Organic Light Pan

In A Hole

Mother Earth ceases to amaze me with the visual allegories she serves up.  If we are in tune to seeing them we could find them everywhere.  On seeing these small pebbles trapped in these holes in Tafoni sandstone I thought how many of us feel like we are in a hole?  Overwhelmed by the state of affairs we find ourselves in, we feel trapped with no way to get out of the hole.  Unable to see over the rim of the hole that traps us we fail to realize that others are probably in a hole was well.

Navigating through life without falling into a hole or two is unheard of as the journey is riddled with them.  But like any trial that we endure in life, falling into a hole is not permanent, we will eventually climb out.

I am home today waiting for dinner.  I spent last night making pumpkin pie from scratch and was very proud of myself – it was the first time I ever made a pie.  This morning I finished the pumpkin puree by making two more pumpkin pies! 

Homemade Pumpkin Pie

Then I made a middle eastern rice stuffing that I grew up eating and stuffed a 15 lb turkey with it, and put it in the oven to roast.  I needed some whipping cream for the pies later tonight and headed over to my local Whole Foods market to buy a pint only to find they were completely sold out!  I then made a 10 mile trek to the next nearest Whole Foods to get my pint of organic cream.  Along the way I started to think.

This year the holiday season here in the United States begins with Thanksgiving as the holiday season for the Muslim world comes to its end with Eid al-Adha, or the Festival of Sacrifice, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  For me It will be five days of holiday starting with Thanksgiving and culminating with Eid.  And yet when thinking about these two holidays they seem so diametrically opposed, not in spirit but in practice.  In spirit Thanksgiving is about showing thanks for the blessings and bounty that we have.  I am sure originally thanks was given to God, but today I don’t know who exactly people thank.  Folks today in the U.S. believe in so many different things or in nothing at all that I have given up on trying to understand who thanks what anymore.  Growing up, Thanksgiving was always a strange holiday.  People cooked more food than they could possibly eat, then ate more then is healthy.  Someone, either a guest or neighbor, always consumed to much alcohol, became intoxicated and then spoiled the day with some boisterous diatribe about how the world was all wrong and he never got a fair shake.  The very act of giving thanks on that day seemed so contrived and disingenuous.  All the while there was the guy on the street corner, like today as I left Whole Foods, with a sign in his hand that read “hungry”. 

At the same time this year, 2 million humans converged on Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula, for the annual Islamic Pilgrimage. 

Mecca at Hajj

From all over the world and from every walk of life these people make a sacrifice to get there, and in some cases their entire life savings, and seek out forgiveness for the wrongs they committed in their life so far.  They sacrifice their time, leaving family behind in some cases, and make a trek into and through the desert for a glimmering hope of starting life a new without any mistakes to account for.  After 9 days of slogging through the desert these 2 million people make one more sacrifice.  They purchase an animal; lamb, goat, cow or camel, they have it slaughtered and the meat is given away to those hungry people in the world, wherever they might be.  The meat is processed there in Mecca, flash frozen and then distributed worldwide to those who need food.  After all the Eid that follows the pilgrimage is called the Festival of Sacrifice.  But all is not roses there during the Hajj.  There is wasted food, more waste than I think I have ever seen in my life when I made my Hajj 11 years ago.  Leftover food, half eaten loaves of bread, plastic bags filled with uneaten cooked rice and curry litter the pathways.  For a spectacle like no other where sacrifice and giving are the hallmark, it is utterly embarrasing and repugnant to see so much food discarded.  All the while beggars are every where asking for help.

Growing up in my home these two holidays were about feeding other people rather than feeding ourselves.  Each year my aunt calls me about a week or so before Eid and asks are you going to hold Eid this year?  What she means is – are you going to feed people?  This year she also asked if I and my family were going to spend Thanksgiving with her.  Like my dear departed mother, she has a obsession of generosity that is only placated by feeding people. 

It is said that it is always better to give than to receive.  Thankfulness for something given is expected.  Being thankful for the ability to give is another matter all together.  The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said ‘charity does not diminish wealth’.  What ever one gives out will return ten fold.  The ability to give to and sacrifice for others is deserving of thanks.  It is a state of well being that marks independence and fortune.  It pains me when those that have the ability to give hoard what they have for themselves and leave others to pine for what should be enjoyed by all.

