SoKoNotes

2009-03-07T00:25:00.005+09:00

Maternity photos! No, no, not Lena. Still a little while before we start thinking about having children. All this talk of global financial collapse, "zombie banks" and the such has scared us away from the idea for the time being. There are other people out there; however, who got pregnant before things really got super bad, and there appears to be a market for photos of these people. Or at least, they've been burning up our phone since we did our first one back last Fall.

Since this is a new market for us, each time we do a shoot we try out a new concept. In the photos below, we brought some cloth we found on sale at Hancock fabric store. One thing I really like about shoots like this one is how creative we can be. Just like in fashion shoots, you can really break the lighting 'rules' in pregnancy shoots and get away with it (as long as the photos look good, of course). So these shoots are rich learning experiences for us as well as a chance to break out of the box and stretch our creative muscles. Enjoy!

--Notes

2009-03-03T02:31:00.002+09:00

I'll take a break from blogging about Venezuela (not that I'm doing a lot of THAT because I'm slammed) to post a couple of photos from yesterday when it snowed about 4 inches on Atlanta. It melted, and the sad children of Atlanta had to go to school Monday. But for us adults, it was a pleasant reminder of nature's existence in our lives. Lena and I saw this beautiful male cardinal picking berries from the tree in front of our window. Harder to see (and thus photograph) was his well-camouflaged female on a branch a few feet away. The other photo is just a slice of life photo that somehow worked. If you look closely, you can see a cross-hatch pattern made by our window screen.

Notes

2009-01-29T07:48:00.007+09:00

Hello All! Nope, I didn't forget cha. Just working 'round da clock, you know. But lest you be unentertained, I come bearing gifts: Photos from our wedding in Venezuela. You know, it's funny. Lena and I spend our lives covering the lavish, beautiful events of our clients and now we have been the bride and groom a lavish event of our own, at the very epicenter of a wild balls-out party of mythic size and scope. Not that I'm going to set up an advice column or anything, but it's probably good experience for a wedding photographer to have! I have a lot to say about the wedding, but as I'll tell anyone who asks, the photos always come first.

Am I taking a risk publishing these images? Maybe. On the other hand, all you people who are thinking of hiring us, isn't it nice to know we are people, too? People who know how to party? People who enjoy a celebration and understand the reason behind every crazy moment? We're in love, too, Lena and I, and there is nothing in this world as wonderful to photograph as two people in love. A wedding day is a story, a story about two people, their families, friends and how much their relationship.

Here is a snapshot of ours. Peace. --Notes

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2009-01-14T00:48:00.002+09:00

Opening Word: Black and White, But Not Yin and Yang

Hello blogfans. I apologize for the terrible reliability of this blog. It doesn’t help that I’ve been on the move for the last week without internet of any kind. The resort in Punto Fijo promised internet, but didn’t deliver it, citing the rain. The rain cleared, but three days later there still was no internet. So be it.

For the next few weeks I will be giving my account of Venezuela in a series of updates revolving around a variety of subjects I have no decided on but might probably be these: Food, Driving, Government, People, Land, My Family, The Wedding, The Future, in no particular order.

First, let me say that there is no substitute for international travel, particularly when you can achieve the level of penetration and exposure that I have experienced here. It’s humbling, massively humbling trying to get by with pidgeon Spanish and a bird’s eye view of the culture. Everything changes, and no, there’s no chance you can wing it with grace. The only solution is to open your mind and heart to the culture, and just as a hurricane will shape an island, you will go home a different person. Try to fight the hurricane and it will wipe you off the map.

Venezuela and her people have made a massive impression on me. It is a country of unimaginable contrasts. What’s more, I cannot help but compare the experience to Korea, which only highlights the contrasts. I feel that Venezuela and Korea’s different relationship to the United States has a major part to play in this contrast, a difference I am only beginning to grasp.

One night a week ago I had one of those life-defining moments when the impact of a choice I made comes home. I’ve had similar experiences in the past: Feelings of insecurity and anxiety when the enormity of my decisions came home to roost.

Usually, this moment comes much, much earlier. When I was hiking the Appalachian Trail, it came a week after the beginning, 50 miles into a 2176-mile journey. Oh my God, I thought, I have 2057 more miles to walk. Walk! However, the feeling was as exhilarating as it was frightening. When I began working for the small newspaper in Hattiesburg the feeling was terrible because I had never set any goals in my photojournalism career. I had no idea how many miles I had left to walk. Not two days into that job I began to feel the itch to leave it, an itch that eventually grew into a rash of disillusion and boredom that eventually pushed me to buy a ticket to Korea. In Korea, it hit me on the train from Inchon to Busan: Holy crap, what the hell have I done? I don't know anything about English!

Here in Venezuela, the full impact of my decision to marry Lennalba sat on my bed that night and shoke me awake. In the dark, freezing cold of the EuroBuilding my eyes snapped open and I starred into reality: This was the biggest commitment I have ever made, for it is a commitment not to me or Lennalba alone, but also to God. It is a commitment of my life, a commitment that must be kept every day, in every way, without fail. It is a commitment that does not even end when I die. Lena and I are now one person, one soul, one life, for eternity.

This is not to say I am afraid of the commitment. I love my wife. I love her for so many reasons, and it is easy for me to say that I am prepared to take any steps necessary to make this marriage run like a Kenyan. I want my children to inherit the rich cultural heritage I’m only beginning to know myself.

And so my trip to Venezuela has not been one of just plain ole’ vanilla tourism. This is now my second home, and every day my eyes are open like a baby, watching, listening and learning. Whereas in Korea I had the luxury of creating a pocket of America and living in it wholly apart from the language and culture because I knew one day I’d get on an airplane and leave it all behind. I have no such luxury here. Half my family lives in Venezuela, I have met them and love them and they love me. Many of them have asked me if I would live in Venezuela, and I know Lena would like nothing better because she has asked me numerous times. I wouldn’t mind, either, but there are some mountains to climb first.

Yet in the back of my head reality spins: This country is in the hands of a mad man. All you hippie types who harbor delusions that Venezuela as some sort of happy socialist promised land take note: There is no rule of law here. Most murders go completely uninvestigated. If you want out of a drinking and driving ticket, just bribe your police officer. If I were an anarchist, this is where I’d plan my retirement.

So how will the rest of my life go? How will I build a life and a living under a government that views capitalism as some sort of disease? What can I do to effect positive change here? Which American values should I pack in my suitcase each time I come, and which should I leave behind? One day soon I will return to Venezuela not as a tourist, but as a citizen. What kind of Venezuelan citizen do I want to be?

The following chapters are more than a blog, they are an attempt to analyze this unpolished gem in the crown of South America, an attempt to come to terms with a commitment I have made but don’t completely understand. Many of the things I will describe and explain are only my opinion, not fact, and I know that as I grow and get to know Venezuela, she will reveal more of her secrets to me, and probably most of the things that I write here will become old and outdated.

Still, knowledge never sits still. So sit back, relax and explore Venezuela with me. I hope you come to love it as I have come to love it.

2008-12-30T07:34:00.003+09:00

There is so much to write that I can't possibly write it all now. That's the problem with blogging. You need time, lots of time, to sit down and do it. Down here in Venezuela, I haven't had a moment to myself for more than ten minutes. Now that's not a bad thing. In fact, that's why I have so much to say. But even now my new uncle-in-law is strumming a cuatro and dancing around the living room of Lena's family house while her brother plays the mirachas and whenever I look up at them they beckon me to join in. Alba, my mother-in-law, just walked in with two of my new cousins and Lenhart, my father-in-law, is on the way home from a business trip to the tiny country of Curacao. When he arrives, we're all going to pack into the Chevy and head for the beach, a four-hour trip. It's already 6PM. Write, Stephen, write fast.

Lena and I packed the bags two days ago. This is my last night in the Saldivia household, which is sad. I've come to call this place home, I've come to call the people in it my family, and they have come to call me one of their own. I've never been so honored in my entire life.

It's been an exciting ride, too, if a bit bumpy at times. My Spanish is only OK, good enough to count past 1000 and speak a few verbs in the past tense, but not good enough to converse. More on that in a later post. Also, for the past four days I've played host to a gifted virus, which has been delighting in my completely unexperienced intestines. I've been to the restroom, lets see, six times today already. The country also has insecurity problems, as the police are merely window-dressing and violent crime is as common as palm trees. All in all, these have been minor issues when compared to the complete experience, but strangely I find tragedy easier to twist into comedy than simply making comedy itself.

The only other country I've spent a considerable amount of time in was Korea, and be prepared for a lot of comparisons. The hallmark of Korea was a culture that emphasized order and control, a country with nearly zero crime and high security imposed by a crushing unwritten social contract. Venezuela the opposite. Venezuela is a free-wheeling culture that emphasizes friendliness, brotherhood and the power of friendship. Perfect strangers can become best friends in seconds here. In Korea, if they didn't know you, it was like you didn't exist.

Both cultures emphasize the family, and in Venezuela I have been immersed in it, and thus my cultural experience here has been much, much richer than any other international trip I have ever made. And my life here is just beginning. Even now Lena and I are talking about how we can make a life here.

Well, that's it. Lenhart is almost home. It won't be five seconds through the door before he starts pushing everyone to get back into the car and head strait for the beach where he can rent a small boat and do what Lenhart does best: Fish!

Notes

2008-12-05T05:51:00.002+09:00

Well, looks like Sokonotes the photo blog is about to transform itself into Sokonotes the travel blog...Again. Yes, for those of you new viewers, Sokonotes was originally my travel diary in Korea where I worked for a year in 2005-06. Ever wanted to see what I look like as God, Santa Claus, or (most shocking) an English teacher? Now you can! Just click on those archives on the left side of your page.

My second year in business has come to a close. My first year living on my own in Atlanta has come to a close. Probably the greatest year of my life is quickly nearing it's spectacular finale. Thus, I thought I'd keep everyone in the know.

I'm just over an hour away from boarding a jet headed to Caracas, Venezuela where Lena and I will get married before nearly 300 of her closest friends and family. Luckily we've been practicing. We've already had two weddings: The official one in April and the Jones family reception in September. This third wedding is the Big Enchilada. Lena has been in Barquisimeto for the last two weeks already, planning, buying and working to pull the event together. Her secretario is on the next flight!

It's raining outside Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International airport. People of many nationalities walk the concourse in front of a garishly lit "On The Border" mexican joint. My ears record a host of different languages being spoken: Korean, Japanese, German, French, and yes, Spanish. But the it's the thick-accented, sharp-witted Venezuelan Spanish that is the most distinct, and I grin when I recognize it. It makes me think of Lena. I miss her a lot.

I'm so happy to be traveling again, even if it's somewhere dangerous. I still remember my trip to Korea, a trip that started with a road trip through Wyoming with Wes, then a three-day stop in sunny San Francisco followed by a trans-pacific flight to Seoul where I caught a high-speed train to Busan. This is a much easier four hour non-stop flight, but to a much more mysterious place; a place filled with danger and beauty as well as a new family to get to know. It's altogether exciting, though this time I have to make a serious attempt at learning the language, not just how to ask for kimchi.

I'm also really happy to be finished working. I haven't had a single day off in months. Even today I was up at 7 in the morning preparing images for GSU. Then I took my lens to the repair shop, bought some fishing gloves for my father-in-law, delivered an album, made my last deposit, had lunch with my friends and delivered my car and keys to my sister. I can't wait to be sitting on some crystalline beach in Venezuela, a martini in one hand and my sweet baby Lena in the other. We deserve this.

Well, it's 4:10 and people are starting to fill in the empty blue seats of the terminal gateway. You can always tell international travelers when they are leaving America: Giant carry-on bags packed with everything they can fit in them crouch like leathery trolls next to their masters. It's Christmas, too. The pilot probably needs to strap on another engine.

Venezuela, here I come!

2008-11-30T10:32:00.005+09:00

Lena and I are about to leave the country for our Venezuelan wedding! Yes, that's right...Wedding numero tres. Well, actually Lena is already there spending time with her family and preparing. I think this is the last wedding for a while. Might get bored and do it again thirty years from now. Who knows.

Anyway, I just finished my last shoot, a maternity portrait session here at the apartment. Maternity is a relatively new market for us, and this is the second couple we've photographed in 2008. It's tricky, in part because you must strike a balance between your vision, people's tastes and posing limitations. Some people like to be nude (these people don't normally sign our model release) and others are more conservative, such as this couple. Check these photos out.

I was somewhat limited in what I could shoot by the space available in my apartment. I think we have completely outgrown the space, actually. Although it's very large for a living room, and the ceilings are really high, this last shoot really reinforced that fact that we need a space twice as large if we are going to get serious about studio-style portraiture. One of our goals for 2009 is to purchase a property with the correct dimensions. Until then, our highly successful location work should suffice.

Speaking of which, the following three photos are of the two technology teachers who own and run the consulting firm, Tech Matters, out of Marietta. Tech Matters helps introduce middle school students to the world of technology and software design. They partner with Southern Polytechnic University in Marietta, who provides them with the computers, instructors and space they need to help the next generation move into the IT economy. The photo is for a brochure put out by the Kennesaw State University Small Business Development Center. These are my three favorites.

2008-11-16T04:32:00.003+09:00

Hello Everyone! Lena and I are wrapping up 2008 in preparation for our journey to Venezuela for our third and final wedding as well as a much-needed and much-deserved break. Neither of us has had a single day off in over a month. We barely have had a moment with each other that isn't work related. We both love running this business, and the rate at which it's growing is staggering, but jeez...We need a vacation!

November has brought us many blessings, including a bevy of new clients and 2009 weddings. We're also re-evaluating our business, drawing up marketing plans and switching out of Pictage for the incomparably better PickPic online-gallery solution.

November has also brought with it a few really interesting assignments, including this one: A portrait session with the Alpha Team Search and Rescue K-9 unit, whom I know through one of their members, Paul Rusczcyk. Paul invited me to take pictures of the team as they practiced near Covington, Georgia. Here are a few of my favorite photos:

2008-10-02T07:06:00.008+09:00

Er, we got married, too. Here are our photos. Scroll down to the bottom to read about the event.

Lena and I set out to get married oh, fives months ago. I could honestly say we're a lot closer. Our reception for our parents was a lot of fun. September 20th will live forever in my mind as the day I danced as Hector Lavoe, the famous Puerto Rican salsa virtuoso, in front of my parents. Yes, friends. It was quite an event.

The entire point was to give my extended family a chance to celebrate the marriage. And celebrate they did. I still have the pony keg I picked up with my uncle Lanny that morning. It's squatting in the work room, probably totally foam.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning, Katy, mom, Sara, Bina, Mindy, Deivis, Pat and Lena brought baskets of food and transformed our modest apartment all-electric wannabe kitchen into a living thing that ate flour and spit out delicious treats.

The food was better than good. It was made by the hands of the people who love us. And everyone pitched in to make the evening entertaining. Our friend Deivis brought his Venezuelan cuatro and my dad brought his guitar. They tried to strike a deal between the harp-like four-string cuatro and the deep, slow pluck of the guitar, but in the end they parted amiably and played samples from both American and Venezuelan traditions. Deivis had the benefit of a choir of female tenors (Linda, Lena, Liz Beth and Sandy) singing along all their might. Dad had me, and I had been drinking. Still, we managed to pull off The Boxer and Bob Dylan's dream, my personal favorite.

The Boxer is special, too, as that was the song dad tried to teach me back in high school. I can still remember a few chords.

One of my best friends, Josh, jumped into his truck in The far northwest corner of Georgia and rocketed into the night with his girlfriend just to be there. My friends Bina and Sarah Epting showed up and kept themselves entertained by marveling at how fast Bina and my sisters' fruit tarts got snarfed. Jennifer took control of the video camera and made history. BTW, she is also a master of dog hair removal, treasure hunting, rollerblading, tropical flower cultiviation and, in case you aren't sold, she gives life-altering back massages. Do I have good friends or what?

Lena's friends added their spice and charisma to the party. Rosario and Jeff sat stylishly on the couch while Liz Beth and her beau chatted in the sofa adjacent. My uncle Lanny grabbed a scotch and joked around with anyone who sat on his arm rest. My engaging, wise aunt Katy met and proceeded to know everyone and like everyone and they all liked her, too. Lena kept the music distinctly mixed, and when some tambore began to play, she encouraged everyone to shake their ass, including me.

