It was a privilege to walk Christo’s Floating Piers on the first day of the project. They are the ultimate sensorial experience: all about touch, vision, and whole body mobilization: it felt so light yet the day after everything feels sore.
A sublime event that created an unexpected shared community. Soft surface that responds to your feet, and really floats so you also have to adapt to its movement. Color that changes with light and time of the day. Knowing glances shared with people you’ve never met before.
By privileging walking, it felt just like pilgrimage, in all senses. And just like pilgrimage, that symbolic voyage, changes you in all ways.
Christo, besides all else, is an amazing human being.
Searching for Light 
Elle, I just love looking at your images. They are so beautiful and different, unique is the word that I am looking for. Honestly I feel so pedestrian after looking at your images. My work I mean. Wow, you are just so talented. We are leaving for Oregon tomorrow. I am studying with Mac Holbert for a week. He has agreed to take me on as a student for five days four hours a day, privately I will be studying with him one on one.He is credited with making the first digital print. He invented the clarity slider in Lightroom/ACR. He is in that small group of consultants that assisted the engineers at Adobe in developing Photoshop. His company is Nash Productions, he went into partnership with Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young a rather famous musical group in the 70’s and 80’s. He was that groups road manager for twenty years. Since the late 80’s Holbert has been making digital prints for museums all over the world. He is a really big deal and I feel quite fortunate to have him accept me as a student. He rarely teaches one on one. So I am excited and a bit apprehensive, I absolutely want to be perfect for this guy. So I plan on spending four to six hours a day after each class just practicing, over and over each step. We are going to start out as if I know nothing. So I will learn his methodology, decision making process in evaluation etc. My goal when I leave is that I will be able to teach exactly how Mac makes a print.
This is the first time in the seven years that I have been digital that I am excited about photoshop. Up until now I have always approached it like a duty or a necessary evil.
I think I told you I have a show at the San Francisco airport.in November. I am sure I have now that I think of it.
I went to LA and shot some more buildings. I also shot a cello concert by Anne Suda. I used the Fuji which is mercifully quiet and a new lens a 100mm-400mm with image stabilization. I was at the back wall of the auditorium and I have individual eyelashes at 100%. The images are really good. Clean black background as she was playing with just a pianist.
The next day we spent about three hours in her apartment photographing, for most of the time just her and her pianist for PR shots, but then I got a little less than an hour with her by herself. I was trying to do portraits for album covers or PR, I cannot say she appreciates what I am doing, not that she isn’t gracious, she just doesn’t understand the glamour part of the portraits that I am doing. Hopefully I will get another session with her in my studio this fall.
Anyway that is the entirety of it all. I have been dealing with a car dealership that is making me remember everything I hated about commercial photography. They have now asked for a bit of about a dozen images for their new showroom of my existing images. I know it will be an awful experience once I place the bid. At least I will still qualify for membership in our little group the Salon des Exclus. Arrgh!!! Joe