Thomas Bowar Photography

On Thursday, I had the privilege of helping a friend with a first ever exhibition of his photography. Bob Cunningham has done commercial, wedding and portrait photography for 40-some years. For the last 8 or 9 years, we’ve done many projects and weddings together.

As we were getting ready for the exhibit a few days before, I think we both thought of this as a nice marketing tool to get some more exposure for Bob’s artistic work.

But as the evening went on, I realized that this was more than a marketing opportunity for Bob; this was a chance for his friends and family see a body of creative work that has come from a lifetime of passion for his art.

Many of Bob’s friends who came had not seen most of this work. I stood next to someone while watching the slideshow of Bob’s pictures, and heard this person repeatedly gasp and say “look at that!” Even one of his sons who came said that there was a lot of work that he had not seen before. It was gratifying to see the recognition Bob received.

I’m glad to be able to work side by side with this artist and call him my friend. Congratulations on the great show Bob!

Click on the picture above to see more pictures from the exhibition.

Click on Bob’s website and Flickr site links on the right to see Bob’s work.

Hey folks, long time since I’ve posted here, but I want to let you know about a few things.

First, I am launching a new campaign to stir up a little business. I will be pushing myself to shoot more weddings, both individually and in partnership with Bob Cunningham.

So, to start with, I am offering a $50 referral fee to anyone who refers a couple to me, when they book a wedding with me!

Second, I will be posting here more often, as well as other places. It’s been too long, but I’m just about finished formulating how I can do this more efficiently, so I can do it without spending so much time as it used to take me. More to come on that later.

Third, look for other changes to my web site, as well as Bob’s. Gotta keep this site more dynamic and fresh.

Tuesday, I arrived in San Francisco with my lovely wife to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. 25 years! It has been such a great life together!

So naturally, I brought my camera, and my eternally patient wife is willing to not only put up with my desire to capture the world in pictures, she is even willing to bend our schedule here a little around picturesque locations to photograph. (Of course, they’re everywhere around here.)

So here is a little of what we’ve seen so far:
On our way out of the airport

We’re staying in a hotel in San Bruno, a nice short drive from San Francisco, not far from the Bay. After a little rest at the hotel, we drove over the hills to Half Moon Bay, where we had a nice dinner. Saw some surfers on the way there, just after sunset:

We found a nice little brew pub called Half Moon Bay Brewing Company:

We watched the glow on the horizon slowly disappear as we ate:

More later.

After hemming and hawing for the last 3 or 4 years about my web site, and specifically how ugly it was, I was inspired by a DJ I met to get a nice flash template for my web site. I don’t know why this seemed so difficult before.

In any case, it’s up and running. Not finished (it should never be finished), but a good start.

I hope you enjoy it: Thomas Bowar Photography.

In my last post I talked about being in Romania, but neglected to mention why I was there. I work for a large radio equipment manufacturer and I was in Romania to teach a class on one of our products to a customer.

One thing that was obvious in Bucharest was that they have not kept control over the use of billboards (or worse: huge banners). In every large intersection, there are gigantic banners hanging on the sides of building facing the plaza, and often billboards and even giant screen televisions, advertising many different products. It is quite an eyesore to someone like me who would rather see the architecture. But this is a country in the process of learning how to have a free market economy.

The American capitalism influence is heavy here. Many of the products are American, and in fact some of the advertising is in English.

There is quite a mix of cultures here. While I’m sure that outside of the big cities it is still pretty pure Romanian, in the city it is a mix of English, German, Romanian, and probably other languages I’m not familiar with.

Here’s a funny sign I saw while walking down the street (so close to the equivalent American sign):

It is nice to see (and hear) that Romanians still cherish Christmas customs. Everywhere I went, I heard "Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!". Not like the politically correct Happy Holidays I hear so much in the US now.

There were a wide range of decorations all around, much of it very simple, like a string of lights snaking around the front of a building, or hung in a tree. In the hotel (Howard Johnson’s, an American chain), I heard American Christmas carols all week.