Shake I did. I need to learn. The next party is in Venezuela and could last a long time and involve a lot more gluteal input. So I need to practice. I'm getting ready like Rocky. I wake and I practice Spanish every mañana, 7AM via my Rosetta Stone software. I now know EXACTLY what a montaña is and EXACTLY how to wear it, thank you very much. I've also been taking careful notes about Venezuelan culture and slang. I'm up to date on the political state of the country, it's relations to the U.S., Russia and itself. Mr. Chavez, I beg to differ: Shankees are NOT mierrrrrrrrrrda!

Anyway, the party was starting to die down a little, and there was still a lot of food to eat, and I needed people to stay and eat it. so I took action. I jumped into a white nylon suit with a rainbow big-collar suit adorned in gold chains and leapt into the party as a strutting, microphone-wielding Hector Lavoe (special thanks go to my cousin Chad Maness for providing the John Ra-volta costume). It worked. And although now I feel my strategy a little extreme and just slightly embarrassing, for some reason it worked perfectly and no one batted an eye. I love my family.

Ah, the next day...

NOTE: To all prospective brides in the middle of planning your wedding, the true purpose of catoring isn't the food. Anyone can or has family who can cook. It's the fact that the caterer also cleans and packs up everything and takes it away. Another lesson learned the hard way.

So here we are, Lena and I, swimming in the roiling economic seas. We still have work coming in, but there have been cancelations, too. Luckily, we've booked three weddings already for 2009 with a few more decisions in the air. Good times or bad, love reigns, people fall in love and some marry under the warm smiles of the ones they love. I know, it's happened to me. Twice. We enjoy making photographs for these happy people. If you are once of them, please give us a call. www.saldiviajones.com or 404.228.9739. Peace.

Notes

2008-09-02T06:55:00.004+09:00

Congrats to Jill and Chris!

The happy couple is (as of this writing) enjoying their honeymoon in Italy, and Lena is extremely jealous. Lena did three tours of Italy during the course of her life thus far, and loved every single trip, particularly the north of Italy. I haven't had the opportunity to travel to Europe, but from talking to Lena, Italy is near the top of the list when we eventually go. If you wish to read more about the wedding, scroll to the bottom of the update.

The wedding was held at The Swan House in The Atlanta History Center grounds near Buckhead. It was an absolutely stunning location, the only caveat being a complete lack of power to all the most photogenic areas of the grounds.

Note to Self: Purchase better battery-operated lighting system.

Not that it would have mattered. There was little time to fool with. The bride had eight bridesmaids and the groom had his own tuxedo-clad platoon in tow. Add to that a massive, camera-equipped family and we had quite a handful before the wedding. Luckily for us, Lena got some one-on-one time with the bride in the Swan House just before the ceremony and nailed some dynamite portraits.

The next week we went to a Pictage User Group meeting where two of California's best wedding photographers, Michael and Anna Costa, talked at length about how they became successful. Needless to say, my pen nearly went dry I wrote so many notes. A few points stuck out in my mind, particularly along the lines of client relations and marketing. This couple outsourced almost every aspect of their business. All they had to do was shoot the weddings and rub elbows with clients.

Mike and Anna made sure first of all that they only worked for clients who made a point of setting aside ALOT of time for pictures and stuck to that schedule. That way they had the room to scout, plan and execute some of the best portraits I have ever seen, period. Also, they pinpointed the people they wanted to work for by working closely with vendors and planners they respected. They had a pretty killer website, too, which Saldivia-Jones needs to invest in as well.

Lena and I came away from the meeting charged and inspired. We met lots of other photographers from the Atlanta area, many of whom are amazing shooters. We'll probably be going to a lot more of these meetings as out business develops.

2008-08-15T00:06:00.010+09:00

Congrats Kirti and Anshu!

The beautiful couple is actually going to be married in India come February, but they hosted an engagement party for Stateside friends and family at the King and Prince Resort on St. Simons Island on the Georgia coast. It was a party centered around having fun with friends and family. Lena and I stayed at their family-owned hotel in Brunswick and had a lot of fun. After 10, the couple even invited us to put our cameras down and join in the dancing! Lena got carried around on the shoulders of an enthusiastic uncle and I learned how to dance Hindi-style. Overall, one of the best events we've ever shot!

--Notes

2008-07-24T10:38:00.003+09:00

Congrats Katie and Levi!

Katie and Levi were wed at Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, my home town. Though the couple currently lives in Portland, Oregon, they came back to their home town to get married. The wedding was almost completely held indoors, which was a blessing. The weather was typically 'Atlanta,' so hot you started to sweat within five minutes of stepping outside. So hot it made you curse under your breath. So I'm glad we were inside first the church and then the Trolley Barn for the reception.

I had the honor of running into my high school science teacher, Joe Winterscheidt and his wife. I was too busy to really sit down and talk to him, but it was nice to see him and his wife. It's funny how your past bumps into you at the strangest times. It's funny how you can just pick up where you left off and get along so well. I wish we had had more time to talk.

Anyway, I hope you liked the photos, which will soon by on Pictage (www.pictage.com/394154). G'Day!

--Notes and Lena

2008-07-17T00:36:00.006+09:00

Atlanta weddings in July. Let the sweating commence! Heat aside, Lena and I got some amazing shots at the Biedenharn/Zins wedding held last Saturday at the Houston Mill House. Tina was the perfect bride, so beautiful that I joked with her that I gave her a 15% discount because she was so stunning. We took scads of portraits of her and worked hard on them in Photoshop to give them the polish they deserve.

The wedding was fabulous, the people polite and respectful, and the bride and groom obviously deeply in love. I have come to really admire the staff at the Houston Mill House, too. They are exceedingly professional, helpful and always well-dressed. Kudos to Melissa, the house director, for her advice and help during the wedding.

Congrats to Joey and Tina! Check out their photos.

--Notes and Lena

2008-07-14T12:12:00.002+09:00

A week back Lena and I took a much-needed break from work and flew to Cape Cod, Massachusetts to say 'hello' to my father's side of the family. It was a great trip. We went on a whale watch, sat on the beach, sailed in the clear fresh-water lake next to my aunt's house and ate fresh lobster. The beaches were somewhat shocking to Lena, who comes from the clear, warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The ocean water at Cape Cod stays in the mid-fifties all summer long. The sand was warm, however, and the bay-side of the cape was more agreeable.

As you can imagine, we took a few photos.

--Notes

2008-06-25T22:14:00.004+09:00

More updates from the business side o life. I've been shooting a lot of Engagement portraits of late. Engagement portraits are fun, quick shoots where I'll meet the bride and groom and photograph them for an hour. The idea is to come away with at least one photo they like enough to have printed 11x14, matted and framed for the reception. The funny part is that we usually come away with a BUNCH of photos they and I both like a lot. The other part of an engagement portrait is the chemistry. How well do I get along with the couple? What is their personal dynamic with one another?

Here are a couple of portrait shoots from the past weekends.

--Notes

2008-06-17T09:20:00.005+09:00

I cannot tell you where this place is.

It's just too beautiful to let just anyone know where it is and how to get there. Nothing personal, of course. I couldn't have found it on my own. I had the aid of my friend, Josh, a couple of weekends back. Here he is with a friend.

Some places are so beautiful you want them only for yourself. Some places move you deep in your soul, like a flashback to your childhood, to a time when the world was strange and new and full of magic. This place was one of those, and like my memories of childhood, I only let special people in to share this experience, people such as my wife.

Lena was amazed that such an environment existed within spitting distance of Atlanta. A native of Venezuela, she was no stranger to the extreme terrain we had to cross in order to reach this spot. She loved every minute of it, and I was happy to show her a piece of America that wasn't sprawling suburbs and crowded, polluted roadways.

I don't mean to wax philosophic on a blog meant to exhibit mine and my wife's best work, but this I had to show. Photography has many uses, but it's primary function is to remind the viewer of a space in time, of the people and events that took place. A truly great photograph does more than that. It reminds us of how it felt to be there. That is my goal when I strap on my equipment and head out on assignment. That is my goal when I put up my lights and load my flash cards. That is my goal each time I press the shutter button.

--Notes

2008-06-04T08:40:00.004+09:00

Congrats Olivia and Marques!

2008-05-28T22:08:00.017+09:00

Alright, folk, here it is: My favorites from the Shah/Patel wedding. Over the course of three days, Lena and I compiled over 30 gigs of photos, which I narrowed to just over 1100 images and then from that 115 that are my absolute favorites. Not all of those are here, but you'll find a good sampling. Many of thm are the very "artsy" images that characterize my style. I've left out a lot of the meat-n-potatoes shots such as the hundreds of grip-n-grins that characterize any human social gathering.

The images are in a loose order. Those of you who are familiar with Hindu weddings will recognize the Barat, for example. There are also some artful portraits of Tina and Parimal utilizing the structure of the Sheraton in downtown Atlanta. On that note, kudos to the Sheraton staff and personnel. They were friendly, most helpful and extremely professional.

On that same note, kudos to the guests and family gathered to celebrate the event. I've shot a lot of weddings, and I've never met a group of people as absolutely polite and respectful in all my career. No one treated me like I was their slave, no one disrespected me by calling me 'paparazzi,' and no one got exasperated when my gear needed tweaking. If people needed a photo taken, they were polite when they asked and patient and grateful when I took it. Tina and Parimal and their wedding party went out of their way to make sure Lena and I were fed first during lunch and dinner. They provided us with breakfast and water, too. During a 19-hour workday, such good manners make a big difference.

I've been preparing their 1100 proofs for the better part of two days and I am almost done. Next: Upload images to my website so my potential clients can know without the shadow of a doubt that Lena and I are the right shooters for their next event. Enjoy the images!

--Notes

2008-05-28T22:00:00.007+09:00

Below are my favorite photos from Friday and Saturday nights. On Friday night Tina and Parimal had their Mendhi, during which henna is applied to Tina and her friends. The Girba is a dance during which the participants celebrate the marriage by dancing in circles around a statue of Ganesh, the Hindu god of happiness and prosperity. Both events were amazing, and Lena and I took some great photos. Check it out.

2008-05-27T04:48:00.002+09:00

Hello all. The blog continues, unabated and unchecked by sleep, work or personal hygene. I'm mentally preparing myself for an entire week of balls-out mega-editing. My wife and I took 30gigs of pictures at our first hindu wedding! Besides being a personal record for one-day shoots, it speaks to how excited I was the whole day.

Lena and I woke up at 4:45 in the morning, showered, dressed and drove to the Sheraton downtown. It was dark. It's eerie driving in Atlanta at 5:30 on a Sunday morning. Oh yes, this was Sunday, our third and last day in this three-day extraveganza. I've never been so high, so alive, and yet so bum tired at all once.

The coffee was slowly working into my system as we valeted the car and lugged our gear into the hotel. I checked the lights and Lena and I rode the elevator up to Tina's 11th floor room. The mood was calm, even jovial. Tina and her sister-in-law Romina sat under incandescents as two hair stylists made over them. Silver and gems encrusted all of Tina's red sari, body and hair, glittering when Lena's strobe popped.

A few pics and a doughnut and I was down the elevator where Parimal was getting ready in a hospitality suite by the pool. he was dressed as regally as Tina. As he put on his hat his father commented that he looked like a king.

After the lightening-fast formals, I followed the crowd to the Red Roof Inn down Courtland to where a horse and carriage awaited it's king. The Barat was about to begin. P got into the carriage with some of his close family and friends. A rolling boombox Escalade roared to life and the air began to throb with Hindu techno. The procession was on. People danced and clapped as the Barat followed the police escort down Courtland to the Sheraton.

At the hotel door the two families met and filled the tiny alcove. A space was made and Parimal was annointed with red paste by his wife's mother. They then played a series of games, which I could not dicipher whatsoever. It looked like the mother of the bride was attempting to feed her son-in-law, except that whenever she tried to pop a morsel into his mouth the men gathered around Parimal would block her and yell. Then they broke something underfoot and everyone filed into the ceremony hall.

The ceremony took an hour and three times the priest had to pause and ask the audience to politely wait to converse until the end. It was an interesting ceremony. The priest explained every act before performing it, and at one point the bride and groom walked around the alter three times and on the fourth they raced to sit in their chair first! This was to find out who was going to be the dominant personality in the relationship. It was fun.

After it ended, Tina and Parimal greeted their new families. Tina's family then went through the act of "giving" their daughter to Parimal's family. There was a lot of crying and European tourists gawking and at the end point Tina's family tried to steal Parimal's shoes as he climbed into his carriage. A melee ensued. They failed in robbing Parimal of his shoes, and the bridesmaids were disappointed in the paltry sum paid them for leaving the footwear alone. All part of the ceremony, of course.

During the four hour break Lena caught up on her sleep and I made the slideshow from Friday, Saturday and Sunday. 745 images would be shown to the crowd at the reception, which started with a cocktail hour at 6. I got 45 minutes sleep while Lena ate some lunch.

During cocktail hour I photographed the happy couple together. People took cards as Lena and I made the rounds poolside. At 7PM the crowd filled the grand ballroom once again, this time covered in white and light blue with flower shapes projected onto the walls. A beautiful white and blue Mundap set for dining sat at the far end of the hall.

A spotlight lit a doorway at one end of the hall and the emcee announced the wedding party. Tina and Parimal strode to the door and danced to open the reception. A series of plays, dances and singing followed, with both sides of the families as well as the couple's friends contributing. There was even a Bollywood-style re-inactment of Tina and Parimal's meeting put on by their friends. It was hilarious.

After dinner the floor was open to dancing and the party was joined as the music from the Barat made the air quake.

A lot of great photos came out of this weekend. Fascination has a way of sparking creative energies. A lot of great lessons were learned, too. Lighting, division of labor between Lena and I, and how to manage time and energy when you're working 19 hours strait. The best part? The people. Bar-none, hands-down nicest people I have ever worked for. Photogenic, camera-friendly, and above all polite. Over the next few blog updates I'll post my favorite "artsy" photos as well as normal but good stuff too. Below are a few from my camera at the reception.

2008-05-05T00:03:00.005+09:00

Cindy and Josh! My first wedding of 2008 as an independent company went off without a hitch last weekend. My new wife, Lennalba, assisted me as we went from the United Church of Christ on Claremont to The Houston House at Emory. We got some great photos, and as soon as the happy couple returns from their honeymoon in Costa Rica, we're going to sit down with them and show them. In no particular order, here are a few of my favorites from the event.

Congratulations Cindy and Josh!

2008-05-04T23:26:00.006+09:00

OK, it's been a while since I updated, which is good because it means I've been busy. Wedding season has officially begun, and to kick this year's wedding season off I went and got married myself! My bride, Lennalba Saldivia, and I had a no-fuss ceremony in the Decatur courthouse with a little party for our family at my parents' Candler Park home. I know, we're very non-traditional. We had originally planned on having the wedding in September, but Lena needed to change her visa from a student visa to permanent resident status so she could start working and applying for scholarships to the Savannah College of Art and Design-Atlanta where she wants to go to school starting next winter.

We plan on having two more parties, one in September for my extended family and one in December in Venezuela for her extended family. Venezuela is also the site of our honeymoon. Lena and I will cruise around the country in her dad's Montero. She'll get to show me her home, which is an exceedingly beautiful place.

Her father, mother and brother were all here from Venezuela, and they made traditional seafood paella to compliment my dad's crabcakes and other dishes brought by my guests. Here are a few of my favorite photos:

2008-02-07T05:32:00.000+09:00

Well, I had some spare time, so I thought I'd post some of my favorite images from January of this year. Most of this is from assignments I've taken for Georgia State University, Mercer University, The Gwinnett Daily Post and some of these shots are simply me goofing around. Enjoy!

2007-12-11T12:41:00.001+09:00

Ah, those shots between shots, those frames after the frame, that click from the hip and the flash all askew...I love those shots. Weddings, bless them, are wonderful places for photojournalists because the access is near-total. Now, of course, this sets up a delicate balance between good coverage and driving a couple bananas. But it's these shots that I remember most, because they come from that side of me cultivated in college that lives for compositional experimentation and capturing moments most people pass by or take for granted. Exhibit A:

I shot this today. Yes, there are weddings on Monday. It appears that the groom is loath to remove his bride's undergarments. This is not the case, of course. I'm sure he can't wait. But people were teasing and taunting him and he was joking around, making as if it were a terrible job. Funny how photos can lie and tell the truth all at the same time.

