A Brother’s Legacy

Jun 252012
 
A Brother's Legacy

“Remember that picture you took of me that launched your career?” my youngest brother Mario kiddingly asked me when I visited him and my father in April, “can you get me a copy of it?”

I was embarrassed to admit that even though I remembered the picture well, the original was never returned and the negative lost, but I had a clipping of it somewhere in the dozens of archive boxes I have. But he was right about the impact of the photo. While a sophomore in high school I entered that picture in the arts competition winning first prize in the photography category and it boosted my ambition to really become a photographer.

Mario must’ve been around four years old at the time and I was playing around with my dad’s camera on the back of our tenement building on Park Street in Hartford when I noticed Mario crying softly at the end of an alleyway, presumably after being scolded by my parents or taunted by my brothers.

I always remember this picture, not only because it was my first published image, but because it also captured a moment in time so early in Mario’s life that was to be symbolic of his lifelong struggles – cornered and down with the weight of the world on his shoulders. I know he also saw that image the same way I did.

Despite achieving a Master’s degree in Finance and Information Technologies, he struggled with his career due to depression and addiction. At the end of his options here, he went to Portugal to be with my parents and try to straighten out his life, but it was not to be. After years of continued battles, he found himself again cornered and took his own life. He was 47 years old.

As I hurriedly packed for the funeral, I thought about this long lost image that I owed him. Invoking St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things for whom our village was named, I miraculously found the clipping. Incidentally, Mario was laid to rest on St. Anthony’s day, June 13th.

So, I thank my brother for being instrumental in launching my career and apologize for not getting the image to him sooner. I no longer picture him defeated in a corner but resting with the peace that so eluded him in life.

 June 25, 2012  Archives, Editorial, People 16 Responses »

Between the Rocks in a Hard Place

Apr 302012
 
Between the Rocks in a Hard Place

I stood there in a light drizzle with my camera tucked under my coat as a wet, cold north wind whipped time worn olive trees, waiting for the clouds to part and for light to do its magic. I was in Portugal, visiting my 85 year old dad and was hoping for some zen time trying to capture some landscape images that showed the natural raw beauty of the place. It rained all week and I wasn’t having much luck. This is the town where I was born, Serra de Santo Antonio, named after St. Anthony, the franciscan friar who contrary to Italians claiming him as Anthony of Padua where he died, was actually born in Lisbon, Portugal around 1195.

I was also thinking about how hard it must’ve been generations ago to extract an existence out of these hostile lands. Portugal had been one of the poorest countries in Europe and has seen much change and progress since its independence with a peaceful revolution from a military dictatorship in 1974. Today my town attracts tourists who come to view some of the most beautiful caverns in Europe, weekenders and returning expatriates who have built magnificent new homes and restored old ones, taking advantage of the eucalyptus scented mountain air and scenery. Most of the area around the town is now part of a national nature preserve. And they also come to marvel at the stone walls.

Serra de Santo Antonio, Portugal

With miles and miles of stone walls crisscrossing the hillsides as far as the eye can see like a giant jigsaw puzzle, it is hard to capture the expansiveness of the experience in a photograph. Stones were a major obstacle in order to work the land and corral the animals. These walls, which are even depicted on the town’s coat of arms, along with stone houses and barns, are now historically protected monuments to the resiliency and endurance of past generations. One can get a better sense of the grid work of walls further up the hillside where there are fewer houses and vegetation. Almost every walled piece of land also has some olive trees, once an important part of the local economy but now replaced by larger industrial operations elsewhere.

Because I left for Brazil when I was 2 years old, this is a land that I only remembered from black and white photographs in family albums and my parents’ nostalgic tales. Places where everyone seemed to be known by their nicknames and lived in strange sounding neighborhoods. Visiting the town cemetery to pay my mom a visit, I walk past crowded rows of tombstones noticing all those names and faces that were so much a part of my parents lifetime, faces I remember captured in photographs always around some kind of festivity with food, wine and laughter – now forever silenced.

My Father at his house

My father sitting on the stoop of the stone house where he was born and where his family lived for generations.

In his time, dad built many of these stone walls. I was always impressed at his craftsmanship, but he dismissed it as no big deal. “Everyone here builds walls”, he would say. He worked for the town for many years, building and moving walls as roads were widened and was a mentor to many apprentices carrying on the tradition.

Al builds another stone wall.

My humble attempts at stone masonry. (Gotta find smaller stones!)