On Thursday, when I had some time to walk around the city, I came upon a museum that I think they call the Museum of Villages. They happened to have an exhibit of Romanian photojournalist’s work, so I went right in. What perfect timing! It was a great glimpse into the country and recent history.

Outside the museum they were setting up for a Christmas program that would happen that night. Every year they have choirs of children singing Christmas songs and (I think) dancing.

A last note about my walkabout: While walking back to the hotel, I decided to stop at McDonalds, both to have a little connection to America and to see how they do a McDonalds in Romania.

Other than the name change on the sandwich, I didn’t notice any difference from the McDonalds down the street from home or office in Minnesota. But it was so busy that there was almost nowhere to sit inside (note the people willing to sit outside in the cold December air - about freezing, 0 C, 32 F). So when I found a table, another man asked if he could sit at my table a couple of minutes later. I decided that rather than sit there awkwardly not looking at each other and not talking for the next 10 minutes, I should ask him if he spoke English. To my delight he did, so for the rest of my meal (and a few minutes more) we talked about Romania, the recent history, the revolution of 1989, the changes since then.

He asked where in the US I lived, I asked what he did for a living (manager at a concrete plant). He said he did not like the city, that it was very different from the smaller villages of Romania. He said they are losing much of the old culture and traditions in the city.

All in all, I found the Romanian people to be a little shy, but very nice. Several times when I wanted to buy something but the clerk didn’t speak English, someone would step up and translate for me. At one point I dropped my cell phone, and a man immediately picked it up and followed me a few steps to give it back to me.

I’ll be going back in January to do a second product training class, with a stop in the UK on the way back for another class. That should yield some more interesting pictures, and hopefully even more interesting conversations.

One last picture, shot in the terminal in Munich on my way to Bucharest.

It’s been awhile, but I have some interesting things to post.

I’ll start with this: I’m in Romania. My first trip to Europe, or anywhere overseas for that matter, has brought me to a country with a fascinating history.

In the years following World War II, Romania was under communist control as was much of eastern Europe. In the last 25 years of that control up until 1989, the country was run a one of the most despicable dictators of the post war era, Nicolae Ceauşescu. As I walked the streets of Bucharest this morning, I saw memorials to the revolution in December of 1989 that overthrew this dictator.

Afterwards I realized that this week is exactly the 18th anniversary of the revolution. It began in a western city called Timişoara and spread to Bucharest, the capital. Within a few days, the dictator and his wife were arrested, tried and convicted. They were executed on Christmas Day.

As I walked along one of the main streets in Bucharest, the first thing I saw were many street vendors selling Christmas presents.

The buildings here are mostly old architecture, much of it from the Communist era. Grey, dull, but there are changes in the works. Romania has had a rapidly improving economy since 2000. There is a lot of new construction, and since Romania joined the European Union on the first of the year 2007, there expectations of even more improvement. One of the drivers of the cars that took me to work at the office here told me that people had hoped that there would be better wages with the country joining the EU, but there has been nothing so far. But he still expects that things will eventually change.

The view from my hotel room (with reflections from curtains):

And from the street:

More architecture and view from the streets:

One problem that Bucharest has to contend with is the traffic. I have seen bad traffic in Mexico City, and I imagine many other large cities have it too, but the drivers in Bucharest are both out of control and amazing. In the large intersections, it’s as if there are no traffic laws. Drivers go any which way (keeping an approximation of staying to the right) to get where they want to go. Because the traffic is basically stopped most of the time, at the large intersections where they have a round area in the middle with some kind of statue or memorial with several streets coming in from different directions, the drivers will try to cut straight across several lanes of traffic, weaving in between the stopped cars to get to the other side, so they can go in from one street and out another street on the other side of the plaza.

Most of these intersections or plazas are controlled by traffic police, but even they seem almost helpless to control so much bad driving. I once saw a whole flow of traffic that made a right turn at a stopped intersection, so that they could all go half a block and then make a U turn to merge into the traffic going the other direction, rather than wait to make a left turn.