Most brides are drawn to a photographer because of style and personality. My style is very rooted in my photojournalistic background, particularly influenced by the likes of Richard Avedon (not a traditional PJ) and Salbastio Salgado. Both of these photographers' work is filled with life, and I try with every shot to follow in their footsteps. Now, I also make sure to get the shots everyone wants from their wedding: formals, friends hugging, the procession, etc. But during those events and once-in-a-lifetime moments, I keep an eye out for the even smaller moments between the big ones, the spaces in which people express themselves and their humanity with feeling and without thinking.

Below are a collection of images that I keep separate from the images I give to the bride and groom. These are the quirky, sometimes fun or funny images I cull from the hundreds of photos I make at an event.

2007-11-06T22:37:00.000+09:00

Congrats Abby and Derrick!

2007-10-27T10:25:00.000+09:00

Congratulations Marlon and Kristy!

I photographed Marlon and Kristy's wedding in cool, sunny Topsail Beach, North Carolina. The warm spectral light and beach setting made for some fabulous photos. In no particular order, I've included a few of my favorites below. Check it out, and if you like what you see, take a gander at my website (www.stephenjonesphoto.com).

--Notes

2007-10-10T06:04:00.000+09:00

Hello.

NOTE: If you are here just for the photos, please scroll down to the two posts below.

Welcome back! Below this post you'll find photos from two weddings I covered this weekend for OTS Photography. I'm really getting a lot of valuable experience working for OTS, as well as crafting my own style and gaining a feel for the hardest part of wedding photography (at least for me): Posing people.

As a photojournalist, this was never a problem because the work was strictly hands-off, objective photography. Though I do a lot of photojournalism at these weddings - and it is my strong point - I have had to learn how to pose my subjects. Complicating this is the fact that most average people know little about posing themselves. When asked to pose for a photo, people can do the strangest things.

For example, go to your average football game and point your camera at a gathering of Greeks and watch the heads fly together as if suddenly magnetized. At one UGA game I remember asking a soroity girl if I could take her picture while she and her boyfriend cheered. I looked down at my camera to adjust the exposure, and when I brought the camera to my eye my frame was filled with laughing girls and boys all jostling to get in the photo!

When I set up a backdrop for a headshot, most people will automatically stand with their backs pressed against it as if in a police lineup. Point a camera at a child and their face will light up like they've been thrown from an airplane in this weird half-smile, half-grimace while they squeeze the word "cheeeeese" out from behind clenched teeth. Some children also have the lamentable practice of flashing gang signs.

So you can imaging posing a group of eight to ten adults for a family or formal portrait. It's a challenge. Luckily for me, I've got two great, practiced posers for bosses: Jennifer and Anthony Stalcup. Over the last two months I've watched them take groups of people and arrange them like flowers into a human bouquet to please any eye. They're never impolite, even though in large measure their success is due to their drill-sergeant-esque command of the confused human mass in front of them. They're amazing, and they routinely hand the camera to me and let me give it a try from time to time.

Truly, my strongest suit is my photojournalism skills, my ability to capture moments that last 1/500th of a second, my ability to predict human behavior: A skill learned from years in the newspaper industry. I think the photos below will attest to that.

Peace.

Stephen "Notes" Jones

2007-10-10T05:52:00.000+09:00

Congratulations Lee and Angela!

2007-10-10T05:42:00.001+09:00

Congratulations Brent and Danielle!

2007-09-27T11:41:00.000+09:00

Good news! I won the Dade County Photo Personality contest with a photo of my friend and artist, Josh McKinley. My reward: One free trip in a hang-glider from Lookout Mountain. Here's the photo:

2007-09-18T02:44:00.000+09:00

Congratulations Katie and Drew!

Katie and Drew's wedding was the second that I shot as a second shooter for On The Spot Photography, a successful outfit run by Anthony and Jennifer Stalcup. Besides paying me, Jennifer and Anthony are teaching me the business of wedding photography, opening my eyes to sector of the market only dimly illuminated by my memories of working for Vera Wang Photographer Nathen Feder back in college. Back then I was a pure free-lance, a Saturday Night Shooter, and as at the time I had intentions of saving the world as a photojournalist, I never paid much attention to the business side of things.

Nathen taught me to shoot a wedding. So I'm not nervous at a wedding and I feel pretty comfortable carrying the weight of all that responsibilty. I know my way around lights, arranging people and what people expect to see when the proofs arrive. The business side, however, was a mystery until I met Jennifer and started working for OTS.

When I shoot for someone else, I try hard too pick people who shoot like me, so there isn't much adjustment. Luckily for me, I like Jennifer and Anthony's style, which is very "PJ." The hard part is shooting the formal portraits in their style. They like a lot of movement in their shots. They'll have the bride throw her arms in the air, "swoop" the bouquet out, or sort of pose-dance with the groom. On just such a dip, I took this frame:

I think it's a funny frame because it looks like Drew is about to throw Katie off the dock. The look in his eyes is a little mischeivious.

Anyway, sorry about the long absence. Enjoy the photos!

--Notes

2007-07-15T12:27:00.000+09:00

Congratulations Daimon and Kirsten!

So I went to Montana this past week. I must say, Montana has a lot going for it. I've been there twice and both times were very, very good experiences. The first time was at the end of my roadtrip through Yellowstone National Park with my friend Wes just before leaving for Korea. His dad virtually owned a little town called Silvergate just a inside the Montana state line. We hung out there for a day or two, helped out with an event and then I left for my Korean adventure.

While in Korea, my friend Daimon and his girlfriend were living out their own adventure in New Zealand. They became engaged. They needed photography. They picked up the computer and emailed Gavin and I. A date was set: July 7th, 2007.

Initially, Gavin wasn't sure he was going to be stateside. At the time, another year in Korea was still a viable option, as the money would be better the second year. I was psyched. I hoped to be stateside running my own photography business by July. I knew I'd need the wedding to build my portfolio and to add to my experience. Though I, too, kept Korea in my back pocket, I penciled in the wedding on my calendar. If I was home, I would do it, provided Daimon and Kirsten flew me up there.

Fast forward eight months. Gavin and I are boarding a plane in Hartsfield Jackson International Airport bound for Minneapolis, where another jet will whisk us off to Kalispell, Montana, thirty miles south of Glacier National Park.

Gavin decided in February to give freelancing a go. Between the two of us, he has more experience in it. Before he took the job in Hattiesburg, he slogged his way through two grueling years as a freelancer in Atlanta. He learned a lot of lessons, many of which he passed on to me night after night over Makali and Samgyupsal while we lived in Korea. One of the lessons that really stuck went something like, "there will be lots of people who want to help you. Take advantage of their generosity."

Kirsten and Daimon's offer was one of those opportunities, a mutually beneficial exchange. The better my photographs, the happier we all would be. They would have kick-ass photos and I would be one step closer to successfully entering the wedding market, a crowded and complicated place to make a living as a photographer.

To be honest, I have been reticent to enter the wedding market. It seemed like a tremendous amount of work and money, both in the initial marketing and in the running of the business. For most of the Spring I sat on my laurels. I played around with album vendors. I took no action to market my skills to potential wedding clients.

Actually, I had shot a wedding in November following my return from Argentina, but a number of people close to me told me I should build up my portfolio some more before striking out further into the wedding market. But who else was going to take a chance on me?

Enter Kirsten and Daimon. Not only were they more attractive, they had picked an amazing location for their wedding: Glacier National Park in the northwest corner of Montana. Ten-thousand-foot glacier-carved peaks crusted in snow, Carribean-colored glacial lakes and fields of waving gold wildflowers danced in my head. During my trip through Wyoming with Wes, as I pressed my face against the glass of his van window in total dumbstruck awe of the Tetons, I remembered him telling me that Glacier was even better. Wes has a great eye for aesthetics. I had to go to Glacier.

So back to the airport. Well, fast forward to flying into Kalispel. There really isn't much to say about Minneapolis, mostly because I just saw the airport, which was not terribly user-friendly.

The Airbus A320 covered a lot of American soil before dropping down into the mountains. Below my perch at 37,000 feet, I watched as it all passed by: The glisening blue lake country of western Minnesota, the green, tan and gold checkerboard fatigues of the tamed and parceled high prairie and the snaking white sinue snaking through the Badlands of North Dakota. Suddenly, I noticed that mine wasn't the only head pressed to the glass portals. Everyone was straining to look forward at something ahead of us. I too strained, and my jaw dropped.

Like a sawblade stuck halfway through a piece of wood, the jagged ridges and peaks of the Rocky mountain chain leapt out of the kahki plains as if in defiance to their unimaginative uniformity of topography. We had arrived.

We picked up our rental car from National: A spanking new refrigerator-white Chevy Cobalt with all the fixins. Sadly, it also bore all the hallmarks of sloppy design: Big blindspots, tiny trunk, sparse seating, sluggish steering and a irritatingly thirsty four-cylinder engine with no punch mated to a dimwitted automatic transmission.

The Cobalt slogged us to the North 40 resort, where we were to stay till Sunday morning. A svelte pregnant woman handed us the keys to our room: A red log cabin nestled among others in a stand of towering conifers. We quickly unloaded our gear, jumped into our ride and galloped off down Highway 2 towards Glacier to scout the location.

It took longer than expected to get to Glacier, which I had stupidly estimated to be a mere ten miles away after glancing at a couple of poor online maps. It wasn't. Try more like 23.

Once inside the park we were confronted with tourists aplenty. For their location, Daimon and Kirsten had picked the Apgar ampitheater beside Lake MacDonald. Though the beach and lake made for a beautiful backdrop, a few trees and bushes were straining to fill the blue Montana sky with leafy green distraction. Gavin and I scouted spots from which to get the best shots.

That night we joined the wedding party in Whitefish for a combination bachelor/bachelorette party. I got drunk and fell in love with a foozball table. Daimon and Kirsten's friends were an amalgation of personalities collected from a lifetime stretched out from the Montana high prairie to the rolling Missouri Ozark mountains and the jagged peaks of New Zealand. A chemistry was worked out between them and everyone had a good time. I hit the sack around 3AM, which due to the time difference felt like 5AM to me. I hadn't closed my eyes for nearly 24 hours by the time my face hit the soft cushions on the couch in my cabin and I passed out.

Friday brought bedlam. Gavin, Daimon, Kirsten, Kirsten's friend Lorenda and I took a trip back over to Apgar to reinspect the location. We stopped at a campground first to welcome Kirsten's older sister, her husband and their three children. Kirsten picked up some decorations to try out at the location.

At Apgar, Daimon and Kirsten rehearsed their vows and measured the benches for the garland. Gavin and I checked our angles, lining up shots and considering the unknown. When we got back, people were getting ready for the rehearsal dinner. Daimon's and Kirsten's family pitched in together, cooking, cutting, decorating, laughing and having a good time. People started trickling in around 6PM, drinking homebrewed wine, beer and muching on snacks.

After everyone had eaten dinner, the members of the various families were recognized. Then Daimon and Kirsten presented Daimon's parents with a gift: $800 bucks towards the vacation of their choice. Gavin and I wanted to be as fresh as possible, so we took our leave early and hit the sack.

Saturday started slowly with a pancake breakfast and then built momentum all morning till by noon it seemed like almost all the guests had a part to play in the event. As many men as could be roused were set to building the giant plastic and steel tent next to the Snowberry Center. I joined them in securing it to the building as well as rolling and carrying out the plastic fold-up tables for the reception. Kirsten's sister put out table settings while other members of the family prepared food and drinks. The musicians, a composite of various family members and talented friends, gathered in Jay Eklund's cabin to practice their set.

Just after lunch Kirsten and Daimon retired to their respective cabins to get ready for the ceremony. Daimon and his groomsmen donned faded linen pants and a sharp white short-sleeve shirts. I photographed them outside the cabin. The white of their shirts popped against the rusty red logs.

Kirsten wore a calf-length white dress with no vail and a pair of cork high-heeled sandals. The two of them gleamed as Gavin and I photographed them on the beach by the ampitheater. We had been expecting a spectacular backdrop for our photos, and Glacier didn't disappoint. A few white whispy clouds floated over the peaks towering over Lake McDonald, itself an unbelievable color of teal blue. It was almost too perfect, and some of the photos almost looked like we had simply cut the couple out and pasted them into a postcard!

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's soulfull rendition of "Over the Rainbow" escorted the wedding party down the aisle. Kirsten's brother walked her down the aisle to the "Ashokan Farewell" played by her sister Kathy and brother in law Bill. The couple's vows were short and sweet. A few heartfelt "I do's" and under the big, sparkling Montana sky they were married. After the ceremony, the wedding party splashed around in Lake McDonald, posed for a few more photos and then everyone piled into cars and headed back to the North 40 for the reception. Only Gavin, Daimon and Kirsten and I remained behind to take a few more photos. Gavin got some shots of them by the big red buses that cart tourists up and down the "Going to The Sun" road.

The reception was an equally simple, elegant affair. There was little dancing in the beginning, as most of the music the younger people wanted to dance to was a bit too much for their older, more conservative elders. Daimon and Kirsten spent most of the night spending time with their friends, some of whom had traveled all the way from New Zealand.

The next day Daimon and Kirsten spent with Gavin and I. We traveled up the Going-to-The-Sun road, a scenic highway winding its way up the side of a sheer mountain to Logan pass, 6600 feet up. As we traveled, we stopped along the way to take portraits of the couple. Daimon and Kirsten wore their wedding clothes and posed for Gavin and I over and over again. They never seemed to tire of looking deeply into one another's eyes and kissing while the cameras' motor drives burned through our memory cards. The photos, though at times a little campy, were some of the best I made all weekend.

For all of Monday and Tuesday, Daimon and Kirsten traveled with Gavin and I through Glacier and into Canada to see Waterton National Park. After we crossed the border we stopped at a scenic overlook that gave us a commanding view of Waterton. Gray stormclouds rolled across the plain like a cavalry line in a collision course with the mountains. Cold winds tore at Daimon's Honda Hybrid as we pulled into the ranger station.

Across the street a black bear was dining on berries. Tourists gathered and gawked as it slowly ambled towards the road. The rangers didn't think this was funny. One of them grabbed a rubber-bullet gun and harassed the bear until it ran up the mountain and away from the busy road.

At Waterton we camped by a huge, long lake flanked on all sides by 8000-foot peaks. Sitting on a ridge at the base of the lake was a rather corny-looking hotel called the Prince of Wales. It looked like something from Helen, Georgia, with cheesy green bavarian shutters, eves and fire hydrants painted to look like the ubiquitous ground squirrils that infested the campgrounds. On the inside it was a different hotel, and it's view down the lake couldn't be beat. Monday afternoon we had a couple of German beers in the lounge, taking in the view and talking of family, friends and the wedding.

Tuesday was spent at St. Mary's campground, where we encountered another bear. This one was totally disinterested in us, it's nose buried in a rotten log were presumably it was dining on fat grubs. On wednesday Gavin and I boarded an airplane in Kalispel and headed home.

During the course of the trip I managed to skin my toe up while throwing a frisbee around with Daimon and lose my phone charger, which the Cingular (Oops! I mean AT&T) people gladly replaced for $21. It was a good, helpful experience, and I spent a lot of time talking to Kirsten and her sister-in-law, Erin, about a bride's expectations, my services, prints and the photos I missed or fudged.

On July 14th I had my first wedding consultation with a bride from here in Decatur, Georgia. We met in Java Monkey and discussed the location, output and costs. With any luck, she'll choose me to shoot her wedding, which is scheduled for September 29th. I was nervous, but I did my best to keep my cool and be professional and thorough. This wedding is even bigger for me than Daimon and Kirsten's, and so I have to nail it on every front.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the photos. Sorry for the long delay. I am going to start simply posting photos and a brief description from now on, as this writing thing takes FOREVER. Up next: Bare-fist fighting from Wild Bills!

Notes

2007-06-24T12:53:00.000+09:00

I had my first 'big gig' tonight: A Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce gala at the Hyatt Regency. 800 business leaders from across the state showed up in tuxedos and flashy dresses to fill the main ballroom from end to end.

