thank goodness for president's day and the fact that it's the monday following the lunar ny week-end is an extra blessing. i was working through the week-end to get a slideshow out to a couple that i shot late last december. i hope they like it. i will share it later once they have a chance to see it.
so it was only last week-end that i attended the
david jay photojournalism workshop at brooks institude of photography in santa barbara. boy that was a mouthful. this week-end i applied everything i learned from
dj to roll the slideshow project out in record time. needless to say, it was time well spent for me and i got to meet some real cool peeps. i don't do endorsements, but dj has my vote of approval ;)
alright, what about tet / lunar ny? i was so darn focus on getting projects out that i thought about skipping out on the festivities all together, but luckily, i reached a milestone sunday morning around 3 am that allowed me to sleep in until 10 am, waked up, worked some more, and hit the street of
little saigon looking for fireworks and dralion performances around noon.
i have been trying to avoid driving through downtown these past couple of weeks, knowing traffic would be snarled up, because vnmese take their tet seriously, but on this morning, i went down town looking for action ;) and boy did i find some.
once i find parking and walked 1/2 a mile to where i wanted to go, i ran into some serious traffic, foot traffic.
oh the humanity of it. what are all these people doing here? they don't seem to be trying to go anywhere. hmmm...and then i found out.
apparently makeshift games of
bau cua ca cop, which is identical the game
chuck-a-luck, have sprouted out of no where in front of shops, spilling onto parking lots, with players making bets and on-lookers cheering them on, a spectacle and quite surreal at the same time.
cool...
firecrackers went off sporatically accenting the festive scene, reminding me i needed to be looking for dralion performances. once i negotiated past the crowd to the main parking lot at the front entrance of the asian garden mall i had this empty feeling that i had missed the dralion performance. there was a small stage in one corner of the mall entrance with a vnmese folk-singer crooning away; sweet, but not quite on a par with a dralion performance.
wait, i saw a young dralion performer out-of-uniform running across the parking lot to meet more buddy dralion performers out-of-uniform. i caught up with one and asked when they will be performing.
"oh sorry, we just finished" was his replied. "where are you guys going next?" i asked. "first & harbor."
arghhhh...early birds get the worm. late birds get none i see ;(
i dropped my head, aimlessly playing with the on-off control of my camera slung over my right shoulder.
wait again, what's that across the street way in the distance? i focused on these gold and red objects that appeared to bob up and down, visible above the cars. oh my goodness, i think they are dralions ;)
and the rest of the story as it goes, is in the photos. 5 dralions in all, and i caught the performance from start to finish.
chúc mừng năm mớ...gung hay fat choy...happy lunar ny...cheers!!!
as usual there were a lot of food, but food under incandescent light don't usually look very good so i forego the food blogging attempt altogether to save myself the frustration of post processing so i can sleep a little sooner later.
on post-processing, as i was flipping through the photos, i noticed how the consecutively shot photos of eric playing the piano would fit well in a slideshow.
