Feeding My Passion

I’m learning some Korean in advance of going there to teach English, which will hopefully happen by the middle of the summer. I’m also going to start making some Korean dishes, starting with their all-time most important one, kimchi.

Like lasagna, there are many varieties of kimchi and ways of making it. I’m starting with a pretty mild version before I try tong paechu kimchi, which is the stereotypical kind: Cabbage, whole-head, and fiery-red. (Yes, I know AP style is to leave off the last comma in a series before the conjunction, but I found leaving it off confusing in some cases and told my J105 instructor just that. My writing is already confusing enough, thank you!) I don’t think anyone in the house except me will eat anything but the white cabbage variety anyway, especially if I don’t ease them into it with this type. There are 3 other varieties besides baek kimchi I want to make before I leave: Whole head (tong paechu), cucumber (oi kimchi), and cubed radish (kkakdugi).

Take a look at my first batch of kimchi!

Looking very delicious in their sterilized jars, at the beginning of their 3-4 day fermentation.

Besides the cabbage, there’s ginger, garlic, dried chili threads, Korean radish, Asian pear, scallions, Fresno chilies, pine nuts, red dates (aka jujubes), sugar, and lemon juice.

I played piano as a kid for a few years, then switched to playing trombone for 6 years in marching and jazz band, so I was excited to see this music store on Main St., knowing that private lessons would be going on inside. The owner was very cooperative, and introduced me to teacher Roddy Jackson, who was also very helpful. Kaleigh Navares, who studies flute with him, also consented. The lighting was decent, but the room was very small. I worked a couple of different compositions, including tight on her hands and some closeup on her face. I’m not crazy about those compositions, liking their interactions better, as well as the similar lines of their flutes.

p.s. Do I have to pick just one photo?

Kaleigh Navares, having just come from taekwando class down the street, studies flute with Roddy Jackson every Thursday at Gottschalk Music Center in downtown Merced. Jackson teaches all wind instruments, from the flute to the tuba, and the most natural wind instrument of all, voice.

Until about 4 or 5 years ago, I was intimidated by yeast breads. The yeast thing seemed so precise or arbitrary, or both, whatever. So I avoided them. Well Mark Lahey’s famous (and famously easy) no-knead bread recipe, faithfully published by Mark Bittman of the NY Times, completely changed that for me.

When I can time the loooooooong first rise correctly so I don’t have to handle it in the middle of the night or when I’m out, it always turns out stunningly well, except for that time I smoked up a house. But that’s another story. Here’s my latest loaf, and it tastes even better than it looks.

California’s Central Valley, the world’s most productive farmland, has been experiencing a drought the last few years, getting 4-5 inches of rain less a year than is typical. This doesn’t seem like a big dip, unless you already know it only gets about 13 inches in a good year.

While Lake Yosemite is a recreational destination for many in Merced, its main job is to be a reservoir for local farms. As the water line on this tower clearly illustrates, the water level has been much higher in the past. Fortunately this Winter, the only season it rains in the valley, has been relatively wet, and locals hope rain levels will be back to normal.

While Lake Yosemite is a recreational destination for many in Merced, its main job is to be a reservoir for local farms. As the water line on this tower clearly illustrates, the water level has been much higher in the past. Fortunately this Winter, the only season it rains in the valley, has been relatively wet, and locals hope rain levels will be back to normal.

Rainy day here, hoping to do something weather-related but by the time I got to downtown Merced, the rain was already drying up.So I just walked down Main St. and looked for whatever. Talked with a cigar and tobacco store owner who had a great shop, but no customers for a while, and then too many. So I walked on.

There are a couple of old barber shops on main, with the rotating barber pole out front, big painted cast iron chairs and funny-colored liquids in faceted glass jars, black combs marinating inside. Unlike the first one, Luis and Bob’s Barber Shop was packed, and so in I went.

Elijah Contreraas is rather unhappily getting his hair cut by Luis Velasquez while being held by his mother Abigail. From right, Elijah’s dad Umberto, sister Mariah, Manny Madrid are there for comic relief, if not moral support.

I like the wider shot because of the kid in the foreground (Adam Abarca) and the kid with the lollipop (oops, didn’t get his name), but this photo highlights one of my biggest issues right now. The quality of my CoolPix 5400′s images is very good, better than I had expected for a 6-year-old prosumer digital camera, even at ISO 400, but I don’t have real depth-of-field control, so unless I’m tight enough to truly block the background with my subject, then I get the background, whatever it is. And wow is this one cluttered! Where to look? EVERYWHERE! YAY!

My brother-in-law is going to let me use his Nikon D200 and 17-50mm/2.8. My dad has a very nice 85mm/1.8, and I’ll get it all by Saturday, so I’m very excited. Honestly I’m very grateful to have access to any digital camera since having to shoot film (remember that stuff?) would make this class expensive. And an assignment like our 30-day thing kind of a pain in the butt.

My photojournalism class has an assignment to take at least one photo a day for the next 30 days. The primary purpose of this, as the phrase goes, is it to “just do it.” The benefits of it are many, and like exercising outside every day, you get more out of it than just fresh air. First, getting in the habit of making pictures is very important, and frequent practice yields a plethora of benefits, technical and otherwise. As the late yoga master Sri K. Pattabi Jois said, “Do your practice and all is coming.”

I made this photo from the kitchen in the Branding Iron, a restaurant that’s been in Merced for more than 52 years. When I was a kid growing up in Merced, it was the best place in town (probably still is) and when my grandfather gave me a choice of any place in town when I turned 9, I chose The Branding Iron.

Julio Garza, who’s worked at The Branding Iron for 5 years, gets ready for Tuesday’s dinner service. He starts the grill and fryers, warms up sauces, sets up the pantry and sauté stations, pre-decorates plates, and fries corn tortillas to garnish the restaurant’s gazpacho before the rest of the other kitchen staff gets there. Once the orders start rolling in, he’ll work the grill or sauté station.

Lamott’s wise and hilarious book instruction manual for writers is also surprisingly relevant for anyone wanting to work in a lonely and creative field, such as photojournalism. It’s also the first book my photoj class is discussing, and seeing as how I’m not really able to participate in the discussions from here, the professor, David Rees, asked me to write something about Bird by Bird in my blog. I’ve written about the first collection of chapters, simply entitled “Writing,” which is mainly about getting the ball rolling and listening to your characters so you can let them develop. I guess I was feeling pretty effusive about the section, because my summary and feelings is more than 2100 words long. Yow.

I’m hoping I can sum up her concepts about the second section, “The Writing Frame of Mind,” and how they pertain to my feelings about photojournalism, just a little more succinctly. Brevity being the soul of wit and all that. I’m planning on having this baby wrapped up by tomorrow night.

I did my first assignment for my photojournalism class while I was up in Sacramento on Tuesday. On Monday, I missed an interesting one in Merced in a park near the library. A little girl wanted to get up on these pull-up bars that were much too high for her, she kept jumping up and down. Her father came over and lifted her up so she could grab the bars and she tried to do a pull up. And then he lowered her to the ground. Simple. Good illustration of a sequence. Good subject. No camera. It was in the car of course.

Anyway, I’m happy with what I did get, a man and a woman building a fence at an organic farm in Sacramento.

And I’ve created a page just for my photoj assignments.

I’ve also decided to make pictures for a couple of hours a day. Lamotte’s feeling that a writer (or creative professional of any sort) needs to sit down and work, no matter what, for a few hours a day, so you break the mind’s resistance to working, and give your muse a regular window of opportunity to come out and play. So I’m going to work on a couple more sequences just for the heck of it. And post them of course.