Late afternoon in the market

 

In Juliaca there are different types of market:

• There are the new malls where people likes to buy and walk with their children, I don’t like them because you need to wait in long queues and even worse for your privacy cashiers ask for your ID or cards
• There are the older markets as pictured in the photograph, this is called Santa Bárbara and I think it could be really ancient, I mean as several centuries long. In the highlands there aren’t fruits (remember we’re at more than 3800 meters/12000 feet) but the jungle is near so we eat fruits from the whole Peru and the jungle, the problem with these markets is that the sellers want you to be loyal to their stands and they can be a bit jealous if you buy from another person.
• The last type is my favorite, usually it’s in fairs with peasants or people from smaller cities as sellers, they have the products over a textile in the ground and they are indifferent to you until you ask or buy. Until then you’re comfortably invisible.

Once I posted big and super red apples, I bought them from one fair, probably in the market they could have cost a lot.

“Andromeda is not there,” said the blue waves…

 

This is a image based in a photography I took in Ilo city. Usually when I edit a photograph my goal is to mirror what I think I saw, sometimes a kind of red, or a silhouette, so although some are blurred, others dark, some others saturated or desaturated in the end they are what I saw in my mind. Instead this image is a modification of the colors I saw, because the ocean there is turquoise and the rocks are darker, but my intention was to create a composition using a photograph as a start point. So to me this is a digital composition based in a photograph and not a photograph in the proper sense of the term.

I know photographers would disagree, regularly I read some of them ranting “I hate to be called ‘digital artist’!,” (what makes me think that they don’t have much love for digital artists, lol) but, hey, I’m not photographer ;-)

Sad eyes

To start the week with optimism, lol. I’m loving Ektar 100, if I could go back to the past I would buy five instead of just one roll :P Although I could obtain just one and get the palette of colors to build a preset for my digital camera…

This lock was broken by my grandmother, I don’t know how, I guess the blacksmith work was of pitiful quality, and even worse this lock is a depraved one because likes to rip women’ clothes off.

Oceans of blue, Oceans of stars

so many stars

Yesterday I wrote about the stars in my city. Juliaca is at 3824 meters above sea level (12,549 ft.) and usually the sky is almost transparent. It’s so high than some tourists can suffer the thinner atmosphere with less oxygen. We evolved to this having bigger lungs and a higher account of red blood cells, so our cheeks are usually red. We know this thanks to the studies the famous dr. Huxley made in XIX century and that were commented by his friend, Darwin (I read it in his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex) When I am in the sea there are no stars so I like to live around the sea, to have an infinite to see.

dreamy twilight in the port

And this is the sea I like to see in the coast, I remember to have seen just a few stars a very few times.

Our society in the highlands, despite the high altitude, always had a tradition of sailors until today. So for example in the market they ask you to add some ingredients of the highland because we eat a bit different from the men of the coast. But that’s story for another post.

Let’s see the stars traveling the sky

Once I saw a terror movie, Warlock, a man from the middle ages in this time hunting a kind of wizard, in one scene the sky get full stars. I didn’t understand the extraordinary because that was our normal nocturnal sky; my older brother said me because in those cities, usually in the coast, they cannot see the stars. Every time I live in a coastal city I always see the sky and it’s quite oppressive to cannot see the stars I know should be there, as living in a kind of sphere. The sky in the photograph has a middle number of stars, in my home in the highlands the night seems to explode so as Bowman I want to say “It’s full of stars” XP.

A vast whiteness closing around the world

Since I was a kid, four years old, I always have seen strange and little people in the countryside; as always I’m just playing and running and suddenly appears this little sir or lady, I start to talk but then just see with their old eyes. Curiously that just happened when I was alone. Since then I almost think that citizens and peasants live in different worlds, they cannot see us or perhaps we exist in an inevitable way like the early star at twilight of the cloud traveling lazily across the blue. And to us they are like persons always walking the infinite landscape, staring to who knows what, like they were three hundred years old and still had eight thousand years more to contemplate the slow life in middle of the domesticated nature.

The frontier were our worlds collide and we actually talk is the market.

Santa Catalina – An adventure in color

Another tale of another princess in hope of a green prince

The photographs of today were made with a film camera, a Samsung ECX-1, and a roll of Kodak Ektar 100. There aren’t skilled laboratories around me so I had to take a photograph of the negative and invert it in a special program, because if you just invert it simple turn to a bluish image. It take a lot of time and it’s my first processed roll, I hope you find one of your taste.

Taking a sunbath in the patio while talking about old times

These photographs were shot inside the cloisters of Santa Catalina de Siena Monastery, a colonial small city for the aristocracy. It’s said it’s the biggest of the word but I cannot find references to confirm that data.

