Experiences in Santa Fe

In large part this trip concerns my continuing evolution as a photographer or, as someone suggested, a digital artists, since I'm really not all that interested in conventional photography but rather extending my efforts into making images that fall somewhere outside of the boundaries of traditional photography. It has been easy to turn this blog into a travelogue and avoid dealing with issues that are complex and, more disturbing, revealing. Yet, as I posited previously, my hope for this trip is that there will be some elements of self-discovery (please excuse any unintended pretentiousness). At any rate, if this blog is to serve a serious purpose, I must start delving into my experiences in Santa Fe. I am going to do so but because I want to include images in the relevant posts, it may be necessary to defer doing so until I get back to La Crosse. I'm not really able to do what I want with images on a laptop and it will work much better when I have my imaging paraphernalia available.

Nevertheless, I do want to briefly discuss the 2 day tutorial I had with Leslie Alsheimer at The Santa Fe Digital Darkroom the first part of last week.  I will write more extensively about this remarkable experience, but for now will simply copy and paste in some comments I made to Leslie in response to her request for an evaluation:

"Be assured that I take your request for an evaluation very seriously and promise to deal with it as soon as I get home. Briefly, after my 3rd tutorial [May,2010] I wrote you that it was the best yet. Now, following the 4th one, the same comment is appropriate. In fact, I have been telling family and friends that this  may have been the best educational experience that I have ever had. As you may know, I am intrigued by the process of teaching and have spent time reading and thinking about why is so often doesn’t work and why in some situations it is so very effective. It would,  in my opinion be a good thing for an Education researcher to study your remarkable talent for teaching. I have some thoughts about it, and may (or may not) share with you."

I think that this is all I am going to say on this blog about the qualitative aspects of the experience, but will go over in some detail the things we worked on and what I learned.
Byron