Home again, off the road
Early today. Oak Mountain State Park, south of Birmingham.
We just got home tonight. Completed a nice project with art director Rich Albright of Luckie Advertising, for the Morgan Keegan firm. Environment portraits in Memphis, Birmingham, and Nashville. Shot stills for ads, and video for their site.
The frame above was early this morning, before the talent arrived. Fall is in the air.
Tutorial from my mother: Frying Okra, southern-style
I would not want my mother to read this, but she is getting to the age where I’m sorta feeling like it’s time to make a bunch of photos, and maybe even attempt some bad videos with this new Canon camera I got. So today, I drive up there, and I wanted to record this strange ritual of frying okra. I can remember as a kid, it was a big deal when the day would come to have okra. Okra might have gone along with fried balogna, or brown beans, and cornbread. I think, in the 60’s in Kentucky, the goal was to accumulate the most amount of Carbs onto your plate, with every single meal. Although, in the 60’s and 70’s, I’d never heard of the word Carbs, let alone known that it was a bad thing. All we knew, at that time, was that it tasted damn good. And we always wanted seconds.
Even today, as I sat there and ate the okra, I could feel my brain going into hyperspeed as I ate the oil, or whatever it was that the okra was cooked in. It was that feeling that you just KNEW you wanted more, but you’d barely even started on the first helping.
So, I present my mother, Margaret Tucker, demonstrating the proper technique of preparing that most excellent dish, Fried Okra. Like she says somewhere in the video: “Enjoy”.
(You might have to give it a second to load…)
I want to show you a giant Sunflower
A few days ago, I went into my new neighborhood organic grocery — you know the kind, with the weird vitamins, and the bulk food, and the water dispenser thing, and the tasteless cookies made from tree bark. So I grabbed my standard Chicken Salad sandwich, hippie chips, unsweetened tea, and I’m heading out the door, when, right in front of me, my jaw dropped. Lying on the counter was a gigantic mammoth sunflower blossom. It was huge — like twelve or fifteen inches across. It was so amazing looking, it didn’t even look like a flower, it looked like some kind of sea animal or something, that someone had mistakedly left on the counter. Like it was still alive and breathing. I stopped the counter lady, and asked it was real, and she confirmed it was. Today, I go back in there, and I asked the manager what happened the the sunflower mascot. He said a grower had brought it in, and they were gonna roast the seeds. I asked him to let me borrow it, to take it to my apartment to photograph it. He said sure.
So off I go, with a sea mammal under my arm. It smelled amazing, like some humid, moist limp animal. Took it home, wandered around the windows to try to find the right light for it. Here are two images — one straight on, that does not begin to show you how large it is, (should have put my head or hand next to it to show scale), and here’s another one, when I really got in there and worked with it intimately.
I feel like I don’t want to take it back to the store. I want to get a cage for it, and adopt it. Almost like it would come alive in the middle of the night, like in that Steve Martin movie. “Feed me!”
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