The past week-plus, I felt like I was in the kitchen working on updating my web site. Much like how yesterday, many households were busy working in their homes preparing their annual Thanksgiving feast. Based on all the photos I viewed since yesterday, it seems that a whole lot of people figured out alternative ways to celebrate Thanksgiving with their families and friends amidst these Covid-19 pandemic times.
My virtual kitchen of a web site was a real mess. Like yesterday’s meal preparation, even if for a very small group in our Covid-bubble, I managed in my web site makeover, to pull out a cornucopia of virtual pots and pans and bowls and dishes, placing them on my desktop like a counter slopped over on Thanksgiving morning. Photo files here. Old writings over there. Video file. Logo files. Notes scratched with outlines revised and re-revised. And plenty of tabs opened like cookbooks or scraps of hand written recipes with instructions of how to put everything together. How many cups of what kind of milk go into the mashed potatoes? What file size am I limited to to upload that file and why will it keep not uploading? All the while, looking for those ingredients that I was sure I had in my space drawer of an archive system. Where is that jar of lemon pepper? Where did that button that allows me to tag the blog categories go?
When we try to pull things together for others to experience, we are faced with our own challenges. Okay, let me be more real and speak for myself. When I try to pull things together for others to experience, I am faced with my own challenges.
This will continue to be my goal as I reconstruct my web site. I’ll be moving on to creating the Photo Gallery section of the site, now that I accomplished migrating 49 existing blog entries over for the past couple weeks. I probably should even be telling everyone I’m doing this work and just wait until the meal is fully prepped and ready to serve. But just like preparing a a meal for a group, I’ve always enjoyed sharing the process, even as messy as it may be. Maybe that’s because the work is never actually done.
Perhaps it’s because, when others are a part of the process of making who we are and what we create, they are a part of end product of what we are and what we create.
About this image: This photo was taken at a high school a couple hours south of Nairobi, Kenya in February 2020. After touring the school and taking a number of photos of students in classrooms for Friends of Ngong Road, we trekked down to an outside dining area near the school dormitories. Here, the students lined up for morning tea. I was fortunate to be able to go inside the building to photograph the staff serving the tea that was prepared in one of the hot kettles, where raw vegetables were also cooking for the later in the day’s meals. I was struck by the heat inside this steel shed. Not only did the steam make me feel like I’d just walked into a sauna, but the smoke from the wood fired stoves seared my eyes. I could hardly keep my eyes open from the smoke and they watered so profusely that I could barely keep focused through the camera viewfinder. I was just hoping I was getting the shot in focus. I shot at f/13 to try to gain as much multilayered depth and capture not only the steam but also retain enough data to manage the bright light coming from the outside.