All of the walls around my 220 year old house in Connecticut are not original, but were actually built by my dad years ago – I’d put him to work whenever he came to visit even though he preferred working more with his native hard limestone than with our soft brownstone. Building a stone wall seems like it would be deceptively simple, but like everything else my father taught in my life, there’s always a method.

My father no longer builds stone walls but his legacy like that of many others is forever part of the town’s character and history. That’s why as an antidote for the daily high tech world I live in, I sometimes find solace in building or fixing another stone wall, creating some order out of all those loose stones. Not that it is ever needed, I just have to do it – it’s in my blood.

 April 30, 2012  Landscapes, People, Travel Tagged with:  35 Responses »

Thoughts on my “new iPad”

Mar 262012
 

As much as I love new gadgets, I waited until the third generation before I got the new iPad. While thousands waited anxiously in lines all over the world on March 16, my new best friend, the UPS man delivered the “new iPad”  to my door at 8:15am, minutes after it was officially on sale. I was among the lucky few (three million) in the first week.

It took a while to convince Joanne why I needed that  ”missing link”  between the iPhone and the laptop. At a recent photographers meeting, I noticed that iPads were the cool accessory, peer pressure was on. Why an iPad when for the same size and price you can get a full featured laptop? I guess each of us have our own justifications but after a week of use, I know that it is a game changer which will radically influence computer evolution and affect photographers and other content creators. Much of it revolves around that “retina” display, and that is a major shift for images on the web.

Apple's New iPad

The 9.7 inch iPad has almost as many pixels as my 30 inch Monitor.

The quality of the images and text on the retina display is simply gorgeous. There are major changes with the display – first, the screen resolution on the new iPad is 2048-by-1536 pixels at 264 pixels per inch (ppi), compared to the normal 72 ppi of normal displays.  This means that some low res web images and graphics may look less than ideal, but for higher resolution optimized images, the retina display can rival the printed image and that is “resolutionary”, to borrow Apple’s line. You can see the evolution of this high resolution screen coming -from the iPhone, to the iPad, to a laptop, and eventually to larger desktop monitors. Even though this is years away, it will involve a whole new paradigm of creating images and content to accommodate these high resolution displays. Luckily, in my last web portfolio redesign, I made the images with enough resolution to look fine in the retina display.

With the new iPad, I realized that since I now have full size browser experience as compared to the iPhone, I don’t need as many separate apps for different sites and purposes. One of my favorite ways to read online material is to amalgamate many different sites into one program. I subscribe to dozens of sites which offer RSS (RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication), and through Google Reader synching, apps like Feedler, Feedly, Flipboard and many others do an excellent job of having all those RSS feeds in one place. I was doing most of the RSS reading on the iPhone, but on the iPad, it’s a more enjoyable experience and much kinder to my own retina.

Along with all these improvements there are always a few caveats. For photographers, there’s still limited functionality in actual shooting situations compared to a laptop. There has been some early user comments about the iPad being warmer, which makes sense with the new higher powered display but I have not noticed it due to the cover and I don’t spend hours doing HD gaming. To take advantage of the HD, apps will have to be reworked and will increase dramatically in size. As an example, one of the first HD games, Real Racing 2 is almost a 500mb download, and an HD weather app with pretty graphics, was 150mb (tip: buy the biggest capacity iPad you can afford).

I bought a protective case which was supposed to fit the new iPad, which is a tad thicker (0.81 mm to be exact, to accommodate the larger battery) than the iPad2, but I had a heck of time fitting it. It snapped in place in my last attempt. Some fitted cases for the older iPads will not fit the new one. Also, the “smart cover”, a magnetic folding protector for the screen which is part of the case, is supposed to put the iPad to sleep when closed but mine does not work along with the early covers from Apple because the magnetic polarity was reversed. Apple has since corrected the issue on the covers, but something to watch when buying from another source. And when I ordered protective film for the screen, they sent the one for the iPad, not the “new iPad”. I do wish Apple had better product identifiers.

With this new iPad, Apple is again pushing the technologies of the web and ready or not, designers and photographers will have to adapt to HD design over vastly different screens and resolutions as other tablets also catch up. Unlike graphics and text that can be resolution independent, photographs are rasterized images which are not scalable without a quality hit, and the only solution for now is serving different resolutions for different devices. All of this will cause interim confusion not to mention the additional bandwidth needed while we lag behind many other countries in internet speed. The hard truth is that millions of viewers with their HD screens can’t be ignored, and photographers will have to adjust to these new evolving standards.

 March 26, 2012  Photography Tagged with:  2 Responses »
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