Well, I’m back. Been a long while since I’ve blogged, in part because of how busy things have been at work, plus, my Canon 40D needed to go into the shop, so I’ve been on a bit of a shooting haitus. And I’m not talking about a three-day stint at Metro Camera Service in Englewood for a sensor cleaning. I had to ship it to Canon’s Main Service Branch in California to have the shutter mechanism fixed. So, all is better now, as these test shots of cabernet grapes and backyard carrots indicate. However, the situation pushed me off the fence on acquiring a new camera, and so, this Wednesday, according to UPS, I’ll be getting a Canon 5D Mark II as my main ax. The 40D, loyal soldier from trips to Italy and Mexico, will still serve me, but as the backup and as Hailey’s camera, too.

So, just to update things, I thought I’d get these pics of our bumper crop online. Hailey faithfully tended to a veggie garden this year, and along with cherry tomatoes, rosemary, oregano and jalapenos, we had great success with carrots from seed. On Saturday, we pulled 50 out of the ground, and only stopped because we didn’t want them wilting in our fridge. Best to keep the last 50 or so in the ground and harvest them for Thanksgiving. And yes, we recommend washing them before cooking them. Less gritty that way.

While in San Miguel de Allende, Hailey and I took a class at the Sazón Cooking School. I thought I’d take a second and upload some images from it. Not much of a narrative, but it was certainly a worthwhile experience. Our instructor was Chef Paco Cárdenas (pictured at top) of the well-known and highly regarded El Petit Four Patisserie in San Miguel de Allende. He was incredibly energetic, passionate and thoughtful, and it made for a wonderful two hours on the Thursday afternoon we spent there.

He made a traditional homecooked meal of dried shrimp cakes with molé and romaritos (a grass-like herb) and topped it off with a buñelo, a deep-fried sugar-dusted Mexican cookie (below right). The class was quite affordable, and I’d highly recommend it if you are spending ample time in San Miguel de Allende. It breaks the mold a bit and its nice to head home with new skills in the kitchen.

Paco was very amiable, and the next day (Good Friday) Hailey and I stopped by his bakery for breakfast. It was incredible. Moist pasteries, good coffee and a clean, well-lit place to contemplate whatever.

On Saturday evening, as we walked the town taking pictures of doorways and the like, an SUV pulled up alongside us and honked the horn. It was Paco behind the driver seat, checking in to make sure we were enjoying San Miguel de Allende. The traffic was stopped behind him, but no one seemed to mind. Such is the spirit of the place.

We had heard from a Canadian couple that a pair of barn owls was nesting in an alcove above the restaurant. At nightfall, the parents could be seen flying out to hunt for their chick. Seeing the mother and father owl proved elusive (at least on this night), but the chick was a noisy little one. From the restaurant’s patio you could see its white, fuzzy little profile on the alcove edge, its screeching for food an odd accompaniment to the fine dining happening just below. Abrasive shrieking aside, I found it magical. Certain birds have a way of adding mystery to an old place, and the owls’ hole-in-the-wall home lent the church a haunting quality.

San Miguel de Allende not only had these nesting barn owls, but also a nightly appearance from thousands of white-faced ibis (pictured below), who would migrate in flowing V formations over the city at sundown. The birds were extraordinary, perhaps because nobody else seemed to notice them.

La Capilla would also serve the best dish of our entire Mexico trip. It was a simple yellow pepper and tomato soup that got increasingly complex with each spoonful. Bold and rich tanginess defined the pepper side while nutmeg, smoke and a touch of heat defined the tomato side. The bowl looked like a yellow-and-red yin-yang with an artistic swirl of white cream down the middle. Getting a little of all three elements in one taste was the most transcendent food experience I’ve had since Italy.

It was also Holy Thursday, a day that lacked the pageantry of the two days that book-ended it. Still, it was no less moving and compelling. Each year in the evening of Holy Thursday, the faithful commemorate the Last Supper by going from church to church to have their feet washed. Lines braided from the church doors out onto the streets at Oratorio de San Felipe Neri, Templo de San Francisco and La Parroquia. Coming from a place where lines like these were more synonymous with buying concert tickets, I couldn’t help but be moved. Devotion wasn’t just something you claimed, you practiced it, even if it meant standing for an hour, washing your feet, then going and standing in another line for another hour and repeating.

