On Saturday night, Rae’s dance company, Facing East Dance & Music performed at the Oakland Metro near Jack London Square. Accompanying Facing East was Jason Britton Dance Company, Courage Group, and musicians Jeff Chan and Vijay Anderson.

It’s been some time since I’ve seen Facing East perform. They have been working every week on choreography for their Angel Island Dance Project, opening this coming September. It’s hard to believe that half the year has already gone by. Where has all the time gone?

The lighting, albeit challenging, wasn’t the most difficult obstacle to overcome last night. What made it difficult was the fact that most of the dances were done in either silence or with very soft accompanying music. I often felt like I was a fraction of a second too late with a number of pieces. Still, there were a number of nice images that came out from the evening, a sampling of which is shown below.

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When I was a senior at Stanford, I don’t recall thinking about going to our Senior Ball. I don’t even remember where it was held! I do recall seeing Eric and his entourage on the night of the formal at the French House, but beyond that, it’s a blur.

This year, the graduating class of 2003 had their farewell formal at San Francisco’s City Hall. It was the night before the City’s famous Black and White Ball, and many of the parking spots around the area had signs warning of impending towing when the clock struck midnight. In front of City Hall, however, there were a few spots where towing would begin at 4:00 pm on Saturday afternoon. Fortunately, I found a space in one of those spots. Other people were not so lucky, and Javier had to inform people that their cars were being towed at midnight!

Given that I’ve been out of Stanford for several years now, I was surprised to recognize a few people at the event. I once drove Domi Le to a house concert at Eric’s some years back. I also saw someone from a recent photo shoot I did at the LGBT.

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Alex called me the other day, asking me if I knew how to save sound files from text-to-speech. Turns out, he was interested in getting his NetNewsWire headlines and descriptions converted into MP3 files that he could sync to his iPod. I had read some other people’s blogs about this very idea some time ago, and I remember thinking to myself that it would be trivial. After looking on Google, I was surprised to see that no one had come up with a good solution to this problem.

Fortunately, my experience developing various pieces to Soybo gave me the insight on how to write this application and how to write it quickly. So, over the last few days, we cranked out the product that we announce today, Read it to Me™!

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Last night, we had dinner at Lily’s house in Los Gatos. In between the main course and dessert, we went out of the house to see the lunar eclipse. The Earth’s shadow casted a reddish glow over the moon as it rose over the hills of Los Gatos. It was quite a site to see. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a long lens with me, so I was unable to get a photograph of it. We did have several binoculars and telescopes, which was helpful.

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The May 2003 COBA featured a presentation on concert and performance photography. Having just completed a three week tour with Vienna Teng, I was able to talk at length about the various tips, techniques, and equipment necessary for taking successful performance photographs. My typical kit consists of a variety of prime lenses (24, 50, 85), coupled with the excellent Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens. Yyou can’t beat the versatility and quality that these lenses afford.

The crowd was a little smaller than in previous months; it was nice, however, as the meeting felt more intimate, with a good set of questions and answers flowing around the room. We also had a brief show and tell presentation. Jean showed his fancy and powerful light meter, Karl demonstrated his angle view finder, clamp tool (when doing macro photography), and camera extender (for fine tuning the position of the camera when tripod-mounted). Chung demonstrated the Gripper, a sort of bracket for SLRs, and Steve showed off his tool for cleaning his sensor. Finally, I displayed my LED keychain light, which was indispensable during Vienna’s East Coast Tour. A number of people also showed this pen brush tool, useful for cleaning your lens of accumulated dust.

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Rae, Susan and I went to see eclipse: celebrations and funeral, a new performance piece by Harupin-Ha Butoh Dance Theatre. Koichi Tamano, the choreographer and artistic director for the dance company was introduced to Butoh 38 years ago by its founder, Tatsumi Hijikata. Eclipse was held at the SomArts Cultural Center on 934 Brannan Street in San Francisco.

The performance was certainly memorable and knowing the history of Butoh certainly helps me appreciate it more than your typical modern dance performance. As you can see below, I have a few photos from the evening, which I spent primarily in the form of a viewer, not a documenter. There was another photographer in the crowd with a D30 or a D60. His focus-assist lamp was going like crazy throughout the first half of the performance. Rae and Susan both thought that the flashing lights were part of the dance. Hah!

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