Churches and Jazz Society

Evelyn has drawing art classes on Thursday mornings, so I walked the 3 blocks to take in the week’s laundry. $3.58 for same-day wash & fold for all I can carry is such a deal that I don’t really want a washer/dryer in Cuenca! I decided to take a long route back home, exploring a part of the neighborhood I hadn’t seen before… and got nicely lost…  After about an hour I emerged back in Known Country near ChocoCream and decided to celebrate my salvation with a strawberry milkshake. 🙂

I then returned to the apartment, where I did some software development until 5:00, at which time I loaded up my cameras and headed to Park Calderon for some twilight photography of the churches near the park. Before coming, I had thought I might make a photo project of all 52 churches in Cuenca.  I have been here nearly a month and hadn’t even started yet.

As it turned out, such a project has a lot more problems than I expected.  For one thing, the churches are mostly big, and they are facing very narrow streets.  Even with my widest angle lens, I can’t really cover many of them.  For another, the weekly processions I keep hearing of seem to have no organized schedule that I can find. We just missed one last Sunday, discovering it only upon entering a church and seeing a sign announcing that it had been at 10:30 that morning (we saw the sign around 2PM).

Here are images from two churches from my first night photographing them.

At 7:00, we headed over to Nectar Cafe for another performance by The Jazz Society (we first saw them last Friday night).  This time I came equipped with two flashes plus radio triggers for them.  Last week I only had one on-camera flash, and was constantly blinding William — our neighbor that came with us, because I pointed the flash backwards to avoid the dreaded “flash shadows” from direct flash.  This time I positioned one of the flashes up on a shelf and the other in a corner on the floor.  That gave a workable amount of light to shoot the performers with.

Jim is the ring leader of The Jazz Society (click here for their facebook page), and plays the keyboard.  I gave him 4 prints from the set I shot last week, and he welcomed me to place my strobes and shoot all evening.  Jorge is the guitarist for the group, though he also played keyboard tonight.  I had emailed him those same images before tonight, and he graciously gave me a copy of excellent jazz CD self-titled Jorge Triana.  Unfortunately, it is neither on Amazon nor iTunes, but if you find a copy and enjoy jazz, grab a copy. I guarantee you will enjoy it!

Vivian is a vocalist from Nashville who joins in.  Tonight there were also two improvisational dancers joining the group.  Milena is a dance instructor at the local university, and Andre is one of her students.

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