Blue bliss in the light blessing the stair

Among the several rolls of film Ektar 100 is the most saturated so ideal for colorful compositions. Santa Catalina is a place of walls, mostly reds and blues. as a religious building I think it success in transmit an idea of peaceful meditation.

A carpet made with a shadow, a wall made with trees, a sky made with red and a space in blue

The little city, with its streets and plazas is a touristic attraction. The monastery still works but in a smaller corner. You know, there are no much demand to be nun these days. In colonial times people to get influence used to send their children to the church and the military, so it was mostly a monastery for the aristocracy.

a beautiful photographer in fields of a blue poem

And I saw this woman with red hair contrasting as a flower against the blue sky; so I felt in the urgency of take her portrait for, err, academic purposes. And this beautiful girl was for coincidence my friend Melissa! you can follow her chronicles in melissainthemiddle across the world in a way not so touristic and instead more experiential.

My respects (j/k)

I took the obligatory selfie but in a more original (I hope) way, a shoelfie! XD

Mystic red

The whole city is built with ashlars of volcanic rock, painted with special paintings with eggs in the colors and with ship skin as a brush.

And one day the mankind simply vanished…

Butlers of blue uniforms and white shoes

Say “O” with me

There is no more food. Please, somebody help me :/

Chiaroscuro of savage with red skin and green crown

Three caravels navigating a blue ocean

I shot two horizontal photographs to stitch this and get away of limitations of format.

The forbidden city of the red walls

And well, there were some more photos but this publication is already longer so see you another day ;-)

geometric angel

At least I could finish to edit one roll of film -_- the photograph here in comparison is quite direct, it was shot with my already dead cell phone (it’s not a photograph turned to black and white by the way), it was strange the pattern of the hail in the roof, a kind of metallic butterfly. Perhaps is my imagination the one flying to far.

Tomorrow comes a post full of color ;-)

A signal from the hills

Once upon a time I was walking the countryside with a beautiful friend. She saw two subtle hills of the same size and pointing to them she told me “see, two breasts!” I laughed and as she knew my spicy imagination she expressed me her surprise because I didn’t think first that analogy. I didn’t know the reason neither. I reviewed mentally several images and I noticed that with those hills usually I title them with names as “two brothers” or “delicate waves across the ground of a sea of ichu”, but I didn’t think in anything erotic 😇, and if you dear reader are a male you know we cannot just stop to think with our erobrains, and if you’re a lady then you already know that our eyes have this double vision undressing you in one thousand and one nights of fantasies.

But I discovered the answer… in our culture hills are usually sacred, so we dance and pay to the earth with more solemnity there, we bond our mythic origins to specific hills, so for that reason I know understand why my names for compositions with hills have this aspect of almost reverence (but for other things my nasty vision works as usual :P 😈)

Sit down, I’ve many stories to tell…

Book review

I ended to read “Did You Read That Review?: A Compilation of Amazon’s Funniest Reviews”, you can found it here. Navigating the internet I read comments by internet trolls, the usual stuff, so one guy wrote that instead of deleting them moderators should just grouping them as Amazon did and sell them as a book. I couldn’t believe that could exists because I love to read comments and reviews, and if they are smart much more; one of my favorites Borges’ tales and fictional essays are those that are reviews of fictional books, as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” So I purchased the Kindle copy as just 1.49 bucks and I ended enjoying it a lot XD. Also I had read a lot of history and serious books so to balance (in my culture balance and symmetries are important) I needed something light. There are quite funny reviews as deep analysis of movies with Shaquille O’Neal, music by Hulk Hogan; reviews of watches and pens that cost thousands and thousands of dollars and articles like bananas slicers (haha, banana is one of the words in English I found so funny!!! How can you say it without laughing!?) And so on. I’ll do as usual my serious review, this time it will be a “review of reviews” XD

A spyware called Google

Speaking about Amazon, today I deleted every app in my tablet downloaded with the Google Play market and replaced by the same downloading it from the Amazon Appstore for Android. Every month it’s just harder to use Android because Google wants me to join Google Plus, and I don’t want anything if it’s forced to me. Before I used to comment actively reviewing my apps or commenting in Youtube, but that ended when they forced to have a Google plus account, I’m not against google but against force you to don’t have options and just do what they want you to do. Today I wanted to play some game but I couldn’t because there was an advice with a stuff similar to “this game needs google play games” and after that “you can have more advantages having a google plus account” and after several messages interrupting me that was the moment when the volcano of my head erupted in a lava of irritation so I just deleted them. Now to me Google is simply a spyware hard to get rid off my devices. If you have the same issues as me I suggest you to use Amazon, they don’t have the same number of apps for your android but at least you aren’t going to feel the heavy pressure of the hands of Google around your throat in search of get your data to share it in a world were some people lives to hurt you using that data.

First spring day

In the last story today starts the spring. It was a quite hot day! My time to eat ice-creams ended so know starts my season for hot teas and chocolates.