Two funny things about the gig: I didn't have any idea that it would be so completely huge, and for some reason the Secretary of State, Karen Handel, knows me on a first name basis. Karen is Georgia's first hispanic Secretary of State, and a rather pleasant woman, despite being Republican. In this state, Republican and Democrat don't really say much about someone's politics.

Anyway, I was sort of shocked by the sheer size of the event. Betsy Davis, the staff PR head for the Chamber, immediately put pressure on me by assuring me that every photographer who had come before me had screwed up the awardee group shot at the end of the performance. I told her that I accepted her challenge and I would be the first to defy that awful pattern. Betsy shrugged, smiled and joined the crowd in the lobby. Hey dude, it's your dragon to slay.

After she walked out, I looked around and began to realize what had burned the brave men who had come before me. It became evident that the cavernous space in which I was too work was specifically designed to ruin photographs.

The walls were dark gray. The stage was black. The chairs were black. The ceiling was thirty feet high, black and festooned with a most busy assortment of convoluted sheet metal strips and giant plastic saucers studded with dim, yellow incandescent bulbs that added ten years to every face in the joint. It was ugly. It would take George Lucas' personal army of lighting specialists and about 30,000 watt-seconds of flash to make the room livable. I had two strobes and a digital camera.

Luckily, there was a guy in the balcony with a couple of daylight-balanced spotlights to light the speakers, and the curtain behind the podium was nicely lit with amber and purple gels. I set up a couple of my radio-slaved lights, hid them behind a giant movie screen, set up my camera for grip-n-grins and waded into the sea of tuxedos and cocktail dresses, snapping away with a smile and the flash bounced off a business card jammed into the strobe head.

There were a bunch of speeches, some awards. For such a large event, it went exactly by the books, and I had to admit to myself that working for newspapers had perfectly prepared me for assignments such as these. I could have shot this assignment in my sleep.

The terrible lighting conditions were no match for my Canon 580EX flash. As I went from table to table, taking group shots and grip-n-grins, it sent just the right amout of light to the happy faces posing for me. The room didn't want to be in the photograph, and lowering my exposure to 1/2th of a second and f2.8 was out of the question, so despite being so well lit, everyone in the photos looks like they hosted their gala in deep space.

I passed out tons of cards, and I'll be able to upload the photos to my online gallery for guests to browse and order prints from. That's great, considering I only charged the GHCC $100 an hour to do this job. A little extra goes a long way. Also, hopefully this will be an account that will stay with me for a while.

After the awards were given out, I successfully took a group shot. Those radio-slaved strobes make all the difference. I just picked them up, placed them where I wanted them, posed my nine awardees and blam blam blam...That's it folks! It could have been better, in my opinion. A third light on the background would have helped cut down on the shot-in-a-cave look, but Betsy was in love with the shot simply because it was well-exposed and sharp. Score one for the good guys!

The best part of the entire gig was after the ceremony had wrapped up. A latino band took the stage, picked up their instruments and started blasting out some explosive, lively dance music. The crowd, who had been sitting on their asses for the better part of three hours, was more than happy to take to the portable parquee and get down to business. And as I had expected, they were amazing dancers. I slapped on my trusty 50mm and did a little shooting for me.

Check out the photos!

2007-06-12T10:12:00.000+09:00

The name of the game is branding, or so I'm told.

I went to a meeting with my business advisor, Lydia Jones, at the Small Business Development Center. Lydia is probably the best thing to happen to my business since I started it back in October. The SBDC is basically paid for with tax dollars, and new business start-ups such as myself can meet with the professionals such as Lydia and discuss things like financial planning, ideas, overhead, and most importantly to me: Marketing.

It seems like in this digital age, a good marketing solution would be a hop, skip and a -click!- away. Indeed the internet, particularly Google and Yahoo! have made marketing much more accessable to the common man. It has. Too easy. Type "Photography" in the Google bar at the top of your page and you get, well, agoogle hits. How to choose? Perhaps modify your search with the word "Atlanta" or "Portrait" and you've narrowed those hits to around 178 zillion.

And where does Stephen Jones Photography fall in that massive tome of hits? Oh, you know, I'm like on page 146,349,533. Really. Go check for yourself.

Even if a customer lost my card but new my name and added that to the search I'd still be on the fifth or sixth page. Lots of guys named Stephen Jones out there. Sheesh. So much for internet marketing. Well, not really. There are a lot of steps I could take to maximize my Google searchability, and I've taken a few of those steps. However, the best marketing mechanism remains the good ole' fashioned word-o-mouth.

There is simply no more efficient way to bring in business than referrals, especially if you happen to be a photographer. A long photography session is such a personal, even intimate experience, that people are extremely reluctant to hire a complete stranger. That's why the first advice I ever got from my dad was to start going to church. Indeed, a photographer I knew in Hattiesburg (who shall go unnamed) told me once that he can pretty much retire early thanks to the massive 3000-person congregation attending the megachurch west of I-59 in Oak Grove. I love Jesus, too.

I'm not going to church to make money. So I'm back to the tried-and-true formula for getting my name out: Run an honest, reliable business with excellent customer service. Oh, and get a good-lookin' website, which brings us to part B of my marketing plan.

My current website has drawn criticism from my business advisor. Too black. Bad fonts. Doesn't load right. Not Google friendly. Not user friendly. Time for a redesign.

Oy. Sigh. Jesus help me. It took me two months working almost every day to build the current bucket-o-bolts and now it's back to the drawing board. Oh, well. In some respects, I agree with her. There is a lot that could be improved, and this is a chance to really make my site shine.

I also felt like a re-design was inevitable, even from the first day I uploaded it to my ISP, sort of the way you know from the first week you're in a new house that furniture is not quite in the right place. This is my chance to rearrange a few couches, move that table out of the dinning room, paint the living room, install a flat-panel display and put hardwood down upstairs. Ah, the joy of anticipation. The future is bright!

Now where did I put that doggeared copy of "Adobe GoLive 6 for Dummies?"

The website also will be a cornerstone of my ongoing marketing war-o-attrition. It will tell potential customers what makes me unique. It will help to "brand" me as a certain type of photographer. In business, if you can fill a niche, you can make money (theoretically) hand-over-fist because no one else fills that need. I need to set myself apart so people have a more compelling reason to hire me other than the fact that I'm well-trained, experienced and have $8000 worth of Canon digitalia.

It's sort of like in nature. If no other organism eat that icky green slime covering those rocks, evolve into something that eats that slime and you can get fat. So I need to A) Find my slime, B) Fine a way to eat it, and C) Keep other photographers from doing the same.

Bringing this whole over-stretched metaphor full-circle, Lydia and I talked today about what makes me unique. We were discussing my child portrait business, which has recently blossomed. I told Lydia how it works: For $50 I go hang out with my client and their children at a park or hiking or something. I take pictures the whole time, turn the whole thing into a slideshow DVD and upload the photos to my finisher's website. The way it works is, parents watch the DVD, fall in love with the photos, jump online and go hog-wild with their credit card buying prints.

Lydia liked it so much that she hired me on the spot to photograph her grandchildren next weekend. She also pointed out that a few things about my system make me unique: I shoot unposed action shots, give someone a DVD that they can then keep and show to family and friends, and I come to their house. Having been to a number of studios throughout her life, Lydia thought that was the clincher. Parents hate going to a studio. Time is precious for parents, and driving all over the place for a few awkward photos is stressful. What makes me unique is that parents and their kids can live their life as they normally do. I just pop in and take pictures.

Less stress on the parents, unposed photos (what maniac tries to get 3-year-olds to sit still?) that exhibit more of the child's natural personality, low up-front cost, and a great, easy way to view and order the finished photos. Seems like I might have found my special green slime. Yum!

Now to find out if it works.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that I need to craft a slogan for my soon-to-be-new homepage that says all of that in fewer words. It needs to be a slogan that capitalizes on stressfree, creative and inexpensive photos.

Any ideas???

--Notes

2007-05-15T11:27:00.000+09:00

My last post was in March. It's funny how quickly the time goes. I felt like I did that update last week. First I have a few photos taken from that chronological gulf.

What more is there to say? Lots. There is a part of me that is desparetly trying to keep up this blog, like the lone captain of a mortally wounded B17 bomber fighting the controls even as the last of his crew bails out. Well, it's not quite that hopeless. I have this bad habit of following a metaphor to it's conclusion, relavence be damned. It was a good one, yes?

I am also trying to turn SoKoNotes from a blog on teaching to a blog on photography. I'm toying with changing the name. But to what? Nevermind. If anything particularly clever strikes me, I'll let my (maybe two, three) loyal readers know. Until then, SoKoNotes is now a photography blog.

With that in mind, I'll start by talking about teaching.

My last chess class came and went last week. Technically speaking, my Championship Chess classes came to an end three weeks ago, but I continued giving private lessons to a group in Cumming up until last week. The parents of that group honored me with a nice gift and a little extra pay. I recommended another coach, but they didn't want anyone but me. They said I was the only chess coach who could put up with their kids.

I have to admit, their kids were a handful. The best player was Rohan. Nine, male and mildly spoiled. However, he was as bright as a 100-watt light bulb, and from the very beginning he became the bane of whoever was across the board from him. He had a gift for learning that was disarming. Rohan never cried or gave up hope when someone actually beat him (we went to a tournament at one point). Instead, he turned his loss into a win by applying the same strategy against his next opponant!

Through teaching chess I've had the opportunity to peer into the world of parenting. Strange place. Through talking to and observing parents, I've determined there are three attitudes towards afterschool programs such as chess. Rather, there are three kinds of parents: Those parents who are strapped for time, those parents who actually want their children to broaden their knowledge, and those parents who just want a little peace and quiet.

No single set of parents falls completely into one of those categories. And in some families, one parent falls into one category and the other a different one. I've had a mother pick up her son on time and grill me for ten minutes on what I taught that day. The very next week dad shows up twenty minutes late, throws me an abashed nod, grabs his kid and bolts. The parents in my former chess homegroup use the hour's break from the screaming to catch up on gossip and cook dinner in peace.

Another odd phenomenon I've observed is the dorkification that accompanies some people's transitions into parenthood. Some people consider a couple of rugrats excuse enough to start wearing ridiculous shoes, floppy hats in hyper colors bizarre sweaters and generally let themselves go. I suppose having a child is like giving up half of your life, giving that time and energy to your offspring.

In general I am in awe of the parents who picked up their kids from my chess classes. The time, money and energy they appear to expend seems tremendous. I wonder if I'll have that kind of energy when I have kids.

I am currently trying to expand my business to cater to these very same parents. Just today I photographed my old math tutor playing with her two toddlers. Some photographers make their entire living from this alone. The same parents who fall into the "expand my child's mind" category mentioned above also usually fall into the "document every waking moment in my child's life" category. I'll probably be one of these camera-and-credit-card wielding maniacs.

Well, I hate to suddenly cut this post off, but I'm tired. Got a lot to do tomorrow. I'll try keeping this blog going. Photography is fun. Running a business is challenging. There are people out there who want to read about both.

Peace,

Stephen "Notes" Jones

2007-03-16T09:39:00.000+09:00

It's been too long without any photos. Blogs that are long on words and short on photos find themselves short on viewers, too. I've taken a lot of assignments these last four months. The following are a small collection from that take.

I can't explain all of the photos. It would take too long. After that last, sort of introspective and dark entry, I did some more introspective wandering and found that things aren't all bad, and I really love what I'm doing. I'm just not sure it's the right path.

Last week I sat down and had a talk with a gifted teacher named Leanne Lutrell. She has been teaching in the Gwinnett County school system for the past 17 years. We met at a small cuban restaurant off of I-85 and spent three hours chatting about the technical, physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual realities of becoming a teacher in this American age of tests, tests and more tests.

It was a rich experience. Lutrell exuded the type of personality one would want in a teacher: Positive, good-humored, honest and excited but measured. Her highly expressive face changed like the weather. A broad, inviting smile could cloud over into a serious, furrowed brow when the conversation turned, and then switch right back again. I could understand why she didn't have many behavior problems. She could easily go from a bright sunny disposition to a raging, angry storm in the blink of an eye, and the only way to keep the sun out was to be good.

She was honest and helpful as I peppered her with questions. Is your first year truly as hellish as they say? What are the keys to discipline? How much room does the curriculum leave you to breath? Can you be creative in your lessons? How much does beaurocracy effect your classroom environment?

As we got into our separate cars to leave, I arranged to sit in on a few of her classes. Though I am drawn deeper and deeper into the professional photography world every day, my relatively new love for teaching does not die out. I also feel a need to give back to my community.

I feel that community service is a keystone in any democracy, but particularly ours. Many of the things in this country that I take for granted were won by people who laid aside their personal goals and picked up a picket, tutored in an afterschool program or cleaned up a trash-strewn beach. By focusing outside of themselves, they connected with their community and learned about it's issues.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmy Carter, the Freedom Riders; they all connected to their community and looked to heal it's wounds. After America has faded into the past, it is their names and their actions that will be remembered when people speak of what made America great.

I once believed the journalism world could fill this need, but I was disappointed in this regard. In the final days of my journey to Korea, the tears, hugs, letters and gifts the students gave to me as I walked out of the doors of ESS Best Jr. taught me the power of helping another human being. A society that worships the individual over the community isolates people from one another. To teach is to care, to let another human being know they aren't alone, to heal the raw wounds of isolation.

Photography and teaching are both creative arts, and both involve connecting with people, which is why I love them both. One thing I hinted on in the last update was that sometimes when I was lost on the AT, looking over my shoulder and wondering if I was walking the right path, I would suddenly stumble across the main trail and realize what I'd done. That describes the last few months pretty well.

Spring is here. I went running today the air was perfumed with an olfactory cacaphony of blooming daffodils, honey suckle, cherry blossoms and azaleas. The warm air rung beads of salty sweat from my skin. I wiped them away with my shirt at stop lights. There is nothing quite like a little unbridled sweating. It's the feeling of expelling the toxins that build up in one's body, a cleansing, healthy sensation.

OK, got to run. Enjoy the photos. Sokonotes is not dead! Just busy as hell.

--Notes

2007-02-16T05:00:00.000+09:00

Alright. Here goes.

One of the great missions in my life is trying to understand the forces that pull me in one way or another. On the ground, the forces are so huge they seem invisible. Then something happens that causes me to look back at my past that I see them, like a man cresting a bare mountain peak only to turn around and look over the great range he crossed under the cover of trees. Everything makes sense.

"There is the that bog that dragged me down. There is the campsite where I met a friend. There is the road where I went into the city. There is the mountain I worked so hard to climb, and there is the beautiful waterfall I saw near the top."

The good, the bad, the unexplainable; it’s all laid out so well when you just turn around and look. It all just fits.

I turn around a lot these days. I forget sometimes that the past is made up of the present, and that it slips eventually into the future. Time marches on like the strokes of a paint brush, each day a coat of fresh pigment, drying and becoming the fading past in the blink of an eye.

The strokes seem random and outrageous until you hold them away from you. Then the content materializes. The colors compliment one another. The pattern unfolds and both fascinates and terrifies you all at once in it's completeness.

What is difficult is understanding where the artist is going with the work, what it will finally look like when it is finished, and more ominously 'when' will it be finished. The forces of creativity and the concept of the future are one, and they can be totally frustrating or liberating depending on your faith in the artist.

That’s what it takes to live in the present: Faith, a belief in the future. That’s why I wasn’t frightened by my decision in the summer of 2005 to drop everything and fly to a distant corner of the earth, to live in a strange land, in a strange job, with strange people speaking a strange language. I had faith. That was why I wasn't afraid to walk 2,176 miles through hungry-bear-infested woods.

I believed in the creative power of doing something different. I closed my eyes as I applied the paint to my canvas and trusted that the stroke would compliment the others that came before it, and it did. Korea was a beautiful stroke, a learning experience, a place where I grew in a positve way. It was hard, really hard, at times, but I stuck with it because I knew deep inside that I was on the right path.

When I returned back in October, I jumped into starting my business. I felt like that was the logical next step in my life. I'm a good photographer. There is lots of demand for photography in Atlanta. Everything has been going alright, but at the same time, things haven't. I find that I keep looking back, like a man who thinks he might be lost. I spend hours reading this blog, smiling, laughing, crying, wondering why I can't put it down and I can't add to it.