This year my wife and I have the good fortune of hosting our extended family at our home for Thanksgiving.  It was a sacrifice for us as well as times are tough and we have had to tighten our belts a bit.  But the joy we feel in giving out, and receiving the blessings of family in our home is more than we could ever ask for.  This year, think about thanks and what you are thankful for and who you are thankful to for what you have and for what you have the ability to do.

Peace.

At some time in life everyone will have come across the feeling of being left out, alone, or not part of the “in crowd”.  As social creatures it is natural to want to be a member of a group.  Membership has it privileges but it also has its casualties.  What if the group you happen to fall into has a modus operandi that goes against your grain?  What if the group sees itself as perfect and everyone else full of fault?  What if following the group forces you to compromise your principles?  Where does that leave you?  Alone.

Outcast

Alone takes courage.  Alone requires fortitude.  Alone demands resolve and patience.  Above all, it is a station that is not for the faint of heart.  Difficulties abound in life no matter what buttrying to navigate it alone brings additional dangers.  Just like the stray lamb gets eaten by a wolf, our Enemy seeks out the person who is alone and confounds, deludes and consumes him.  Be careful, of finding yourself alone.  The outcast rarely will outlast.

Just some food for thought.

In a rut?  We have all been there.  Creatives find this state often and sometimes it is hard to get out of it and move on.  But it can happen to just about anyone for any reason.  Sometimes the trials of life are just relentless and can drive a spirit into a state of apathy making it feel like you are stuck and can’t move – almost paralyzed.

Stuck

Don’t let it get the best of you.  Relax and let it pass.  Focus on nothing, not even the “rut”, and you’ll find that it will pass.

Wednesday evening marked the beginning of the Hajj, the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca. The moon was stark, the sky was beautiful, and the air was bitterly cold. But when you do what you love, nothing can get in the way.

Dhul-Hjjah Begins

Good luck to all those making the Pilgrimage, may your scarifice be accepted and may you find what you seek.

At times, especially in the face of tribulation or calamity, we all find ourselves with feelings of incapacity.  The inability to do something or move forward with plans in spite of the desire to do so is frustrating.  At other times sloth or laziness is out ailment leaving us with the means to achieve a goal and not exhibiting the desire to do so brings on depression. 

Broken

In either case, something feels broken.  You can see where you want to be. You can see your goal ahead of you but you just can’t seem to reach it.  Its like standing on a path broken by a fissure that is too wide to cross on foot.

I have been feeling this way lately.  I know my goal, but I just can’t seem to achieve it.  At times I feel incapacity while at other times sloth.    My fissure is not totally impassable, it just requires additional effort and maybe some ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking to find a way across.

A few weeks ago I found myself immersed in light and form for about forty minutes where many of the feelings I had trouble expressing suddenly appeared to me among small pebbles and sandstone.  ‘Broken’ was the first and it has helped me pass over the fissure in my way.  I will share several more photographs from that evening in the days to come.

I would be interested in hearing if you ever found the answer in the sublimity of nature to a problem that puzzled you or hindered your progress.

Achieving excellence in my endeavours has always been a top priority for me. I could never bring myself to do work that was half way, and if I could not produce top rate results in what I was trying to do, I either worked harder at it or decided that my efforts could best be served doing something else. When I finished high school I was very fond of woodworking and making fine furniture. That was nearly 30 years ago, and I still have a fine birch table that I made in my senior year. I left high school seeking to work as a furniture maker. I ended up working that first summer in a factory that made rock-band speakers building the speaker cabinets production-line style. Not really my idea of fine woodworking. So at the end of that summer I signed up for community college, not exactly sure what I was going to do.