We strolled around town in the mild night, circumnavigating El Jardin a few times to the sound of wheezing toys, giggling children and mariachi music. This old town was amazing at night — a place where kids had no bedtime and the temperature was perfect.

A full moon rose over the hillside to the east and crested the church towers. The next day would be Good Friday, and I was getting nervous about shooting the event. I had no deadline, no assignment, no client — this was all self-imposed pressure to do the spectacle justice.

I woke up this morning in New Orleans at 6am with a flight to catch home. I had flown in Sunday night with some colleagues from Weaver, and I was proud to see a New Orleans that was only slightly different from when I last visited in December 2001. There were crowds of people, albeit slightly smaller ones. There were street musicians playing a beautiful medley of styles, albeit not as many as last time. And there was a whole new set of contexts to nearly every landmark I saw. I couldn’t look at St. Louis Cathedral without seeing Bush in front of it, desperately trying to regain the nation’s trust from the city’s only dry patch of ground. I couldn’t even look at the Superdome without thinking about the suffering that happened there.

It’s been said that what doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger. So very true. New Orleans is proving to be resilient, even if she’s letting certain parts of herself go. But then again, it’s not complacency that resulted in that doorway at the top of this post — it’s just graceful aging.

This morning I’m up before Hailey, which means I have a pot of coffee to work on and some color correcting to do for a client (in this case, Tim and Lexi — hey guys, your photos are now ready!). But I started thinking about travel and coffee and the moments where the two have collided beautifully. Travel tends to be an exercise of the senses. Obviously, sight + photography, but also sound + music (I’m working on a special Mexico playlist right now), flavor + food (just discovered they put molé on eggs in Guanajuato — yes!) and its cousin flavor + drink. In cases of this last pairing, I’m usually seeking out the holy trinity of liquids: wine, beer or coffee.

This morning, I’m compelled to write about coffee, and the best cups I ever did have. Warning: this is a self-indulgent exercise, but then again, so is blogging, right?

1. Italy (where to begin) – This cup starts in Varenna and has traversed the entire Boot wherever we’ve gone: the cappuccino. I had my first real one on Lake Como, and it was the first of many introductions to the beautiful details of Italian flavor. Enough espresso for every sip, a bold yet smooth flavor, and milk fading steadily into foam at the top. We can’t make these in America, at least not that I’ve found. In Seattle, they’re close, but as with many things and travel, its goodness is amplified by the setting. The cappuccino pictured above was our first in last year’s trip — served over breakfast at the Hotel Minervetta in Sorrento. When paired with a view of Vesuvius over the Bay of Naples, breakfast became less an exercise in sustanance, and more an exercise in realization — you are a long way from home, and its all good.


2. The Palms Cliff House, Big Island, Hawaii – Hailey and I honeymooned on the Big Island and Maui, and our first five nights were spent at this magnificent bed and breakfast on the wet coast north of Hilo. The amazing breakfasts were served on the lanai, accompanied by a hot cup of Kona. Mornings were always the right temperature. Pods of rain would splash the cliff-lined coast, cool things 5 degrees and cast a rainbow for 60 seconds, before moving on. The best cups of drip coffee I’ve had were on that porch, newly married, looking forward to everything.

3. Stella’s Cafe, Monteverde, Costa Rica – Here’s the magic formula of Stella’s: 1.) It’s backyard is the famous cloud forest of Monteverde, 2.) it’s patio featured an assortment of uber-comfy chairs, 3.) it’s local resident was an affectionate cat who had a penchant for sitting on your lap and purring, and 4.) they served mild shade-grown Costa Rican coffees. On top of all of that, our good friends Will and Liz were living up the road at a biology research center, meaning this was the place to meet up. On our first morning, we met a birdwatching guide here, and we hardly had to leave to see some of the area’s most magnificent birds. Across the street was a flock of golden-browed chlorophonias and a blue-crowned motmot perched nearby. Be sure to click the links to these birds — some of the craziest wildlife I’ve seen.

Unfortunately, this trip was a long time ago during my Nikon FM days — meaning I only have 4×6 prints of the trip, and crummy ones at that.

4. Seattle – If you love coffee and you’ve been to Seattle, you just can’t leave it off your list. I’ve been a handful of times, but on this last trip in November, I finally “got it” when it comes to this city’s coffee culture. That’s because it rained the whole freaking time, and without fail, there was always a coffee shop to duck into. Tops on my list wasn’t even a cafe: Macrina Bakery. It was one of those places where they specialize in one thing (incredible baked goods) and just so happen to know how to make cappuccinos like the Italians do. Bonus.