I work on my business, but there is no force behind my work. Like a loaf of bread with no yeast, I work and work and work and the bread doesn't rise. I don't seem to have my heart in the work, and my mind is always full of doubt. I am a person who, once his heart is behind something, becomes unstoppable, irresistable, consumed by the task at hand. When it comes to the photography business, I feel consumed only by doubt.

I'd like to share a story with you from 2003 when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail. I think it will illustrate how I feel right now.

The Appalachian Trail is managed by thirteen or so 'trail clubs,' with thousands of volunteers who maintain it year after year. It moves my heart to think about all of those people giving their time, money and sweat to maintain a simple footpath. This spring I plan on joining their ranks, but that's not where I'm going with this. Every year those clubs decide that a certain section of trail has had too much traffic and the trail needs to be re-routed for a few years so the old section can 'heal.'

Some of these re-routes were so new that they hadn't made it into the maps (mine were four years old) or guidebooks. The old, well-worn and muddy rut of the old trail would wind off in one direction and the new path with it's blinding white blazes and freshly cleared underbrush would stretch off in the other. There was usually a sign indicating that the trail had been re-routed. Sometimes, due to weather, forgetfulness or vandals, the aforementioned sign would go missing and many a hiker would simply cruise right on past the intersection and keep following the old rut.

I did this a lot, sign or no sign. Lost in thought and not paying attention, I'd innocently follow my happy feet down a former section of trail. Sometimes I'd have no idea that I had taken the unofficial route until it re-connected with the new trail sometime later. I'd come to an intersection (not expecting one), look dumbly at my map, scratch my head, realize what I did, shrug, and keep walking.

One time, I gave myself an awful scare. To doubly make sure no one followed the old trail, the trail crews would paint over the south-facing blazes with dark brown enamel. North-bound hikers would see that there were no white blazes and thus take the new route. However, many of these trail crews would neglect to paint over the North-facing blazes, thinking there was no way a northbound hiker would miss the sign indicating the detour.

One time (I think I was in Virginia) I was walking along and noticed there were no white blazes on the trees. Confused, I looked behind me, and lo! There were white blazes! I thought I was on the right path and I kept walking, but the lack of blazes on the south side of the trees bothered me. Was I going the right way? Did I miss something? Maybe the blazes were old and faded. If indeed I am on the right path, why are there no blazes? It took me almost a mile of walking in confusion before I realized the ruse innocently played on me by the trail maintainers. I hustled back to the intersection, cursing.

That feeling of not going the right way, of looking for signs of affirmation and seeing none, that's the feeling that's been eating me since late December.

I believe that every human is endowed with 'blazes,' internal truths that guide them through life. Angels, the Soul, God, whatever you want to call it, I believe they are part of every person on this planet. Some people listen to them, others ignore them. I believe that when you listen to them, success and happiness follow; and when you ignore or repress them, misery, doubt and failure become your companions (read "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho).

So what has kept me going if all this time I've felt that I've been walking in the wrong direction? What have been the North-facing blazes that have confused and misguided me? Well, for starters, I am a talented photographer, and when I was in Korea, I felt that I should give that a chance to grow and blossom once I got back to Atlanta. I felt that I couldn't be anything else. My parents were going to support me with housing and a car. I thought that was to be my career, my life path. I was stubborn, and that has paid dividends of uncertainty. This dogged adherence to a former dream has kept me asleep to reality.

I've tried fighting it. I bought $9000 in equipment in an effort to force myself to keep going, which has now ended up simply making me feel trapped. I justified my misery by banking on my future. "Don't worry, Stephen. You'll get rich and then you'll have all the time in the world to do what you really want," I tell myself. There is something really insidious about that statement, if you think about it.

So what do I want to do?

The greatest thing about realizing that you may be walking down the wrong path is that the right path is usually very close at hand. In my case, it was in my face every day I breathed the Korean air: teaching.

Make no mistake, teaching in Korea was hard. I lived in a dump. I had few friends. In the classroom, I got no supplies save a chalk board, thirty screaming children who didn't speak English six to eight times a day, and daily xenophobic torment from my superiors. Still, something about it felt right. The days when I came to school and did a great job, I got an equally great reward: A feeling that I was doing something worthy and additive to the common good. And when I left at the end of my contract, the children proved those feelings contained a modicum of truth with their letters, flowers and tears.

My roommate and I would laugh and talk for hours about our students, our successes and our failures. We still do.

Teaching appealled to me in many ways. It harnessed my creativity, my caring nature and my love of people. For these same reasons, photojournalism appeals to me. Even writing about it now, I am energized and excited. I look forward to my chess classes every week, and I am beginning to get a handle on the discipline issues that plagued me in Korea (speaking the same language helps a lot).

This morning I had another existential conniption and got really depressed. I consider these little depressing fits something of an alarm ringing in my head, like the guy on the Titanic yelling, "Iceburg right ahead!" Could I just be a lazy asshole who doesn't want to put in the work needed to start a business? No, that's not me. When my heart is behind something, I'm like a juggernaut. Nothing stands in my way. Aspects of my personality appear that I didn't know existed. I become excited, resolute, unflappable.

Booking a swim meet just doesn't ellicit these feelings. The thought of harrassing another editor for a morsel of an assignment doesn't, either. Barnstorming bridal shops is not me at all. I am beginning to realize that I may be the photographer, but I'm not the businessman. In this market, you can't have one without the other.

But every week, my uncle Steve's secretary tells me that, "As much as we'd like to give another coach the chance to teach at Mt. Carmel, the parent coordinator says she wants Stephen Jones and no one else."

If that isn't a south-facing blaze, than I don't know what is.

--Notes

2006-12-24T10:22:00.000+09:00

Merry Christmas from Atlanta!

There were only two reasons to come home, and being with my family over the holidays was reason number two. Reason one, of course, was Stephen Jones Photography.

Last week my family bought a Christmas Tree. However, there was no room in the living room for it, so my parents put it on the coffee table. Where once a lamp, coasters and a few magazines rested, there sprouted a tree reaching a foot or two higher in the air than nature intended. Dad and I clothed it in lights, Sara and her boyfriend came over and we all decorated it with ornaments from the dusty boxes mom brought downstairs from Sara's closet.

Ornaments are like personal artifacts. Not all of them have stories, but many of them are from different times in my life. Sara found ornaments with pictures of us as children, ornaments we made in grade school, ornaments from Happy Meals, ornaments my grandmother once hung on Christmas trees when she was a girl and she and her mother were living alone in Kansas City, estranged from her violent father.

Even the generic ornaments my parents bought from Ace hardware over the years, the balls and butterflies with their brass hooks, told a story. There were ornaments from the seventies when my parents were first dating, ornaments from eighties and nineties when Sara and I were kids, and brand-new ornaments bought just this year that one day will be from this period in our lives.

We drank eggnog and brandy and listened to the London Philharmonic play Vaughn Williams' emotional orchestral arrangments of ancient English folksongs. We talked. We laughed. We were a family. I found myself satisfied for once with my decision to come home.

I've thought long and hard about going back to Korea. Starting a business is hard, but that isn't the reason. I am not a stranger to hard work. In fact, the difficult part of starting a business is finding time to put your feet up and relax. No, I seriously consider going back to Korea because life was so damn easy there.

I can already hear you saying, "But wait! You bitched a lot about Korea." And you'd be right. I did. It was. But not like this.

Teaching was hard, living in Korea tried my patience, but I loved it because it was different. I felt like every day was an opportunity to explore, to learn. Even though my days had a pattern, there was always the chance for something totally mind-blowing to occur. Learning the language and navigating the culture presented challenge enough to keep my mind occupied. Not only that, I had a steady, relatively good paycheck, a challenging job, and lots of spare time. I have none of those things here, especially the spare time. Also, there is something about Atlanta that changes everything. The magic of 'new' is gone.

My waking hours are framed by an emotion resembling remorse. I am starting out on a new path, but it feels old. The excitement of Korea and the Appalachian Trail is absent. My surroundings are so familiar, and with familiarity comes dullness, the unspoken curse of memory.

For the last few years, I have lived away from home. College, Chattanooga, The Trail, Hattiesburg, Korea. Long has it been since I woke to the sound of my parents making breakfast. Strange are sounds that never change. In the space of my absence I have grown a lot, and arrived home far from where I left. But little has changed in those years. The owls still live in the trees towering over my house where it slowly ages in the wooded cove of a midtown neighborhood. My dad still labors every weekend to keep it standing. Some friends have moved away. Others stayed, married, had kids. I see them and remember, and when we speak, one or both of us carries the burden of meaningless memory, recognition without bond, things done or undone that don't matter anymore but still seem to cling to us like a faded tattoo barely visible under our sleeve. We're adults talking to memories of childhood.

The 'oldness' of Atlanta acts as a weight, a burden weighing me down. It is the weight of birth. Everything about me was born in this city, starting with my physical being in the fall of 1979. Within a ten-mile radius from my house is my first day at school, my first friend, my first kiss, my first experiment with drugs, my first broken arm, my first broken heart. If experience is the brick and morter of personality, Atlanta is where I was built, and when you return to the place of your construction, you cannot help but feel the rough hands of the creator upon your soul.

There were plenty of times that creator screwed up. All of my issues, my personality problems, they were all born here, too. Some of them were with me when I was born. Others were the result of experience, and sometimes during my travels throughout the city, I come across these personal epitaphs. There's the corner by Mary Linn Elementary where John Arnold used to beat me up after school, and that's the park where I broke up with a girlfriend I was close to. Here is the school where I spent a year with no friends. All of these experiences left marks on my soul, scars that itch faintly as I drive by.

Anywhere else in the world, I still carried this luggage, but they were easier to ignore. Living in and around Atlanta is to live a lot closer to who I am, the good and the bad. Viewing those old tapes in the cold light of adulthood makes things worse. My shortcomings suddenly take on form and reason. Some of them I feel like I can resolve. Others look to me like boulders stuck in a mountain side. Big. Immobile. Perhaps part of the mountain itself. I must learn to live with them or get around them. This is who you are, because this is who you were.

One thing Atlanta can't do is tell me who I will be, though it has become clear that whoever that person is, he will be shaped by who he was. There is no avoiding it. How I change is entirely dependant upon how I handle the issues and history that Atlanta has held up to my face. Starting Stephen Jones Photography is only part of what is starting in Atlanta. Stephen Jones himself is starting, too. Who he will be is not immediately apparent. Against the fading portrait of my youth I must craft a new work of art.

Some things and some people will fade away. Others will come into the foreground. Interests and passions will be stoked, habits formed, clothes bought and hangouts established. I will catch a break and my business will thrive. Or it won't and I'll find something else to do. It doesn't matter. Over time, the person inside will make it's habitat outside. It takes years. I must be careful about which parts of my past may become part of my future.

The only thing that is new about Atlanta, the only magic that awaits me is within myself. I will bring to this city a person it has never known, and that person will grow and thrive and build a new life. I do not have to be ruled by my past, but in order to move beyond it I must face it and come to terms with it.

I large measure, this is what Christmas is all about: Rebirth. To me, the principle lesson of Christ's birth is that what has happened is trumped by what is and what will be. To live in wholly in the present is an act of confession. To focus on the future is to forgive.

Sometimes I feel like the message of Christmas is lost on most Americans, most of whom mistakenly celebrate it a week later at New Years. Decorating the Christmas Tree with my family has reminded me of the good experiences in my life that live side by side with the bad. I am reminded that life is a mix of good and bad experiences, a series of questions against which we are all tested, and those of us who can smile at it all have passed with flying colors.

Peace

--Notes

2006-10-09T09:13:00.000+09:00

OK, I'm going to try. I've sat down at my computer. Photoshop is off. So is GoLive. I've made time and space to sit down and update Sokonotes.

When I returned from Argentina, I was swallowed up by my ambition. For those of you who don't know, the primary reason for returning to the States was to start a photography business, and as you will remember, I went to Korea specifically to raise capital for that venture. I'm not positive that I have enough money, but I'm here and it's going to happen.

Heck, I've already incorporated. if anyone needs a photographer, just call Stephen Jones Photography Inc. The number is on my website, www.notesjones.com.

Starting a business, any business, is an uphill climb. I really had no idea what that climb would be like. I sort of dove into the venture the same way I approached a big mountain on the Appalachian Trai: Well, as the White Blazes go, so go I...

God, I wish it were that easy. If only someone could tell me how to climb this mountain. But when starting a business, everything is left up to you, including the destination. There are no trails, no blazes, and for some people, no summit. Sometimes my parents, who run a business of their own, half-jokingly lament that they will work until they die. They'll be climbing forever.

I don't want to climb forever, and I've discovered that the key to summiting the climb is deciding where the top will be far in advance.

Like any climb on the trail, the hard work of starting a business is good work, rewarding in so much as it feels like I am finally in control over my life. I don't feel like I am mindlessly spinning my wheels for someone else. As a free-lance photographer, I set my own prices, I decide how much work to do and I keep my copyright. Oh, and I can say 'no.'

Saying 'no' feels good, almost as good as saying 'yes.' When I say 'yes,' I get paid. When I say 'no' I feel like I am setting my own course. I don't have to take every dumb assignment some desk jockey thinks up while wolfing down donuts. But if I want to take that dumb assignment, and that desk jockey wants it down bad enough, I can set my own price, and that price is damn high!

So far, I haven't taken any dumb assignments. Being your own boss has it's advantages. It has it's disadvantages, too. I don't get overtime. In fact, I don't get paid at all. I haven't cut myself a check in two months, but I work all the time. How long has it been since last I updated?

I am a ruthless self-employer. Whenever I try to sit down and relax, there is a little voice in the back of my head admonishing me. Shouldn't you be using this time to work on your website? Prepare mailers? Call clients? Keep up with your books? Deal with that printing error? Even now, sitting at my computer writing this blog, it distracts me. Is writing this blog really nessisary? Does anyone really read it, anyway?

But it isn't about that. It's about taking time for myself.

When you don't take time for yourself, when you don't relax, your days begin to run together. Eat, sleep, wake, shower, shave, work, run, teach, tone, print, call, drive, eat, sleep, wake, shower, don't shave, work, run, breakfast, and on and on and on and on until one day you wake up and it's Friday. How is it Friday? Do I have plans? Oh, I have that football game for the Gwinnett Daily Post. Shit.

Better cancel that date.

Some weeks the only time I had to myself was the seven or eight hours I slept. What is funny is that I do a lot of catching up in my sleep. I've had dreams where I am hiking, going out with friends, even watching movies. I've had dreams where I've sat by the Chatooga and fished for trout, dreams where I am drinking a beer with Gavin, dreams where I've been at a concert with Wes.

Luckily, I've realized that if I do take time for myself, I am a better photographer for it. It's hard, but it has to happen. No one can live a life so unbalanced for so long without going mad. So I make a few hours available every night to watch TV with my folks, or go to Trivia Night with my sister, or high Stone Mountain with Jennifer. I am also going to try and make room for blogging. Look for update, however irregular, every few weeks. I'll include photos from the assignments I've taken.

Oh, and I plan on finishing the blog on Argentina. Just let me finish this website first, which I need to go work on now...

Peace.

--Notes

2006-10-09T03:55:00.000+09:00

NOTE: This is part two of a multipart series on my trip to Argentina. If you missed part one, scroll down and read it.

I loved the Argentinean people. They were vibrant, beautiful, full of life, and awfully creative. See? They finally found a good use for the PC tower! (I'm an Apple user, for all of you who don't know)

After I finished touring the photographic exhibits at the end of Florida Street, I found myself at the crux of a daunting situation in a foreign country. Tengo hambre. I'm hungry.

My (sort of useless) Spanish phrase book (because Argentineans don't speak Castilian Spanish) in hand, I walked down the stairs to the basement of the building where there was a food court selling everything from steaks and sandwiches to Chinese food. There is nothing as interesting to a traveler as the food he or she encounters. It is one of the first things people ask me about Argentina or Korea.

Lunch was to be my first meal in Argentina. I wondered if the plump, pimply girl behind the cash register felt any pressure as I haphazardly ordered a submarine sandwich filled with something called "Lomo" that wasn't in my Castilian phrase book. Was she worried about how I might react to Argentinean food? She had me pinned as a Shankee from the second I opened my mouth.

"Olah, me gustaria, uh, uhhhhhh, pee-dir lo-mo, uh..." I stumbled.

