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.

Luxor Part "II"

More pics from Luxor.  not much to say I suppose before the actual pictures, so here we go...

The room at El-Fayrouz, a wonderful and cheap hotel we stayed at on the west bank.  Can you tell its 3 guys?

A statue outside of the Hatshepsut temple.  I didn't really like the temple that much...there wasn't really anything to it...but this statue I felt would make an awesome "portrait".

Another shot of the guy making the shisha pipe.  I liked this shot because I was able to capture his cig smoke and the flame in the burner.

A friend and I were able to duck into a small room at Karnak without any old fogey tourists lumbering in after us to ruin it.  She had actually sunburned her hands earlier in the trip and was wearing gauze on them as protection against the sun.  I thought the luminescence of it made a great photo in the beam coming from the skylight niche.

My english box is maksur...

So we are officially back from Luxor, and while I have more I havent had much time to process but its been awhile since I posted so it'll be a several-parter.

My friend Geneva on the ferry over to the west bank the day we got there.  Greg is in the background but hes dark so that keeps him from ruining it :)  I was however severely annoyed at the fact that I jad left my camera set on jpeg basic from the previous night when I was taking BS photos and processing this image was disaster.  after about an hour and a little help from Greg, I finally got it where I wanted, but it could have been better.....malesh...

So Seth, Jen, and I were in the market and Jen was looking for a skirt, so we took off down a side street to another clothing shop.  on the way there we passed a guy who was in the process of making a shisha water-pipe.  I asked him if I could take some photos of him and he said yes, so I stood there for about 10 mins watching, shooting, and smoking a cig w/ his friends.  This set by-far are imo the best photos that I got the whole trip.  small debate going on here at the house.  My frineds seem to prefer the second photo while I prefer the first.  Seth especially likes that You cant see his hands in the second photo but I prefer seeing the process better in the first photo.  In all three of these photos he is using the iron in his hand to apply solder to the seams on the pipe.  There shall be more, I just haven't gotten to processing them yet.