Lady Sunset..

For months now I've had an image in my mind that I wanted to capture. I'd think about trying to set it up at least every week or so yet in amongst the busyness of life I discovered that months had gone by and I was still repeating the same ole mantra to myself'; "next week.. next week.. next week.." It was while drinking my morning coffee a couple of weeks back that I noticed the fields behind my house were beginning to make the shift from impossibly green to a warm golden hue and I knew if I kept up this mantra and didn't act soon then my window of opportunity to shoot in amongst the rice fields would be gone, and that was something I was not prepared to let happen.

I asked amongst some friends if they'd be willing to let me shoot them and sold them on the concept of the shoot and was pretty jived when they agreed. Part of my vision was to have a background in which the setting sun was just kissing the mountain tops and so on a couple of afternoons at around sunset I rode around the outskirts of town location scouting. I thought I had settled upon a place but randomly one afternoon when I was picking up Wildfoot and Little Feather from their school, I decided to take the long way home and as we rode the scenic route through fields upon fields of rice just ripening for the harvest I knew I had stumbled upon a far more beautiful space.

I came back later that afternoon and wandered around the fields looking for interesting nooks and crannies and points of interests that I might want to include. The whole time I was keeping my eye on my watch so I would know where I needed to be at what time to get the most of out the rapidly changing light, but at times it felt almost pointless. I challenge anyone to try and focus or to make plans while walking through those fields at sundown! The whole afternoon felt like I was walking around in a dream. The soft breeze blowing across the top of the rice fields that created ripples which stretched out all the way to the base of the Himalayan Foothills while the sun gently settled down behind the mountains and smothered everything with an impossibly gorgeous golden light. If I'd had a picnic blanket, a bottle of red and my wife I believe I'd be well in my right for thinking that I'd died and gone to heaven.

 I rang around and locked in a day and a time for the shoot. I even managed to convince my friend's eldest son to come out and be my lighting guy/voice controlled light stand and this move ended up being one of the the best 60 baht I've ever spent! But on the morning of the shoot things didn't look anywhere near so promising. The weather was overcast and cold, the wind was kicking up a stink and the sky was continually threatening to rain. Living in a valley means the weather is always unpredictable and so there was always a chance it might come good, but because the weather report said it was likely to rain I opted to postpone the shoot till the following week, a risky move considering the difficulties in getting all my friends there at the same time coupled with the unknown date of the impending rice harvest but ultimately it was the right one.

The days rolled by and thankfully the rice remained unharvested. Everyone turned up for the shoot and it was like God had been saving up the most beautiful weather he had ever conceived of just for that day. The golden sunlight was otherworldly and helped give a real milky quality to parts of the images that I was hoping to capture along with the occasional bit of lens flare. I fired off a bunch of shots in different locations and tried to capture a variety of moods (as well as a number of individual portraits which I'll upload once I've had a chance to edit them) and walked away with a digital copy of the image that I'd been seeing in my mind's eye for months in advance (the first image on this page) and that is a sweet feeling indeed!

The final noteworthy part to this story came the following day when Shoonklicky Spoon went for a ride back to where we shot these images only to find that the fields in their entirety had been cut down in the harvest. Not more than than 12 hours after I captured these images the harvesters arrived and put their sickles to work. If ever there was a time I was grateful to have gotten off my butt and made something happen, this is likely to have taken first place!

Sunday Sun..

 
Of all the genres of photography, portraiture is my favourite. Don't get me wrong, I love rambling off road to try and find a unique perspective for a landscape, I love capturing candid moments in street and travel photography, and if all my friends here continue to be under the spell of this strange new desire to watch birds, I might even try my hand at wildlife photography, but without a doubt my photographic heartbeat is for capturing people. Is it that I'm by nature a people person? That people seem by far the most complex, diverse and beautiful creatures on our planet? That attempting to capture the essence of a person on film (or more to the point, my interpretation of that person's essence) seems an almost transcendent pursuit? I truly don't know, but what I do know is that right now I'll take any opportunity I can to stick my lens in someones face and capture a frame full of the beauty of the world.

Chhath Puja..

We've been back in ole Banaras for a little over two weeks now and it feels like our last days living in this city are all too quickly racing away. We've been insanely busy packing up our home and selling off most of the possessions we've amassed over the years, trying to schedule in enough time do decent goodbyes with friends (which I feel we're failing at), trying to not wear out the kids with all the running around (which I feel we're failing dismally at) - and of course, trying to manage all of the above with a family who have all had the flu since arriving back in town.. It's been an exhausting couple of weeks!

But none-the-less, I'm trying to make the most of our last days here and thus trying to get the camera out as often as possible. And whilst those who know me know that mornings are not my most favourable time of the day I decided to get my sorry butt out of bed get and down to the Ghats before sunrise last week to witness Chhath Puja. 

