) just once, the first week we got here.  After that the police freaked out, and Matt had to go meet w/ the head of security in the Suhoag governate to resolve the matter, which essentially came down to him telling the local guys to stop being such jerks and do their jobs.  Last friday we finally got to go up again, and while I have more pictures, I haven't gotten through them all yet as its something so massive it definitely presents a difficulty in representing the sheer magnitude of it, and just throwing up a snapshot isnt my style.  what I do have though are these 2 portraits, one of Ileana and one of Damon that I both really like.