Oak Net

I spent the next 6 years working towards a bachelors degree in engineering. I quickly became obsessed with earning high marks in all my classes. Something that was new to me, as I was never driven academically in high school. I devoted those six years to my studies, from dawn to late into the night, sometimes putting in 20 hour-days for weeks on end. All my work was elegant, solutions to problems meticulously carried out step-by-step, with every problem in the texts solved. I went above and beyond what my professors asked for. I did not need to do this, but I was driven to produce only the best work. At times I hated that I worked so hard, but I could not bring myself to do anything less. In the end it was all worth it, graduating Summa Com Laude with a 3.94 GPA.  I was proud of what I had accomplished and it gave me the ranking that earned me the opportunity to attend Stanford University where I was given a research assistantship that paid for me to study there for another 6 years where I earned Doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering.  However, when I finally finished my studies and decided to enter into the corporate world, I quickly discovered that quality work was not as prized as it was in academia.  Cost was the driving factor and unreasonable deadlines usually drove the outcome.  That was a hard pill for me to swallow.

During those six years at Stanford I picked up photography as a hobby and then it too became an obsession and finally as my livelihood.  At first I was concerned with learning how to master exposure, which by the way only took about 8 years.  Then later working hard to master composition and further than that how to produce a photograph that would move some one’s heart the way mine was moved at the time I experienced that moment depicted in the photo I made.  I still struggle with that.  It has been a long and arduous journey learning how to do this.  Along the way I met with many brick walls that almost forced me to stop.  At times when I felt my work was not up to par, that it could not compete with the work of other photographers that I admired it was not hard to convince myself to just give up.  However something inside kept pushing me.  In school it was a level playing field, my work was compared to my peers and we were all learning.  But with my photography, I compared my work against that of the masters and it was falling short in a very serious way. 

Incense Cedar and Lichens

Now after 20 years of work, I no longer compare my work to the work of others, at least not in a superficial way.  I rank it by my own expectations and by the responses I receive by my patrons and admirers of my work.  If I find that a certain photograph can elicit a response from a viewer in such a manner as to indicate that their heart was moved how my was, then I know that I have been successful.  And if it further moves a person to actually purchase it for themselves, then I know I have achieved excellence in my work.

It has been a long and hard process getting to this point.  One that I would never want to trade in or change.  Five years ago I decided that I had enough experience under my belt, so to speak, that I could offer what I know to others through instruction.  I have had many students since that time.  One of the over-arching complaints my students have had when asked why they are seeking photographic instruction is that they can’t seem to make photos that represent what they “saw” at the time they made their photo.  I have found over the years that the majority of the time, the answer lied in technical proficiency, and in specific proficiency in making the “correct” photographic exposure.

Dogwood Carpet

One class will not bring the proficiency of making a photograph that captures what was seen at the moment it was made, and anyone promising that is lying to you.  What instruction will bring is a savings in time and effort by having someone tell you what mistakes to avoid based on years of experience.  This points the student in the right direction on the journey to making the photographs they want to make.  It will still take practice, lots of practice, and many mistakes will still be made but with an instructor concerned with the success of the student in mind, every mistake becomes a means for learning what to avoid without having to suffer the frustration of not knowing why that photo did not work out.

My instruction is step wise.  I first focus on the technical aspects of camera operation and how to expose a scene the way the student wants it to appear.  I emphasize the basics, the foundations of good photography, by learning how to control the camera manually rather than letting the camera control the student.  I instruct the student to see the camera as a tool in their image making and not as a constraint.  Once I feel the student has a good grasp of the technical, I then move on to the esoteric aspects of image making – the how and why of making a photograph speak for you.  It takes time, but I have seen great things come from the students  I have taught, and in turn they have seen their improve as well.

If learning how to make expressive photograph interests you, then consider one of my clinics, workshops or photo tours.  And if you find that my approach or offerings don’t interest you let me know and I can suggest several fine classes from other photographers that I admire.  Helping you improve in your work brings me great satisfaction, and it raises the bar of excellence a bit higher every time I can help someone improve.

For a listing of the clinics and workshops offered visit the Organic Light Photography Workshop Page, or Contact me for more information.

I wonder at times about the things in life that attract our attention while we don’t know why they attract us at the time. Sometimes its because of the beauty apparent in what we see. Other times its due to the ugliness. But most of the time its for no apparent reason.

However, as is often the case, understanding something usually occurs after encountering it.  Such was the case with the above photo titled ‘Stripped’.  A barren dead tree snag surrounded by lush green foliaged trees.  I guess what initially attracted me was the starkness of the bare tree.  How its bare branches contrasted against the green.  At the time it held no meaning for me and its graphic nature made me stop and something inside said ‘make a photo’.