5. The Lodge at Chaa Creek, Belize – My final selection is another trip from the Nikon FM days. This memory is flavored by the sweetness of morning ritual. Every day, the routine was such: wake up at sunrise (courtesy of the chachalacas in the tree over our hut), walk onto the porch, lie in the hammock, listen to the rainforest wake up, and enjoy the rich coffee they delivered to our room. Next door to us were my Mom and Dad, they’re first tropical rainforest/ecolodge/birdwatching/coffee-drinking experience. There was a small and ornery ferruginous pygmy-owl who was nesting in a hollowed-out tree above our porch. While drinking our morning cup of Joe, we’d watch her chase the iguanas off the tree. On our final morning, she killed a hummingbird and feasted on it while we discussed breakfast. Of all the collisions of experience that travel brings, file that one under Strange Yet Sweet.

So here’s a heads up: I’m hoping to blog from Mexico next week. We leave Friday and return the Monday after Easter. We’ll see how the internet connection is at the two places we’re staying, but hopefully we’ll be able to chronicle our journey through Holy Week nightly. Looking forward to it.

I won’t show the pork tenderloin experiment from Saturday night. Let’s just say we know how to follow a recipe and execute it, but plating it is another matter. Pig products should never look like a smiley face, and a sprig of rosemary shouldn’t look like a tuft of hair. It was bad.

But I was happy with Sunday’s experiments. Hailey (the resident baker) made Bara Brith, a delicious tea bread from Wales. I’m not sure of all that went into it, but it required soaking tea bags in water with brown sugar and a medley of dried fruit before folding that into the dough. It’s easily the best sweet breakfast bread she’s ever made.

The top photo was taken with the ring flash off camera (to the right) on a manual setting (1/125, f/20, 100 ISO). The bottom one, with available cloudy light pouring in the window. As much as I want the ring flash to make me a better food photographer, I like the natural light shot more.

For dinner, we made what has become a new favorite — chicken sofrito. It’s a Spanish chicken and rice dish in which you brown chicken thighs and legs, add zesty goods (onions, garlic, peppers, fennel seed, spices), a cup of rice, chicken broth and then you bake it for 25 minutes and finish it off with a quick broil to crisp the chicken. We got the recipe out of a recent Food + Wine Magazine and we’ve cooked it three times in four weeks. Needless to say, I think fennel seed should be a secret ingredient on the Iron Chef. I love that stuff.

Both of the above sofrito shots were taken with the ring flash off camera, and here it worked pretty well. The chicken is actually backlit on a wooden table in the top shot…that explains the yin-ying black and white effect on top and bottom.

We’ll be trying a few more experiments in the coming weeks. Its a good time of year to be dinking around with the flash. More to come soon.

Oh yeah, and a glass of water. I figured this may have some sort of stock value some day…like the kind of thing used in an annual report…or maybe not. Yeah, its a bit esoteric.

I was just thrilled that the ABR800 was smart enough to sync and fire with my external flash without any complicated formula or another accessory. Pretty simple really.

And for the record, this tomato was used in a salad later in the night.

Well, this week it came off the press and I’m thrilled with the result. Here’s where the article begins. Click on the image for the full view!

And here is the second spread:

The guide won’t be in circulation for another two weeks or so, but once it is, you can request a copy through Colorado.com. For an online gallery of the trip, visit my portfolio site, TanagerPhotography.com, and click on the Travel galleries.

Special thanks go out to Kelly Faigin (the graphic designer who did such a great job picking out photos and laying out the photo essay…she even used one of my food photos), Hannah Pierce (the guide’s editor), Andrea Golod (head of the photo department) and Dusty Demerson (who conducted the photo class in Crested Butte that was the subject of the story).

The criteria here is simple: which photo composition makes the subject most enticing? Another way of looking at it: which image screams “get in my belly!”

Remember to vote for the Travel, Nature + Landscape and People in Places category within the next week. Feel free to leave comments on your selection.

#1. Stewed pork wrapped in pork fat with embedded pistachios and an arugula garnish, at Baccanti Ristorante, Matera, Italy.

#2. Beef tenderloin meatballs, fresh pasta and pesto at Timberline Restaurant, Crested Butte, Colorado.

#3. Cappuccino at Locanda San Francesco, Montepulciano, Italy.