She smiled patiently and finished my sentence for me in perfect English.

"..Italiano. Do you want fries and a cola?" Sure. Boy, that was too easy. Korea was so much more fun.

Wait, back up. Shankee? What's a Shankee?

"Shankee" is the word Argentinean people pin to ignorant American jackasses like me. Actually, it is little more than the word "Yankee" pronounced in the Argentinean Spanish accent, which slides Y's and LL's into an "Sh" sound. "Llamo" sounds like "shamo," "yo" sounds like "sho," and "Yankee" sounds like "Shankee." I resent that nickname. I'm a Boston fan!

After a long wait, I got my lomo submarine. Lomo is nothing more than beef tenderloin, and it goes well on French bread with mayo and tomatoes. They served me a coke with no ice and a plate of salty, rubbery fries. Typical mall food court fare, I thought as I mindlessly consumed the mastication-resistant fries. I rode the sugar buzz all the way home, where my blood glucose levels crashed and I fell into a fast-food fostered sleep on Faith and Bernardo's mafia-made couch.

Mafia-made couch? I guess I didn't mention that the mafia runs Argentina, or so it seems. A day didn't go by that someone didn't mention the mafia and/or how they are closely related to the government, a sort of Argentinean Department of Nefarious Deeds. People said, and I believed them, that they were closely tied to the police through bribes and blackmail.

All sort of inconveniences, infrastructure problems, monetary issues and even the couch I was sleeping on were the result of some super secret anarchic ultracapitalist subculture existing just under the surface of a seemingly lawful society. Sounded like home to me.

Oh, and the couch. It had, uh, character.

Faith and Bernardo, who recognized the awful state of their couch, insisted I sleep on a spare mattress, which was a million times more comfortable than the lumpy brown couch. Actually, I hadn't complained about the couch. After six month on the Appalachian Trail, I can sleep in any weather, anywhere, on anything, and if it just happens to be soft, well! The couch was soft. Lumpy, yes, but soft. I slept well on both couch and mattress.

The story about the couch went like this. Faith and Bernardo went to a futon store, found a mattress they liked, and asked for it to be delivered. Upon delivery, not a solid Japanese futon but a loose brown corduroy bag filled with shredded foam was heaved into their apartment along with the convertible bed/couch frame that came with it. My friends complained and demanded the correct mattress be delivered pronto, but it all came to naught, and they knew who was to blame.

The Mafia! (cue dastardly music/evil laughter).

As you can tell, I took the whole matter much too lightly. People made it sound like the mafia was this omnipotent force, everpresent, never sleeping, waiting behind every tree to leap out and nab your purse. Luckily, I don't carry a purse.

People would point out something backwards or ridiculous about Buenos Aires, speculate in the form of a question as to the nefarious rationale behind the seemingly irrational phenomena indicated, and then let the obvious answer hang in the air like a fart. Mafia. Had to be. Bastards. I found it all amusing, and tried to encourage Faith and Bernardo to see it the same way. They didn't, and with good reason.

In December of 2004 a fire ripped through the Cromagnon night club where hundreds of people had gathered to hear the rock group, Los Callejeros. Someone had wired the doors shut to prevent people who hadn't paid from entering the concert, and 194 people died in the resulting fire trap, including several small children. Fingers were pointed, the owner was arrested, and investigations were dutifully conducted.

The investigations found the government's fire inspection unit badly managed and corrupt, the fire department and emergency response teams underequiped and poorly trained, and the owner of Cromagnon to be unreasonably oblivious to the obvious fire hazards in his club. The mayor lost his job over the matter, but it was small consolation to the residents of Buenos Aires, who all knew who was really behind the disaster. Mafia.

Monday night Faith and Bernardo took me to club called The Konex to hear a percussion group called "Time Bomb" do their thing. I hadn't yet heard about Cromagnon at this time. Bernardo's college friend Martin drove Faith, Bernardo, and another friend, Diana, to The Konex along with me in his old blue Renault stick shift.

This is a picture of Martin, who everyone calls by his nickname, Tincho. He graduated from film school with Bernardo, and uses his tremendous talent to a number of artist ends. He is a virtuosic painter and his films exhibit a masterful command of timing, light, and photography.

And this is Diana, a lovely entrepreneur from the same neighborhood Faith and Bernardo live in. During the economic crisis in the late 1990s, she lost her job working as a designer with an internet company, and started her own business helping independent designers of all breeds network and sell their products online. She is also an amazing photographer, who proved to me over the course of two weeks that it is the photographer who makes the image, not the camera. Don't worry, I'll explain later.

OK, where were we? Oh yes, the KONEX. This is also a reference to my previous thread on the mafia. Ah-hm.

Martin parked down the street from The KONEX, and I was the first one out of the car. A gruff, middle-aged man with a stocky build and a polypro windbreaker walked up to me and started speaking fast in Spanish. He had a serious look on his face, and I wondered if he was mafia. He certainly looked the part. The only words I understood were "car" and "to pay." Martin and Bernardo quickly took over for me, as the man was starting to get exasperated, as answer to his questions was a slow, "un momento. Habla despacio por favor." One minute. Please speak slower.

"Mafia," Faith said in a whisper as Bernardo and Martin dealt with the man. They had to pay him a small fee for his "protection" against thieves. A couple of pesos and no harm would come to Martin's car. How funny, I thought. A human parking meter!

All the money actually bought was protection from the man himself. When we returned to the car later on, he was gone. There was nothing in the car worth stealing, as someone had already ripped off Martin's stereo long ago, and Tincho had been shrewd enough not to replace it. An American living abroad (from my home city of Atlanta) named Sarah and her friend joined us.

The concert itself was a treat. We entered what had been a factory that had been converted into a cavernous music venue with giant red neon letters spelling the word KONEX laid out diagonally in front of the windows. It looked like a set from the first Batman movie. I would have photos, but Faith and Bernardo urged me not to take a camera, as it would result in a more personal meeting with members of the mafia.

The band, Time Bomb, was a collection of music students, focused mainly on percussion, headed by their charismatic professor. They practiced at The Konex, and then afterwards put their skill and talent to work for whoever could spare seven pesos (two bucks). It was an absolutely astounding show.

Ten to twelve musicians sat in a circle around their master, a dazzling array of percussion instruments laid out at their feet. As we walked into the room, they were working on a simple but catchy phrase with their drums. Their professor, the conductor, stood at the top of the circle with two small hand drums on stands by his side, his black wingtip shoes keeping time on the floor. He was a thick, jovial man dressed in dark clothing with thick black hair and a pirate-like mustache.

He swayed like a martial artist to the increasingly complex rhythm, watching and communicating with each musician with a series of homegrown, unique and delightful hand gestures customized to change the meter, instruments, styles or even which musicians were emphasized.

Over the course of three hours, the conductor and his students filled The KONEX with a thunderous, emotionally charged sound made from scratch. They brought in new instruments, different styles, mixed them in unbelievable ways and toyed with the sound like the wind plays with a falling leaf. Everyone was dancing, clapping and swaying to the sumptuous beat. Everything and everyone, down to the crowd itself, became an instrument in the hands of the conductor.

At one point, the conductor set the audience to clapping in time for him, and upon that human pulse he brought a symphonic masterpiece to life, sending the crowd into wild cheers. It is said that friendship is one soul in two bodies. By the time Time Bomb was through, everyone standing in the KONEX were friends. The cadence united us and released us as each melody changed, built and resolved itself over and over again. I realized how much color and creativity was to be found in Buenos Aires, and the whole night I pined for my camera. As we drove home, I ached to go explore.

Over the next two weeks, I got my wish.

The next day, Faith took me downtown, where she works as a mortgage saleswoman (another benefit of being bilingual), and knowing my love of the outdoors, pointed me towards the Parque y Zona de Reserva Ecologica Costanera Sur. This massive stretch of managed land spans dozens of city blocks, bordered by downtown Buenos Aires on the western flank and the Rio de La Plata to the east.

The route Faith chose took me down the long series of dikes that lined the main avenue downtown. In the first dike, sailboats rested.

The area by the dikes is another trendy location slowly being turned into a haven for tourists. Called Puerto Madero, it made for pleasant sightseeing. To my right were buildings housing upscale restaurants and pricey lofts. To my right was what looked like a train station converted into similar monuments to Western comforts and decadence. An artful bridge pictured on the cover of my city guide spanned the dikes. Called the Woman Bridge, it was designed by celebrated Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava Valls. Wes, these photos are all for you, my friend.

Rowers silently glided past me as I stopped at a small cafe for lunch. I had a lot more luck this time. I ordered a chicken sandwich on pita bread and a cup of espresso. Cost to me: $4, and Faith told me later I got ripped off.

At the end of the dikes, the road turned into the ecological preserve. In the turn of the century, it was a popular destination for bathers, and had docks along the ponds for such purposes. Nowadays you'd have to be absolutely bonkers to try swimming in the Rio de La Plata or any pond fed by its polluted, neglected waters. Unlike the Koreans, the Argentineans don't have a particularly close relationship to the sealife living side-by-side with them.

"Our backs are to the river," Bernardo pointed out about the city's design.

I walked a broad sand path towards the river, bikers, joggers and school children my companions. Behind me, the skyline of Buenos Aires rose above the razorgrass and pine trees.

People rested and took in the open space, a necessity in a city the size of Buenos Aires.

Others looked for a place to escape and be together.

At four thirty, I met Faith after work and followed her to her next job: Teaching English in the Palermo district. But you will have to wait till the next update for those stories and photos. Also, I'll get into the joy of using Spanish and Rashashana with Bernardo's family. Jeez, I'm only two days into my trip. Don't worry, there won't be 14 updates on Argentina, but these first few days really stand out. I guess that's true anywhere you go. It's all about travel. So till next time...Peace. --Notes

2006-10-04T10:48:00.000+09:00

NOTE: This is part 1 of a multipart series about my trip to Argentina. There are ALOT of photos. You can imagine how much there is to say.

I'm back from Argentina!

What? Argentina? Wasn't I just in Korea? Isn't this SoKo, as in South Korean, Notes?

Yes. Amazing isn't it? For a thousand bucks and a few uncomfortable hours at 40,000 feet a person can sleep under a different set of stars and wake up in another world. In my case, that other world was Buenos Aires, Argentina.

When I first thought about it, Argentina didn't sound quite as exotic as Korea. I spoke a little Spanish. I had more background knowledge about Argentina than I ever had about Korea. By 'more' I simply mean I knew they had cowboys, boleros and invented the Tango. I also had heard of this place called Patagonia. I wanted to visit it.

In fact, most of my trip to Argentina was geared toward exploration. When I go on vacation, I'm not one of those people who likes to spend days sipping margaritas on some sun-soaked beach by an azure sea. I simply can't sit still long enough. I itch to get out and learn about the strange world in which I awoke. Luckily for me, Buenos Aires is custom made for such an oddball vacationer.

It is my opinion that one of the hallmarks of growing older is a steady narrowing of one's worldview. As the years pass by, we start taking the world for granted. Our eyes become accustomed to whatever little space we've chiseled out around us and we miss out on the discovery and sense of wonder that characterized our youth.

Little by little, routine and the daily grind wear down our senses and starve our imagination. Meals become nothing but food, the flowers become scenery, and the people around us become like furniture in a huge house in which we only occupy one bedroom. The seasons come and go, the news changes, sometimes we buy a new car, but very little holds magic for us. Everything is normal, plain, uneventful, simply there. And then one day we're ninety.

Traveling changes all of that. Traveling, especially international travel, is frightening stuff. You pay a thousand bucks, you get on an airplane, and nine hours later you are standing in a place where no one knows your name, no one speaks your language or shares your culture or your history, and quite possibly resents that history (if you are American, that is). Heck, they might not even know how to make a rye bagel!

Scary, isn't it? But what is the age-old saying? What doesn't kill us only makes us stronger? Yes, I believe that's it. Sort of cliché, but it fits. International travel DOES possess the ability to kill us, making the saying even more true. However, by defeating those fears and getting the most out of the experience (as well as not getting killed), a person gains alot.

Travel renews the sense of wonder and wide-eyed amazement of youth. When I stepped off of that airplane in Buenos Aires, all five of my sense were awake and vividly alive, tasting, listening, smelling and seeing in a way I hadn't experienced since I did the same thing in Korea back in September of 2005. All around me people were speaking Spanish, and my mind was furiously trying to recall the three or four years of classes I all but slept through in high school and college.

NOTE: A few days before I was shopping at the local farmer's market in Atlanta with my parents and I happened across my high school Spanish teacher, Nieto Studstill. She was happy to see me, and asked me how I was doing. When I told her where I was going and how bad my Spanish (still) was, she shot me a look that said, "See, I told you!" You can imagine how I felt.

That feeling came back to me as I waded through Argentine customs. Como say what? Unlike in Korea, the words coming out of people's mouths were not a complete and total mystery. Spanish is closely related to English both grammatically and in terms of the latin based vocabulary. Also, Argentina is populated with immigrants mostly from Europe. Racially speaking, I fit in pretty well. My mouth gave me away.

Luckily, the woman working the desk of a taxi company spoke flawless English, and I arranged an inexpensive ride into town. As the driver loaded my suitcase, I had a chance to look around myself. The Buenos Aires sky was a deep blue and the spring air as dry and cool as the Fall weather in Atlanta. To my right, a family was greeting a recent arrival back into their arms. They all kissed each other on the cheek as they loaded her things into their car. Their chatter was warm and friendly and felt like a good omen to me.

The journey into town was long. Outside my window the slums of Buenos Aires flew by, block after block of empty roads, cinder blocks, metal bars and graffiti. As we neared the center of town, the slums gave way first to suburban ranch houses and then to quaint apartment buildings, shops and cafes. People, dogs, trees and busses flashed passed my window. In many places the pavement had been worn away by time, cars and weather, exposing the much more resilient cobblestones lying underneath. My taxi shook and lurched to a stop beside a shuttered convenience store nestled into a corner of a slate-grey two-story building along Rocamora Avenue.

The driver patiently waited as I rang the intercom button. A groggy but excited voice from my past answered. A few minutes later, my old friend Faith Marden opened the door and welcomed me with a big hug. Down a long hallway and up a flight of stairs and I got a second helping of hugs from her boyfriend, and my friend, Bernardo Bronstein. The two had met in Paris five years earlier, and settled (for the time being) in Buenos Aires.

This is Bernardo.

And this is Faith.

It had been a long, long time since either Faith or Bernardo had been up at 7:30 in the morning. Faith taught English and worked for a company selling mortgages and Bernardo taught English. As with many people in Buenos Aires, their jobs didn't usually start till late morning or early afternoon. They found it strangely entertaining to be up before 10.

"So this is morning?" Bernardo quipped as we pulled out the table for breakfast. I unpacked the grocery bag full of goodies Faith's mom entrusted to me to deliver to her daughter. Issues of the 'Funny Times,' a can of organic pineapple, and an avalanche of socks spilled from my suitcase. However, the true treasure I bought for the couple the Saturday of my departure from Atlanta. Faith laughed with joy when she saw them.

"Yeah! Bagels!" she squealed and took them into the kitchen. We caught up with one another over a breakfast of bagels and the strong Argentine tea, Mate (pronounced Ma-tay), which looks and tastes something like kudzu and packs a massive caffeinated punch. Faith and Bernardo have been living in Argentina three years running, with no indication of returning to the States.

Why should they? Life is good in Buenos Aires. Rent, bills and food are cheap, the transportation is adequate, and work is plentiful. Faith and Bernardo's linguistic dexterity afford them a certain degree of competitive advantage in the Argentine job market, which has become a mecca for multinational outsourcing.

Their apartment is a simple one-bedroom affair with a big living room, one bath and a kitchen so small only one person can stand in it at one time. A giant wooden-slatted shutter opens to a concrete terrace overlooking Rocamora Avenue, and you can even climb a steel ladder to their roof, overlooking the neighborhood rising up all around in bright shades of gray.

Many of the buildings in Buenos Aires have a lot of character. And though I saw many buildings sporting grand architecture and classic facades, by far my favorite building lay across the street from my hosts' apartment: A small two-story apartment building I named Mr. Roca. See if you can spot him.