Although now, finding myself unable to carry out my business as usual I feel somewhat stripped as well; left unprotected from the uncertainty of the future just like those bare branches are left unprotected from the harshness of the elements.  

Strange is the notion that having the ability to do something somehow imparts the sense of protection or control or stability from unfortunate future events.  Strange how losing a physical possesion effects the intangible spirit.  Strange how in-spite of being afforded every blessing in life from health to loved ones to our daily bread, we still feel bereft if we don’t have money.  How unfortunate it truly is that we attach happiness with monetary wealth.  Especially when we deal with fiat currency – paper has no true value in it – its only worth something as long as everyone believes it does.  Even if the currency was something that had intrinsic worth, like gold, it does not persist.  If we hoard our ‘money’ it is of no real benefit; we can’t eat it, we can’t wear it, it does not hug us or console us with soothing words when we hurt.  And if we do use it, then its gone.  Keep it or not, it cannot preserve us.  Eventually we will expire and leave it behind if it did not already leave us.

I suppose then that it is not the ability to earn ‘money’ that brings us happiness, but the endeavor behind that earning.  When we work as an employee we are paid a wage commensurate with the value of our service.  If what we do is important to others, then we are compensated by them accordingly.  If we work independently providing a service or product to others, we find satisfaction in what we sell when others buy it because we have facilitated ease or utility.  This then has value, and while intangible it still brings benefit to all involved.  Its just that in our age the compensation for our efforts is rewarded monetarily rather than by the transfer of necessities, such as food, clothing, shelter etc…

I photograph the world to share my joy in the beauty that I see.  It brings me great satisfaction when another person finds solace or elation when viewing one of my works.  If it was not a financial burden to produce them I probably would give them away for free, but alas they are not and so I do offer them for sale.  And since we do live in a time where our livelihood is obtained via currency, the photos I sell are also the means by which I provide for myself and my family.  Thus I think being stripped of my ability to bring beauty to others as well as seeking sustenance for myself and those that rely on me, has left me feeling how the tree in the above photo looks.  And until I have the means once again to bring the photos to the world, I have to rely on the world, albeit the virtual one, coming to me to enjoy and purchase one for themselves from this virtual store.

Take care and enjoy what remains of Autumn.

No More Words

I just wanted to remind everyone of the Fall Photo Sale that is going on right now. Due to the inability of bringing the photos to the public on a weekly basis at an art show, exhibit or other market place, I have set up an online gallery where the current inventory can be viewed and purchased for Immediate Delivery!

In addition, The prices in this sale are the same as those at any venue where the photos can be purchased in person.  What this means is that you are getting a discounted price – discounts range from 5% for the larger pieces all the way up to nearly 20% for the smaller pieces.  That is a substantial savings from the normal website prices.  But these prices won’t be available for ever on this site.  So don’t miss this opportunity to get some Organic Light into you life TODAY!

Autumn Meadow In Yosemite Valley

This Autumn and for the near future it will be difficult to exhibit at local art shows and markets due to not having a vehicle to pull the trailer that is used to transport the show equipment to the various locations.  To this end, I have set up an online gallery of all the photos that I have in my current inventory that would normally be seen at an art show. 

The prices in this gallery reflect those obtainable at an exhibit or art show which have always been lower than the website price.  They are also immediately deliverable with a wait time of only 3-5 days rather than the typical 1-2 week delivery time with a regular website purchase for an on-demand print job.  I will be uploading more photos in coming days as I have much more inventory and availability of current inventory will be reduced as sales occur.

To view the gallery Click on This Highlighted Link or on the Autumn Photo Sale link in the Right Sidebar.  I have also listed the last scheduled workshop for this year, Maples and Redwoods, October 23 – 26 as well as private photography instruction or photo tour. 

If there is an image that you particularly enjoy that you do not see in the sale gallery, or the image you like is not immediately available in the size you desire, then please visit the Organic Light Photography Website Gallery Page and place your order there and I will be more than happy to custom print, mat and send it to you.

I truly appreciate your consideration in helping keep Organic Light Photography a viable source of beauty and inspiration to all and the source of  livelihood for me and my family.

I Sincerely Thank You.

~ Youssef