The amazing part is that even with all the cars doing a pseudo push and shove through the intersections, every car struggling for a better position by a few inches, I never saw an accident. Not even a scratch. Many times the car I was riding in was only inches from the cars next to us, but no one actually touched. My driver would sometimes whiz past cars a foot on either side of us at 20 miles per hour without slowing down. I guess you get used to it.

Typical daytime traffic, it gets much worse during evening rush hour:

Although the office where I was working was away from downtown, the traffic was horrendous going back to downtown at night compared to going to the office in the morning. This has to be due to the number of people who live in apartments downtown. One morning it took 15 minutes to get there; that evening it took and hour and a half to get back to the hotel. Most of the time we were sitting still in the car.

I have to get on a plane in a few hours to go home, so I will post more when I get home.

We’ve all heard about progress in modern medicine over the years. Advances in medicine have come at an astounding rate in my lifetime. But until last week, this was mostly academic for me.

Last week on Friday I had surgery that had been planned for months. In January, I came down with an infection in my colon (large intestine) called diverticulitis. It manifested itself in the form of a pain in my abdomen.

After a couple bouts with the infection and three rounds of antibiotics to completely get rid of it, I consulted our local well known surgeon, Dr. John Carlson. I was hoping to avoid surgery, but talking to Dr. Carlson, I was pretty easily convinced.

I remember the statistics like it was yesterday. If a person gets diverticulitis once, they are 32% likely to get it again. After they’ve had it twice, they are 85% likely to get it again. More than twice, it’s almost a sure thing.

So I scheduled surgery. I wanted to be sure that I would not miss a wedding at the end of September (Nathan and Genevieve’s) due to the long recovery, so it was scheduled for October. The best open date was October 26.

This brings me to the point of this long post. The surgery is formally called a colon resection. What it means is that they would remove the section of colon that is diseased, then sew the two ends together. Dr. Carlson explained to me that the surgery could be done in the conventional manner: long incision, working on everything with conventional tools, then sew it all back together. This requires a long painful recovery, especially with a guy my size. (I’m a very big guy, but getting smaller since the surgery…)

Or he could do laparoscopic surgery, which means they do the surgery with instruments that fit through small incisions using a tiny camera guiding what they do. They literally watch what they are doing on a TV or computer monitor, I’m not sure which. The result is that the largest incision they have to make is one where they remove the bad part of the colon. And my recovery time and pain are decreased dramatically. When I heard this, I started asking people to pray specifically for this.

You see, Dr. Carlson wasn’t sure which type of surgery he would be able to do. He would try to use the laparoscopic method, but if that didn’t work because of my weight, they would have to do it using the conventional method.

When I woke up, I found out that they were able to use the laparoscopic method, and also that the disease had been worse than they thought. (They had done an x-ray in June, and it showed most, but not all of the problem.) But the surgery was completely successful. So I was grateful that I didn’t chicken out just because I felt OK before the surgery. I knew the facts, and trusted that God had given me a wise doctor.

After a week, I’m still not feeling great, still regaining strength, etc. But the pain from the incisions is almost non-existent, except if I cough. I could take a shower after 2 days, and didn’t even have external stitches (they used tape).

I think the most interesting part came on Monday before I left the hospital that evening, when Dr. Carlson came to check up on me. We chatted for a minute about how well I was doing with the incisions, then he just exclaims “I love my job.” With all of the medical advances, it’s always exciting and gratifying for him. He pointed out that he has a brother-in-law retiring as a doctor, and he can’t imagine doing that yet, because he can’t think of anything he could do in retirement that he would enjoy as much as what he does right now. That must be why he is one of the most respected doctors I know.

Thanks everyone for all of your prayers, and keep praying for a fast recovery!

I ran across this video at one of my favorite photography sites, Strobist.