See him? In the middle? He's the one with his eyes half-closed, a bright yellow mole and a Marine haircut. I wanted badly to try and convince the people living in Mr. Roca to help us make a movie in which they pulled the lampshades on the windows up and down to make it look like he was talking.

Around lunch time Faith and Bernardo went to work. I followed Bernardo into downtown Buenos Aires and cut loose as he headed for the office. He dropped me off at a park named after the Argentinean hero, General San Martin, and pointed me down Florida Street towards a photo exhibition by Magnum photographers on September 11tth.

Florida Street is home to one of the city's premier touristy shopping destinations, and sported the usual harbingers of capitalism.

Some of the shops even sported a little Konglish (though I guess it should be termed 'Arglish' in Argentina).

I walked the streets past numerous shops selling everything from cellphones to leather jackets. Wow, I thought to myself. "I'm in Argentine Nampo-dong!" I couldn't help but compare Florida Street to Gwangbokdong. The two were just too similar, so I focused on the differences.

One of the main differences were the poor people who haunted the awnings and stairwells around the shops hunting for spare change from tourists. In Nampo-dong, such people were there, but rare, and almost always just adults. It's not that Korea is bereft of poverty, but rather that the Koreans are better at sweeping such people under the proverbial rug. One of the shocking aspects of walking Florida street were all of the homeless children, some of them just babies, walking barefoot and filthy from person to person or sitting on the sidewalk.

Naturally, people living off of the charity of others have a keen eye for American tourists. We also sort of stick out. I walked down Florida street in a $250 Gore-tex jacket with a brand-new LowePro camera bag on my back, a digital SLR in my hands and a pair of blinding white New Balance sneakers on my feet. According to Faith, no Argentines wear New Balance shoes and nobody but a tourist would carry his camera around his neck. There is simply too much street crime in Buenos Aires.

I hadn't walked 100 meters down Florida street before a girl who couldn't have been older than 8 walked up to me with a baby tucked under one armpit like a football and the other hand outstretched to me.

"Monedas, monedas," she begged. Her hair was knotted and filthy and her skin was dark with dirt. There were no shoes on her feet. My heart went out to her, and I dug out a few coins. No sooner had I given her the money than three more children quickly changed course and intercepted me at a busy intersection.

"Monedas! Monedas!" The implored, spurred on by the first child's success. "Oh, shit," I thought, suddenly trapped between my conscience and the simple reality of exponential and inexhaustible demand growth for my charity. I could already see other children across the street eyeing me. I was saved by an Argentine in front of me who turned around and said something harsh in Spanish that scattered the children. He nodded to me as if to apologize and the light changed. I crossed the street.

Waiting on the other side of the street were the Volantes (however, the "V" is pronounced like a "B"). A volante is basically a flyer for some local business, and lying in wait all down the length of Florida street are the people who pass them out. They prowl the street, thrusting the volantes into the hands of passers by. Another 200 meters and my back pocket bulged with volantes advertising everything from strip clubs to Chinese food.

As I neared the photo exhibit, I passed other, more enterprising, Florida street denizens. A student of music played classical guitar. Another man performed magic tricks. A couple danced a sort of hyper-athletic Tango.

And for a few bucks you could have your picture snapped with the handsome old dancin' geezer.

These children employed their musical talent to pick up a few coins. Faith told me some of these kids allegedly work for the mafia, and if they don't make enough money then their "boss," usually a parent, will beat them at the end of the day. After I snapped this photo, they both begged change from me and I gave them more than I had given the barefoot girl with the baby.

Some people make their wages legally. This man worked as a "human billboard." He patiently waited for the traffic light to turn red and then, as other people crossed the busy avenue, he walked out into the crosswalk and held his sign up in front of the drivers stopped at the light. He was a friendly man, and said his was an easy job, as it afforded him lots of time to listen to music and talk shows on his mp3 player.

I finally made it to the exhibit and was brought back five years to that cool fall day in early September when the world came to a standstill and 3000 people needlessly lost their lives. It was hard and strange to relive that day. The photos were massive, well-composed and captioned. After the 9-1-1 exhibit, I plunked down a few pesos and took in an exhibit on the Mexican artistic genius, Frieda Kohal.

The Argentines take the arts very seriously, as I will get into in in the third installment of this multipart blog. Next up: An all-percussion orchestra and the exploration of Buenos Aires. I hope you enjoyed part 1. Look for the next update in a few days. Peace. --Notes

2006-09-11T10:33:00.000+09:00

My time in Korea has come to an end.

It’s been a while since I updated, and I apologize for the delay, but the current of life picked up over the last couple of weeks and I just never found the time to update SoKoNotes. I started this update from seat 51A on a Boeing 747 bound for the United States and I finished it up a few days after returning to the USA.

As I sat in the terminal at Busan’s Gimhae airport preparing to board the plane for Narita, I looked around me. There were a few Western foreigners in the terminal. From somewhere behind me I heard a voice speaking in English. It was a man talking to his wife. The voice was just close enough to penetrate approaching reality and just distant enough to seem like it was coming from a dream.

It was surreal to sit there and listen to strangers talking and understand what they were saying. For so long I have lived in the artificial silence of a language barrier, unable to understand more than a few words. From behind me came the sound of my past, the sound of my homeland, the sound I will need to reacquaint myself with these next few weeks.

I continued to listen off and on to the Westerners, who sat behind me on the airplane. Their conversation was nothing special, but I simply marveled at their words. Simply listening to them speak and understanding their words was fascinating. I thought about the structure of language and how strange a tongue English actually is. I wondered what it would be like to listen to English and have no idea what was being said.

The halls in Narita were crowded with Westerners. It felt a little uncomfortable, like slipping on a shoe you haven’t worn in a while, to be among them. For one year I have been a minority, and I have long enjoyed both the anonymity and the minor celebrity my white face and blonde hair afforded me.

As I walked the halls towards my gate, I suddenly felt stripped of those qualities. I became boring old Stephen Jones from Atlanta all over again. As I boarded the plane and the nice Japanese gate workers spoke to me in English, I realized that nobody around me knew of the powerful experiences I had lived this past year.

It felt just like September of 2003 when I scaled Mount Katahdin and completed the Appalachian Trail. Over six months I had learned all the habits, skills and tricks of a long-distance hiker, and the minute I stepped into my parents’ minivan and drove out of Baxter State Park, it all became practically useless, history, trail behind me. I shaved my beard. I hung my pack on a nail in the attic. I started looking for a job.

The one thing I never hung up were my memories of the experience. To this day I can flip through one of the many notebooks I kept on the trail, read the entry and instantly be carried to that exact day on the Trail. I can smell the air, I can taste the sweat, and I can feel the ground under my feet. There were people I met there that continue to be my friends and experiences that helped shape and mold me into the man I am today.

The very same concept holds true for Korea. My experience in this small nation has been no less enriching and amazing than the journey on the Appalachian Trail. I learned more about being an adult in one year than in the entirety of my ‘adulthood.’ I rose to challenge that I was completely unprepared for and I left a success. I lived in a foreign land and learned how to solve the problems contained within that relationship. I discovered elements of myself that were good and bad and I became more familiar with both. I made a friend who changed my perception of myself and taught me how to love another person with my whole self.

Korea has been good to me in so many ways. Korea has affected me deeply, even my language.

I caught myself thanking English-speaking people with a ‘Kamsamnida’ and as I traversed the Narita terminal I accidentally greeted a few new faces with ‘annyong hasayo.’ I felt embarrassed, but sort of proud that such words were reflexive and natural. These changes speak to effects on my being that I cannot guess at, changes in my perception of the world that I have not yet realized.

My last week at ESS Best Jr. went by without much fanfare. I brought my camera and tripod to class with me and took photos with all of my favorite students. Advanced Three and Four were saddened to see me go. The students gave me candy and letters and promised to treat the incoming replacement - A Canadian named Laura Spencer- with dignity and respect.

I spent entire blocks of class simply teaching them how to pronounce here name. Most of the students have a hard time with L’s and R’s. They inadvertently pronounced her name, ‘Ralla’ or ‘Rolla’ or ‘Rollar.’ Han-sol, in Advanced Three, turned the class’ poor pronunciation into a joke and nicknamed Laura ‘Roller-skate Spencer.’ Someone in Dave’s class coined the name, ‘Ms. Pencil.’

The youngest children were the most perplexed by my imminent departure. The middle school students all wrote me cards and Eun-hee had the entire 1S students make a heart-shaped goodbye card for me. It was sort of odd to read their letters and all at once be touched in my heart and want to correct their grammar at the same time.

Some of the students were very personal in their letters, and told me things that made me feel like I had actually done a good job. The students praised me for my enthusiasm, patience and how much fun they had with me. They said they could tell I really cared, and they meant it.

However, it was these very qualities that the students liked so much that had the opposite effect with my employer. The state of my relationship to ESS Best Jr. had grown cold and impersonal in the last few months of my tenure. Mrs. Nam, who when I arrived would pay me compliments and trade jokes with me, was just a notch better than my enemy when I left.

I greatly angered that woman in the Spring by directly confronting her style and the methods of teaching, methods encouraged by Mr. Kim, methods I considered old-fashioned and a waste of the students’ time. Mrs. Nam caught me playing with 3B before class. We had turned the blue podium into a pirate ship by laying it on the floor and we were pretending to sail through the classroom. I guess it was a little over the top, and I braced for the worse when I got back up to the teacher’s lounge after class.

Mrs. Nam didn’t disappoint. She began to berate me in front of everyone in the office. She had some valid points about proper discipline and teacher conduct, but I have a short fuse, and I was angry over the public humiliation. I met her head on.

Emboldened by my status as a Native Speaker, I got into a screaming match with my boss, and I spoke my mind on Mr. Kim’s methods. For Mrs. Nam, this was a direct insult, and all that kept me from getting fired was my status as a Native Speaker. From that point on, the compliments and jokes ended. At the core of my relationship to Mrs. Nam, and by proxy my relationship to all of the Korean teachers who used Mr. Kim’s methods, was a mutual lack of respect and distrust.

I also had to teach closer to Mr. Kim’s methods in order to keep from being dismissed. I despised the drudgery and total lack of imagination inherent to these methods, and a dark, angry place grew under my skin. When Mrs. Nam and the other Korean teachers took me to lunch on my last day, they all sat apart from Gavin, Dave and I and we all barely spoke to one another.

Still, through all of this strife, I made out alive. ESS Best Jr. bought me my plane ticket, paid me my last paycheck, bonus and had the students gather in the auditorium Friday night to say farewell. Earlier that week, I wrote a speech and my girlfriend, Hyun-jeong, translated it into Korean for me. Here is the photograph of me reading the English version of the speech, which is below it.

Well, here we are. Twelve months ago I stood at this very spot and greeted you for the first time. Let me tell, time flies, and what can seem like an eternity passes in the blink of an eye.
Twelve months ago I stood behind this podium still a boy: Scared and insecure, unprepared for the great challenge before me. Over those twelve months, you and I grew together. I became familiar with your strengths, weaknesses and personalities, and I came to know me own personality, strengths and weaknesses, too.
But there is more. I knew that when I stepped into that classroom, you would ask me to be the adult, to be a voice of justice, moderation and wisdom. By addressing these demands, I have learned powerful life lessons. I have learned to be patient, thoughtful and caring. I have learned how to be a good friend by cheering you on when you succeeded and being supportive when you failed. I always strived to answer your questions, and I have taught myself to be humble when I didn’t know the answers. In many ways, I arrived in Korea a child, and I will leave as an adult. You shared in that transition. You challenged me to be more than I am, and I rose to that challenge.
I stand before you now preparing to depart for my homeland. It is hard to say goodbye to you all at once. I want each of you to know that wherever you go in life, you have a friend and a brother in me, and as long as I live, my house and my heart will always be open to you. I want to take each of you by the shoulders and look you in the eyes so that when I say this, you’ll know it comes from my heart: Thank you. I hope to see you again someday.

* * *

Afterward, Mr. Kim said a few words for the kids. I don't know what he said.

Hyun-jeong translated the speech so well that Mr. Kim read it to the students for me before I did. After I gave my speech, the students gave me a standing ovation. I shook hands and traded smiles as I walked down the aisle, Gavin filming the whole affair with my videocamera, Dave taking stills. It felt great.

All the rancor and bitterness I held in my heart for my employers evaporated. Yoo-jin and Han-eol gave me flowers and an impromptu speech (that was really impressive). The Korean teachers even gave me a nice letter and Mr. Lee gave me an amazing Korean mural which now rests in my dining room. Even Mrs. Nam gave me a hug. I felt sort of dazed.

Afterwards, I waited around the teacher’s office for the second-year middle school students to finish class. They had promised me a treat. I set up my camera and waited.

Dave rummaged through my drawer for overlooked goodies. Mrs. Nam and Ms. Ha chatted. I sat and stared at my empty desk, wondering where the time went. I pray that when I die, I don't feel the same way. So much of life doesn't feel like it's actually being lived sometimes, and then a part of it ends and I am left wondering how I could have lived it differently.

Of course, that is not the way I feel about my time in Korea, but until that moment, it had felt that way. I had been exhausted much of the time, stressed out from managing all of those classes, a disgruntled boss and a language barrier. I spent too much time feeling negative and angry, defensive and powerless. In the end, it was time very, very well-spent. The power of leaving lifted me out from those dark clouds so that I could see the truth. I love this place, I love these people and I will hold no grudge against any of them.

At 10 o clock the second year middle school students poured out of the sweltering auditorium and into the teachers office where I was sitting. We snapped photos, traded gifts and laughed. Here's a photo. Notice the befuddled look on the guy on the far left. Today was his first day.

Mr. Kim broke the party up with a series of sharp commands in Korean. The students all came to attention.

‘Don’t you all need to go home to your mommies and daddies?’ he enunciated in a flat, syrupy tone of voice that carried more meaning than his words. ‘I think we should let Mr. Jones go home,’ he finished, as if I was inconvenienced by the students. We all obediently filed downstairs and a few of the students made plans to take me to lunch the last Sunday I was in town.

I met them at Starbucks in the early afternoon and ate seafood noodle soup. I marveled at their English, which was much better than I had originally thought. They told me about their plans for the future and how much they were going to miss me. I bought them icecream and we exchanged a few more gifts, email addresses, and even a few tears. We took pictures at the Gwangbokdong intersection.

What I found so wonderful about the meeting was that I felt no uncomfortable change in status from Mr. Jones the teacher to Stephen Jones the foreigner. They treated me with the same respect. I felt honored to have been their teacher, so aware of the fact that the passing of my face is like that of water under a bridge to these children, so easily replaced by another and another and another with each passing year.

I smiled and got embarrassingly emotional as I sat and prepared the photos for SoKoNotes. Here are the group photos I took with my favorite classes. This first picture is of my sixth graders, Advance Four. I had this class the longest - nearly eight months. They went from being my most hated class to being one of my most loved.

The next photo is of my all-time favorite class at ESS Best Jr...Advanced Three. This was the best group of children I have ever taught. They had real panache, character and enthusiasm that made me smile every day. They could make a Winter day Spring. They were an inspiration. One of the little boys, Jin-soo (to my left), spoke better English than most of the children in the school regardless of age. When I would award a student an "Outstanding" for making a really good sentence, Jin-soo would get up out of his seat, run outside the classroom and declare "Outstanding!" Then he would run back in the classroom and declare with joyful abandon, "IN-standing!" Does it get any funnier than that?

This is Advanced One, my most troubled advanced class. This class wasn't composed entirely of students who had properly earned an 'advanced' ranking. There were a few dopes and goofballs, but it was these jokers who made this class so much fun. One of them, Joon-byeong, was particularly funny. Whenever I gave out word-search puzzles, Joon-byeong ignored the English words he was supposed to find in favor of the strange, random, meaningless mix of consonants and vowels that appealed to his warped sense of humor.

"Teacher! Teacher! Look!" Joon-byeong would say and point to a haphazard combination like JZXXCER. "Jazzecksser!" Joon-byeong would yell and burst into raucous laughter.

Next is 4S, a completely unremarkable class except for how hard they tried. Oftentimes at ESS, there are simply too many bright kids for the advanced class, so they less gifted ones get knocked down to the next level, "S." The "S" kids tend to be very good students, but not quite as talented in picking up languages as the advanced kids. They are really nice and fun and I only had them once a week, which bummed me out.