Chhath Puja is a an ancient Hindu festival that centers around Surya (the sun god) in which participants offer puja and gifts to thank the Sun for sustaining life and to grant their wishes. Prosperity, healing, babies and other various wishes are all considered up for grabs over this four day festival in which devotional acts such as abstaining from drinking water, offering prayers at the rising and setting of the sun and prolonged standing in bodies of water are all part of package. Whilst men and women both participate in Chhat Puja, it does seem to be more of a Women's festival and with the noticeable increase of women outside of their homes it actually creates quite a different (and wonderful) atmosphere in and around this overwhelmingly man's world which is Banaras.

I hope you'll enjoy this little morsel from the feast of colour which is the Varanasi Ghats during Chaat Puja!

(And because I can't help myself I have to point out that the compression that occured when uploading these images has done some weird things with some of the colours and really brought out the vignettes. You'll have to be patient and forgive me this time round till I work out how to fix it.)

Confesticles and Wymns Rhydms..

Me & my favourite Jesus lovin' cats

So not too long ago we landed back here in Australia. We decided years back that we'd return to Oz every 2.5-3 years so that we could reconnect with family and friends and our broader Jesus loving community because we deeply value those relationships, and so that's just what we're doing. It's been an interesting re-enty in Australian life and there have been plenty of moments of reverse culture shock that I wasn't quite mentally prepared for (more about that in a later post) but one thing the Wild Flower and I were really keen to do was get away on Confest 2014!

Confest is essentially a volunteer driven festival that takes place in the bush about an hour outside of Deniliquin (only a lazy 11 hour drive from Sydney) and I'd say that in the 9 years we've been going its probably attracted a turn out of a few thousand people each year. The motto of Confest used to be something along the lines of "the gathering and sharing of ideas of what it means to be a happy and whole being" and so it relies on people voluntarily running workshops on whatever makes their heart sing the most.

 

Essentially, if you play an instrument/have a deep knowledge of something sacred/are skilled at celestial twerking (yes that really was a workshop this year!)/ etc. etc. etc. and one morning you wake up and feel like running a workshop, you make your way to the central meeting area, write it up on the workshop board and you might get nobody turning up, or you might strike gold and get five thousand people turning up.

 
I've always been excited to get away for these few days in the bush with thousands of other people who are interested in digging into the deeper things of life, of meaning and of spirituality. For those who know me, I'm pretty open about my favourite conversation topic being based around 'what do you believe about spirituality and why,' and so a festival that's designed for people to share their thoughts and beliefs on precisely this topic means a lot of the time I'm feeling like a kid in a candy shop.

 

I also feel pretty blessed by the crew that go along with year by year. In the past I've always known pretty much everyone I was going with pretty well before Confest, but this year there was bunch of amazingly wonderful cats I got to meet for the first time and had some sweet moments getting to know them and building some new relationships. Being my first time on Confest with kids meant that getting to spend as much time with people as I would have liked proved to be a more challenging experience than before, but I'll take what I can get, and what I got was certainly nothing worth complaining about.

 

Like most Confesters, our crew really loves the Confest magic and we always strive to invest our love and skills into making it a greater festival experience for everyone (and I feel I can say this without compromising because in general all of the creative energy and greatness comes from others in our crew and not from me! I just get the joy of riding on the back of some truly fantastic coattails!). Over the years we've put on parades, Jesus Easter Gatherings, bush sculpture workshops, meditation sessions, classic 80's pop rock jam sessions, acrobatic classes, Javanese inspired back lit puppetry shows, all of which have been amazing, but without a doubt one of my favourite highlights each year has got to be the Chai High Tea.

For weeks in advance we're baking treats, hoarding Chai ingredients and raiding op shops for the most garish and outrageous outfits possible. We decided this years theme was 'Oscar Wild goes to a Rave' so a bunch of us went storming throughout Confest singing and dancing and inviting people to join in the festivities which saw about 50 or more people rocking up to join in the good vibes.

 

There's always this moment at the start of the Chai High Tea (just after this blessing was offered from up on high) when the cloth covering the baked goods is pulled back and the place explodes into a cosmic free for all. With live music, platters of amazing food, pots of hot chai and a forest full of crazy shenanigans, really, how could it be anything less than amazing?

One especially great element is thats everyone's "welcome at the Chai High Tea, where the Chai is hot and the love is free!" Even if you're a dirty feral, or a high flying corporate, we don't mind, bring in the lame, bring in the blind, even bring in this sleazy bearded homeless lady on her way from a Phd graduation ceremony, everyone's welcome!

And if you ever get a chance, you should most definitely do what we did and get yourself into the same space as these fine creatures in the above image! We've known these cats for more than a decade now and suffice to say they're some of our favourite people on this green planet! Reverend Rainbird, Lady Wildwood and their lil ones live (& kind of run?!) the Homelands community up in Bellingen on the midnorth coast of NSW so if you're WWOOFing or looking for an amazing place in Oz to be, these are most assuredly the people for you!