What a great way of showing that they can both acknowledge mistakes and go forward with technology! For years Kodak was THE photography company. They made cameras, film and the chemical process to develop and print the pictures we produced. They were the premier film, chemical and print paper manufacturers in the world. Most professionals would not use anything else. When I got into photography, I was like everyone else in America. I started out with a Kodak Instamatic 134 camera as a kid.When I was in high school I took a photography class, learned how to shoot pictures with a 35mm camera using Kodak Plus-X and Tri-X black and white film, developed that film with Kodak D-76 developer, stop bath and fixer, then printed the pictures on Kodak paper developed with Kodak Dektol developer, stop bath and fixer. Everything but the camera was Kodak.When I shot my pictures in my early years I usually used Kodacolor negative print film, but I began to love landscape photography. What I didn’t know in those early years was what most professional photographers did know: To get great color for those landscape shots, I should be using slide film. But not the standard Ektachrome that used a relatively simple E6 development process, but rather the more expensive but richly colored Kodachrome.

Kodachrome was known for not only rich true to life colors but it’s archival qualities. It was the main film used by National Geographic photographers for color photography when I was reading it back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Paul Simon even wrote a song about it.

In the late 70s, things began to change. Fujifilm, a Japanese photographic film and equipment company came up with a new film that had brighter and more saturated colors than Kodachrome, called Velvia. This new film had very fine grain and the colors, although too saturated for some subjects like people, were perfect for landscape and nature photos because of the deeply saturated reproduction of greens and reds. National Geographic photographers (as well as the growing numbers of pro and amateur nature photographers) began to turn to Fuji for there film. Fuji also made their own commercial print processing equipment, chemicals, paper, etc. Kodak had a major rival.

In the 90s digital photography became a viable consumer option. By the turn of the century, photography was turned on it’s head. Film photographers were oftem caught by surprise and it seemed Kodak was too. I think that many thought this transition to digital was going to be a long slow process. But it happened almost overnight.

I remember thinking at some point that I would really like to set up a darkroom in the basement, but I just didn’t have the time or money to make it all happen, although I did buy some chemicals and tanks for developing black and white film. But then I went from trying to decide what film camera or accessories to buy to virtually dumping all of my film equipment for digital in just a few short months. As soon as I saw the potential for digital, I not only bought a digital camera, but I started a part time business, because I knew that for the first time I could shoot on speculation and make money.

I thought Kodak would go out of business, being seemingly caught by surprise. But this video is a nice testament to their resolve to stick around.

I miss the good old days of film sometimes. There was something nice about the simplicity of a totally manual film camera. You loaded the film, set the camera according to your knowledge of understanding of light and exposure (and the light meter), and exposed that one frame of film. Wind the film, and you’re ready for the next exposure. I liked the tactile feedback, the organic nature of it. Ah, the good old days.

This week, the US News and World Report published the usual weekly editorial column by Mortimer Zuckerman, editor-in-chief: Column link

It was a great column about a topic that many in the media shy away from: How government policies have supported the demise of regular two parent families. Or, more specifically, how welfare and social security policies have not helped support marriage and 2 parent families. The numbers are scary, but it isn’t like this hasn’t been happening for many years. It’s just that as it gradually happens around us, we tend to ignore the alarming statistics.

So we had a nice time over the weekend. We saw a couple more things in Grand Marais…

before we took a drive down the shore…

and up into the hills where it was foggy.

We stopped at the Bluefin Grill, where we had a great Walleye dinner.

Sunday morning we left for home, but stopped in Two Harbors for church and brunch. We had a little time before church, so we explored Two Harbors a bit.

Before we headed home, we stopped in Duluth to see if any ships would be coming or going. After 45 minutes of wandering through a gift shop and stopping for coffee, we came out just in time to see a thunderstorm heading in fast. We quickly walked over to the canal to see the American Fortitude as it was heading out.

By the time I shot this picture, the rain was starting to come down. Fortunately, I had advised my sweet wife with no raincoat or umbrella to head back to the car, because by the time I had walked the one minute walk back to the car it was pouring. We headed out of town, but did not even reach the top of the hill on the way out of Duluth when the sun came out while it was still raining, and then everything cleared up. Nice end to the weekend.