Another class that I struggled with early on and then grew to love was 1-2A. These incredibly young children were really bright and could be fun to teach. However, ESS Best Jr. didn't properly equip me for teaching these kids. There was neither adequate materials or enough time to really engage them, so we mostly just played games. It was babysitting. Fun babysitting, though. This was the best photo I could manage out of this bunch.

Nothing in my life has reminded me of how much I've lost by growing up quite like the children. They reminded me, and then they gave it all back to me over the course of twelve months. Although I've grown up a lot in the last year, I've also been put back in touch with my inner child. They say as you grow older, you grow harder. Maybe so. But I would say I am a harder man with a softer heart.

A lot of the kids wrote me letters. Their English is splotchy, but their words are sincere and beautiful to me. Here are a few of their letters to me, verbatim.

Mr. Jones

Hello! I’m Mi-gun. First, I’m very sad because you will leave ESS. But I’ll not cry because you will go to your country to achieve your dream. You are my best foreigner teacher. When I didn’t have pride of English, you helped me very kindly. So it is very helpful to me. I like your smile and your cool character. We had practiced the play, we went to Summer Camp, those were very good times! I will never forget you. You love taking pictures, don’t you? So you will be the best photographer. I’m sure about that. Don’t forget us! Thank you very much!! I was really happy with you. Be happy.

To Mr. Jones you likes Korea and taking photos.

Sincerely, Mi-gun.

* * *

To: Mr. John

How goes it, Mr. John? I’m your a pupil, Ji-won. Thank you for the tip. Thanks. I’m sad, because you are go to the America. But I’m never cry. Um, that explains why your English is good. I envy you. I wish I could speak English like you. AH! And you miss me. You can always get me on the phone. We all miss you. Please come and see us sometime. Could I see you again? Goodbye my teacher, Mr. Jones.

--A wise saying--

Little deeds of kindness, little words of love help to make earth happy like the heaven above.

Ji-won.

* * *

To Mr. Jones!

Hi Mr. Jones. I’m Da-mi. I write a first letter to you, because you will go your hometown. I met you on September first in 2005. Do you remember? I remember then. But you’ll go your hometown, by the way I’m very sad. I think you are the best teacher. We had great times. I miss you so much. Maybe you will a great teacher in USA. I believe you. I wish go Havard University School. Then I will meet you. I remember first and last Summer camp with you. In the future we will meet in Havard. Maybe you are a teacher and I’m a student. I wish...Idon’t know much English, but in the future I give you a perfect letter to you. Bye Mr. Jones. You must not forget me.

From Da-mi

* * *

Hello Mr. Jones. I’m the cute girl, SHin-eun!!!
Teacher. You’ve going back home, so I’m very sad!! And thank you for teaching me!!! Teacher! Teacher! This box is for you, and I made it. I’ll give you photo. Mr. Jones. Your class is fun!! And thank you for the bag. Ohhhhh! This is my address. I will send you a letter and please write back. Teacher. Always stay healthy and don’t forget me!!! Good bye teacher.

I’m Eagle. I love you. Teacher. Shin-eun.

* * *

I love you too. All of my students. I love you, too.

It’s funny. Only a few boys wrote letters to me. One of them, a third-year middle school student abstained from writing me letters. Instead, he began sending me bizarre, schizoid email messages I took to be friendly. He was always a really quiet boy who suddenly came to life in the final weeks of my stay. His English is horrible, but I know he means well. Here is one of those funny messages I received after I left.

OH - I'm sorry ... My answer the letter is late . I'm ! I'm ! see my picture in your homepage ~. Um .... When hiking in the mountain , I'm help Ha Jeon Young teacher ! I'm proud of myself ~ and thank you .. You're very very take a picture ? well!!
However ~ I love you hahahahahahahaha - Young-jun.

* * *

Following my last day with ESS Best Jr., I went to Jejudo with my girlfriend, Hyun-jeong. We had been planning the trip for a few weeks, as it had been our dream to get out of Busan and be a real couple, even if for only a few days. Up until this point, I had been a secret Hyun-jeong kept from her mother, who like some Koreans, probably would not have sanctioned our relationship.

As the airplane approached the runway over Jeju, I felt like I was descending into a central American banana republic like El Salvador or Nicaragua. Lush green farms covered the island, broken only by the occasional road or village. Mountains rose in the distance, shrouded in clouds. I could see the ocean through the window on the other side of the aircraft. The glass oval filled and emptied with blue while my window filled and emptied with green as the plane tilted from side to side on its final decent.

Rental cars were cheap, in the neighborhood of $30 a day. However, the woman behind the counter informed me that I would need an international drivers license in order to rent the vehicle. This was disappointing. I tried to make due with my Mississippi license, which I insisted was internationally certified (despite any markings to that effect), but the woman stood her ground and flat out denied me my God-given American RIGHT to drive a car!

So we took a bus.

The bus took us to the other side of the island, to a town called Seogwipo, where there had been an Ironman triathlon the day before. Here is a shot of Seogwipo.

And here is a shot of a man with a bicycle, presumably to highlight the previously aforementioned information concerning a triathlon that had previously occurred on the date prior to our imminent arrival in the glorious Korean city of Seogwipo. Right.

Our hotel room was, well, not what I had paid for. Actually, it was very far from what I had paid for. My sixty dollars a night had bought us what looked like a set from a porno filmed in the 1970s. Earthy browns, oranges and yellows were the colors of choice, though the walls were white. Our bathtub was an olive green set on an orange-tile floor. The air conditioner wasn't on, so the room was an oven. A pitiful electric fan standing by the TV was our only respite until 5PM, when the air conditioner was slated to come on-line. None of this mattered to either of us. We were free! This was our own little slice of heaven, a veritable Eden compared to the awful, stifling purgatory of Busan.

That afternoon we decided to go to the east end of the island and see the famous sub-island of Ewdo. We spent a couple of hours looking for the ferry in Seogwipo before giving up and hailing a cab to take us to the bus terminal. Upon entering the cab, the driver informed us that there was no bus to Ewdo now, that we had missed it. He kindly offered to take us there for $30. OK, I said, willing to see some of the island at almost any price. I had lost my mind.

The trip to Ewdo was long, and once we got there, the woman at the ferry terminal told us that the last ferry had already left and we were too late. We walked out of the terminal under cloudy skies, the afternoon slight quickly slipping away. There was no bus terminal in sight, just a huge parking lot and a long, bleak gray breakwater twenty feet tall stretching into the ocean. A group of taxis was gathered in one corner of the parking lot, and they grinned at us as we walked by.

One of the taxi drivers ran up to us. He had a cocky grin on his face that instantly told me that Hyun-jeong and I were being milked for cash. He almost jokingly offered to take us back to Seogwipo. Sensing a scam, I protested, but he put his arm around me and did his best to convince me that there was no bus back to Seogwipo and his cab was the only method of transportation back to our hotel, thirty miles distant. I was enraged, but I had no choice. Hyun-jeong agreed with him, and so I had no recourse but to pay the man $28 (he gave us a discount) to take us back to our hotel.

The cabs had managed to talk me out of sixty dollars. I would learn later on that such charlatan behavior is common among Jejudo Taxi drivers. On the bright side, we got to see a lot of the Jeju countryside from the window of the cabs.

To make up for our blunder, we decided to stick close to home for dinner. We walked down to where the river met the ocean and followed it down a beautiful winding stone path to a waterfall lit RockCity-style by sodium-vapor lights. The air was cool and the path was sheltered by trees and bordered by the river on one side and the cliff wall on the other. We took pictures.

For dinner we ate the famous Jejudo Black Pork Samgyupsal, so named for the famous black pigs raised on human feces.

Raised on human feces!?! What!?! Wait a minute...

Gavin had heard a rumor that the pigs were fed human excrement because it made their flesh taste better. This, I presume, had been fed to Gavin via Dave, who had got it from one of his adult students back when he was working for ESS Adult. Dave and his wife spun many tales such as these, all culled from their students. I never told Dave or Susanna this, but I think now it was all alot of Korean urban legends, or so I hoped as I wolfed down black pork samgyupsal in that restaurant on Jejudo.

Hyun-jeong didn't seem bothered by the rumors of the black pigs' disgusting diet, and told me such rumors were just that - rumors. Rumor or no, the samgyupsal was the best I had ever eaten in Korea. (For those of you who don't know, samgyupsal is basically half-inch thick, unseasoned bacon that you grill on your table, cut into pieces and wrap in leaves with kimchi, vegetables and soybean sauce. Very, very delicious)

The next day we decided to hike Jejudo's signature mountain: Hallasan. Jejudo is basically the remains of an ancient volcano, and Hallsan is the cone. It rises over 2000 feet into the sky and sports a small crater lake at the top.

Hyun-jeong and I jumped into a cab that morning and directed him to the bus terminal.

"Oh?" He asked. "Where are you going?" Hyun-jeong told him and he shook his head. "Hallasan? You can't go there, it's too late to catch a bus. There is no bus there now." I looked at my watch. It was 10 o clock in the morning. The cabbie continued. "I'll take you there now for 20,000 won, if you'd like." Hyun-jeong began to nod in approval, but I detected the hint of the same scam the cabbies pulled on us the day before on our cursed journey to Ewdo. I cursed under my breath.

"Pull over, let us out." I said and paid the cabbie his two dollars. The driver protested, but I insisted and we left his car. Hyun-jeong was confused, but I said we should at least check the bus terminal before we took a taxi. Hyun-jeong called the bus terminal while I scored some egg sandwiches for breakfast. Hyun-jeong was just hanging the phone up as I walked up to her with the steaming egg sandwich. She looked upset.

"The cab driver lied!" She said. "There is a bus to Hallasan, and it's only two thousand won!" What was more, the bus runs all day long. I felt vindicated. Later on, Hyun-jeong's friend Yoo-jin would confirm my suspicions that the Jeju taxi drivers were notorious for ripping tourists off. We were lucky to have only been 'taken for a ride' just once.

HJ and I rode the bus up to the trailhead for Hallasan. The rest area was shrouded in fog as we bought kimbop, candy bars, water and rain ponchos for the eight-kilometer trek to the top of the mountain. The lady behind the counter said that the park rangers were turning hikers away before they got to the top due to inclement weather, but that didn't stop us. After a brief stop to look at a Hallasan photo gallery, we were on our way up the well-graded trail to the summit.

The hike was really pleasant. A cloud clung to the mountain, lending the forest an uncanny silence. The air was cool, damp and still and the leaves on the trees and bushes glistened with moisture. I felt like Sam and Frodo from The Lord of The Rings trekking through the forests of Galadriel. We talked and laughed and had a good time as we slowly ascended higher into the clouds.

After six kilometers, we stopped for lunch at a camp site consisting of two tent platforms by a wooden staircase. Kimbop and Snickers bars were on the menu. I took a nap while Hyun-jeong snapped photos.

It was getting late, so afterwards we walked back down the mountain and caught another bus back to Seogwipo.

The next day we went to see an art gallery exhibiting the works of one of Hyun-jeong's favorite Korean artists, Lee Joong-seop. Joong-seop was one of Korea's greatest artists rising out of World War Two, with a style obviously influenced by the likes of Picasso.

Though trained in Japan and married to a Japanese woman, Joong-seop took his art in a wholly Korean direction. He lived and painted in Seogwipo for a portion of his life, and a landscape he painted could be clearly viewed out the window of the museum, looking South.

Hyun-jeong and I snuck onto the roof of the building and took photos. I felt like a teenager again, my dad's camera in my hands, getting into mischief with my friends. I tried climbing a wall.

Here is HJ. Isn't she cute?

Here I am checking out the authentic replica of Lee Joong-seop's house. Hyun-jeong pointed out the stark difference between the age-old Korean design and the high-rise condo towering above it in the background. She has such a good eye.

After we flew home to Busan, I spent the remainder of my time saying good-bye to all of the people who helped me live and work in Busan. Here is Soo-ho, my banker. Soo-ho's only request was for white, American t-shirts, which he claims are higher quality than the Korean version one can buy in Nampo-dong.

This is a photo of the crew working at Kimbop Chunguk (Kimbop Paradise), a Korean franchise restaurant my coworkers considered junkfood. For the first three months of my stay in Korea, I ate nearly every meal at Kimbop Chunguk. They had everything: Jiggaes, baekbans, dabops, dankas, noodles, rice, mandu, and of course, Kimbop of all kinds. The ladies who worked there were kind to Gavin and I. They taught me a lot of my Korean food vocabulary, and were very patient as I practiced new Korean words and phrases on them. Lovely women. I wish them only the best.

Naturally, some of the best friends I made were friends with Hyun-jeong first. Here is a pic of her Algerian friend Allal and I at an upscale Indian restaurant in Haeundae. Muslims are rare in Korea, and so it was really interesting and sometimes hilarious hanging out with Allal, who politely enjoyed standing out in the crowd, so to speak. He had a great sense of humor and a positive outlook on Korea, which is rare among foreigners here.

This next picture is of me and Yoo-jin, another of Hyun-jeong's friends. Yoo-jin and Hyun-jeong met while they traveled to the United States together in 2003. When they returned to Korea, they met every week to practice speaking English with one another, a sort of two-woman conversational English club. This is part of the reason Hyun-jeong speaks English as well as she does, and Yoo-jin was no different. Here we are at Haagen-daz together.

Yoo-jin has impeccable taste in food, and whenever we needed a restaurant recommendation, Hyun-jeong called Yoo-jin on her cellphone. It became sort of an inside joke with us, actually. I really liked how forward-thinking and positive a person Yoo-jin was. She also had a good sense of humor and honored me by exclusively speaking English whenever I was around, even to Hyun-jeong. An amazing person.

Here is another photo I took that night of my beautiful Hyun-jeong. Though the light is bad, her expression is priceless.

Of all the people I met in Korea, she is the one I will miss the most. Over the course of our three months together, I fell deeply in love with her. Our separation at the airport was possibly the most painful moment of the last four years. Will I ever see her again? I know so, but not the exact date. The current US-Korea visa requirements present a massive, unwarranted obstacle to our relationship being anything more than friendly. Hyun-jeong needs to jump through numerous hoops, some of them financial, in order to get even a tourist visa to the US.

The sick thing is how easy it is for me to get to Korea. All I have to do is step on an airplane pointed towards Seoul with my passport in hand. POC - Piece of Cake. So I'll probably visit her when the time and money become available.

The other person I left behind is Gavin, whom I invited to Korea back in November of 2005. Gavin turned out to be a brilliant teacher, and we had a lot of fun together over the ensuing months. He took me to dinner at the Lotte buffet a few weeks ago, where we crammed all the steak, lamb and sushi we could into our mouths for forty smackers a piece. Here is a picture I took of him at a samgyupsal place in Haeundae. Check out the restaurant's emblem.

I will see Gavin again in January of 2007 when he returns to Atlanta to take a break.

I gained a little weight over the last few weeks as people bought me dinner, drinks and gave me candies and chocolates for parting gifts. I’m sad to say the ten pounds I lost by eating the Korean diet has been cut in half. I guess it’s fitting that I should put on a little weight before going to America, you know, to fit in.

When I stepped off of the plane in Detroit, a giant LCD screen showed George Bush addressing the nation, his voice booming through the airport. Westerners were everywhere. I felt small, alone and behind the times as I boarded the plane for Atlanta. When I got off the plane, my parents greeted me with cheers and open arms. It felt like a movie. My father and mother held me tightly, repeatedly telling me how good it was that I was home. I hugged them right back, glad to be home.

Atlanta is much like I left it, though now it sports the largest aquarium on the face of the planet Earth and the Braves are a lame, losing team for the first time since I was 12 years old. I only have a week to go before I step on another airplane and visit my friends Faith and Bernardo in Buenos Aires, Argentina for a couple of weeks. So stay tuned, I have more insights into the joys of international travel coming up in the next episode of SoKoNotes.

What? You thought the adventure was over with Korea? Good heavens, no!

In many ways, my life is just beginning. I have a photography business to build and get off the ground. I have to find a way to get Hyun-jeong into my country. I am not finished traveling. If anyone is interested, I can continue this blog for a long time to come.

Well, I've written enough. I'm tired. I'll write again in October when I get back from Argentina. Or I'll write from Argentina itself. Depends. Stay tuned! SoKoNotes will be right back!

Peace.

-Notes