#4. Rumballs, the Day family recipe (and the bane of my existence right now).

#5. Ciabatta Frutti Rossi (strawberry turnovers), storefront window, Assisi, Italy.

#6. Caprese salad at Locanda San Francesco, Montepulciano, Italy.

Feel free to leave thoughts/critiques in the comments box below. I’m hungry now…

We went and baked Christmas cookies with our nephews: Andrew, Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Hosting the festivities was my mom, who the kids affectionately call “Oma” (German for grandmother). Joining Hailey and I — and meeting the twins for the very first time — was Hailey’s mom, Diana. The kids took to calling her “Nana King.” Things got off to a rip-roaring start when Hailey and Nana King turned the mixer on and sprayed powdered sugar all over Hailey (above left). The kids, undeterred, snitched sprinkles off the kitchen table.

I started off by helping the boys with icing the gingerbread cookies. Those metal canisters aren’t easy to operate for 5-year-old fingers (let alone 3-year-old hands). As I showed him how to push the tip down to dispense the icing, Isaiah had a great idea: “in my mouth?” He tilted his head back and opened wide.

Pretty soon, the boys were in the mood to leave the kitchen and go play, and that pretty much ended up being the rest of my day. Isaiah dumped a deck of animal flash cards on the floor, and Jeremiah promptly showed me which animals were what (above left).  St. Nick had also recently visited, and delivered some cool kitchen-tool figurines for the boys. A man with a spoon head. A man with a spatula head. A man with a whisk head. Andrew quickly noted their “bungus”  and I only encouraged him to say “bungus” some more by taking pictures of Mr. Spoonhead’s “bungus.”

Is that Colonel Klink hiding in the pantry (below)?

Each one of these boys is a natural comedian. Andrew and Isaiah can be absolutely rubber faced sometimes, coming up with these hilarious expressions out of nowhere. And Jer’ — Jer’ just knows how to make up a good time with any toy.

The boys and I went downstairs to the living room and played dodgeball for an hour, but to make sure we didn’t break any of Oma and Funpa’s stuff, we rolled the balls at each other. Isaiah — always the independent, self-entertaining type — decided he’d rather play pretend and be a doggie. So as I rolled balls with great velocity at Andrew and Jeremiah’s feet, Isaiah would crawl over with a ball in his mouth, drop it and pant. So we played fetch, too. His idea. Honestly.

After about two or three hours of cookie crazed mayhem in the kitchen, Oma took a break to carry on the renewed tradition of reading “The Christmas Cookie Sprinkle Snitcher.” I just looked this out-of-print book up on Amazon and its paperback is selling for $200! It’s a great book, one from my childhood, and for the past five years, Mom has dusted it off and read it to Andrew, and now, the twins.

It’s a cute story about a goofy fur-covered villian with feathers and wings who steals an entire town’s Christmas sprinkles. The whole village cries, and a determined little boy sets off to make things right again by retrieving the stash of sprinkles.

Below you can really see each boy’s personality: Andrew, rapt with attention; Jer leaning forward into the story and scanning the illustrations, Isaiah hanging back and listening from afar.

I was charmed by Jer during the reading. He’s very sensitive — a kid with a lot of heart. During the part of the story where the villagers cry about losing their sprinkles, Jer wore this concerned look on his face:

After the reading, it was time to suit up and sled before the sun slid behind Carpenter Peak (which happens at 2:30pm this time of year). Andrew, Amy and I went down to a slope below the house which Funpa had recommended. Shortly after we arrived, Oma showed up, towing the twins. Jer — as it turns out — is a little daredevil and loves sledding. I mean, check out that smile…

Amy and Andrew went down the steeper part of the hill. Despite Andrew’s reservations, he joined Am’, only to roll off the back ten feet down the hill (below). Then I took Jer down the steep part. I somehow managed to spin us and go down backwards…whoops.

Back at the house, Hailey and Diana were busy putting on the finishing touches on the brandy balls. Isaiah parked himself at the table next to Nana King and told her about the cookies (and pretended to be a doggie again). A few more snitches, a few more sprinkles, and then it was time for the kids to pack up and head back home to Colorado Springs with Amy.

Below are just two of the seven types of cookies made. On the left, Amy’s hazelnut chocolate chip cookies, and on the right, Mom’s German linzer cookies. Speaking of which, maybe I’ll go have one here.