A friend I was talking to about Confest yesterday was asking me a bunch of questions about my time and we had a great moment when he looked me in the eye and said "Let me get this straight, you spent 5 days at a Clothes Optional Hippy Festival in the middle of the bush and you don't have any crazy stories to tell?!" And I think that's kinda true (Banaras what have you done to me?!?). I had an amazing time and feel greatly encouraged, but "crazy" stories, not so much this time round. Upon reflection, I guess naked bike riders, dog whisperers, tantric energetics, polyamorous communities and packs of naked mud people running around pretending to be cavemen have all become a more normal feature in my life than I first realised.

 
It was however, very sweet wandering around and running into people we hadn't seen in a number of years, especially when those relationships felt like they just picked up exactly where they had left off. We first went on Confest in 2004 and have gone every year since (except for 2012-13 when we were overseas), and so you make a lot of "Confest friends" who because they live in Melbourne of somewhere outside of Sydney, you really only connect each year when you're back on site, but it is interesting how much Wild Flower and I value some of those relationships, even if we only spend a very small percentage of time together each year! We even got to catch up with a good friend we met in Varanasi!

 

We begin each morning at our campsite with a time of connection. It's such a beautiful way to begin each day; praying together, meditating on the Scriptures, someone sharing a reflection or teaching, speaking the love of Jesus into each others lives and getting into plenty of great music and singing.

I had two gorgeous moments during our morning times of devotion this year; the first was playing along to some Yeshu Bhajans (Jesus Devotion Music in Hindi) with Wild Flower who played her harmonium in front of other people for the very first time. I've played with countless people, countless times throughout my life, but sitting side by side with my gorgeous wife, our backs warming in the morning sun, singing and making music together, aaah, it'll be a sweet memory I'll hold with me for a long time to come. The other was sharing a Bluegrass song I wrote last year and hearing it sung by a group of people for the first time. Around eighteen months back I was going through a real Bluegrass Gospel phase and set myself a goal of writing a song in the genre, so to then have 25 people all stomping their feet and belting out a tune I'd written was a pretty surreal moment.

Prayers, Scriptures, Devotional Songs, This Crowd = Bliss.

Lastly, I have a small confession to make. I have a guilty pleasure that I indulge each year after Confest. On the trip home, it's not unusual need to stop for petrol in the first could of hours after leaving the site and it's par for the course that many Petrol stations will be adjacent to a McDonalds. Now in general I don't eat McDonalds (I think I went 15 years without touching the stuff) and I don't crave eating it while driving home from Confest, but I do LOVE trying to make eye contact with other dirty footed confesters while they're sheepishly running to their cars with bags full of maccas. I think people must feel like they're committing the ultimate betrayal; 4 days of mostly organic, vegetarian, local grown foods at a Hippy Festival, followed swiftly by Micky Dees! Truthfully I really don't mind what people eat, but the look of horror on people's faces when they see they've been caught out with a mouth full of cheeseburger is just too priceless to pass up! So if you're one of those people I've seen over the years then I must convey a giant thank you for making my drive home just that much more enjoyable!

More realistic..

So finally, if you find yourself wandering around Bliss or Tranquility one day and you come across this campsite, make sure you stop in and enjoy the hospitality of some of the finest & furriest Jesus lovin' folk this side of the Jordan.. he's the cat on the right.

Paint The Town Paan..

Step out your front door, it'll be there. Take a boat ride down the Ganga ('Ganges River'), it'll be there. Walk into a fancy looking Government office, you'd better believe it'll be there! Paan, otherwise known as betel nut, is as ubiquitous in Banaras as the holy cow! And no matter where you go you can be well assured that it won't be long before your eyes (and probably your feet) will stumble across a smattering of someone's most recent chewing session.

Paan is a chewing stimulant native to India and Pakistan and derives it's name from the Sanskrit word for 'leaf' or 'feather.' Due to it's psychoactive properties (most often tobacco) it's popular amongst hard working bicycle rickshaw wallas, auto rickshaw drivers, day laborers, taxi drivers, fruit sellers, tailers, fishermen, chai wallas, salesmen, water buffalo herders, businessmen, old ladies, ok, so it's pretty much popular amongst everyone. There's a pretty broad variety of Paan from the innexpensive to the slighty more pricey, but at its cheapest and nastiest it sells for only a couple of rupees (AU$0.08) per packet and once you've let it linger in your mouth for as long as you care to, it seems you can spit it out wherever the bloomin' hell you want.

I remember the first time I walked into my faculty building at Banaras Hindu University. The building is old and not particularly well cared for, but it's a university building and so it still looks big and official. As I walked inside the front doors, through the lobby area and began climbing the flights of stairs it was quite the shock to see that even inside a place as prestigious as BHU, the corners of every stair well, the end of every hallway and at the base of every window sill, the tell tail signature of someone offloading their Paan payload was still waiting there for the world to see.  

Sure it's gross, sure it's unhygienic, and sure it'll give you cancer, but the splatter often has a quiet charm about it if you're willing to accept it. It took me sometime to begin noticing but eventually I pulled out the camera and went for a walk to photograph some of the local "street art." This series represents just one 40 minute walk around my neighbourhood photographing the Paan stains in my local gullies. What this collection represents to me is that as long as there is Paan to be sold, there will be photographs to be taken.