I just did a workshop at the Salton Sea with National Geographic photographer Gerd Ludwig as part of the Palm Springs Photo Festival. It was quick – we spent a day getting prepped (having our portfolios roasted, talking about technique and looking at images), two days shooting in the desert, and the last morning editing and presenting our images. The days on location were long – up at 3:30am, back after 9pm – catching both sunrise and sunset – and in between still trying to catch as much of the festival as possible. The experience was incredible. Gerd and Brandon, his assistant, put in hours well beyond what we’d signed up for, making sure we made some kind of progress in the way we see, document, and tell stories about the world. Instruction filled every minute of the day from the ride in the car to conversation over breakfast burritos, and by the end of the workshop, my brain was swimming in an ocean of new rules and ways of looking at spaces, light, and storytelling.

The first day in the field we went to Salton City at dawn and explored what looked like a city whose inhabitants had simply one day forgotten to return home. Piles of clothes and forgotten dish-ware lay strewn on floors amidst broken panes of window glass, suitcases, and spare tires. Furniture expelling stuffing perched awkwardly atop mounds of singed rubble, and dead fish lined the shores of somewhat odoriferous waters. Every time I stopped shooting and looked up, there was Gerd waiting to tool through what I’d shot helping me see what I’d missed and sending me back to do it better… or at least maybe just suck a little less.

On the second day, we were instructed to approach people in Slab City or Niland (small towns on the south end of the sea) and try to get into their homes to shoot a quick story of the way they live. I ended up in a golf cart with a drunk for three hours getting a tour of the trailer park and meeting the townspeople. I got invited to join them for the easter egg shootout and also for dinner, both of which I had to politely decline.  Everyone I stopped to speak with was more than happy to share their stories and show me their lives.

Returning back from the second day’s shoot as Gerd looked through my camera I got nearly an hour’s personal lesson on finding the shot and working towards a stronger image. I started learning ways to play with the light using a color-temperature flash, and ways of creating situations in which the images present themselves, but mostly I learned that there seems to be a fathomless pit of understanding imagery that I have yet to even scratch the surface of. I can’t quite decide if I’m more scared shitless or super excited, but in any event, here is the expanded set of images I took in the two days. The more carefully edited set of 11 is on my homepage [here], and images of the workshop itself taken by Bob McNeely are on La Lettre [here].  Most exciting week of my life to date I’m pretty sure.

These are ordered (badly) the way I would have done it before having learned anything this week. They are ordered properly in the final edit: kspill.com/salton-sea.

Given the number of times I’ve read The Little Prince I thought it only fair to make my way down to the Sahara to see if perhaps I might encounter an elephant inside a boa constrictor or at very least a fox to tame.  While I didn’t find either of those, I did come across a well that looked fitting enough, but sadly the Little Prince never appeared.  I don’t know what it is about deserts, but I always enjoy them.  So silent it makes your ears ring, and the sun casts eerie shadows as it slips behind the dunes.  As the heat of the day abates, the warmth lingers on the sand even once the air has cooled.

Getting to Fez involved a ferry from Fethyie to Rhodes, a day wandering around the old city and Greek waterfront, a bus to the airport, a flight from Greece to Italy, a night on the floor of the Bologna airport, and a dawn flight from Italy to Morocco.  On the upside this meant that I got to have Turkish cheese/olive/cucumber/tomato breakfast, Greek yogurt and honey lunch, Italian espresso and croissant, and Moroccan corn bread all in the same day!  In Fez I was couch surfing with the wonderful Soukina and her family, so for a few days I go to hang out learning to cook cous cous with her aunts and go exploring the local way.  Arriving in Morocco was a pleasant change because they speak French as well as Arabic, so for the first time since leaving Europe I was able to communicate in the local language.  We sat around drinking tea in one of her uncles’ shops for hours at the end of which they started cooking up tagine on a gas tank out back and I got to roll meatballs and help make sauce!  Every time we returned to her home (which was shared with nearly a dozen people) something delicous was wafting out of the kitchen and her niece would come running out to say hello.  In the four days I was there I did make it out to Meknès (briefly) and wandered through the medina to see the tannery baths (filled with pigeon droppings to curb the smell of the hides), but for the most part I hung out with the family and a few of her friends, helped in the kitchen and played with a three year old.

It would be possible to spend months and months puttering around the Turkish coast exploring rocky beaches and waters glittering sapphire in the noonday sun.  A good portion of the coast throngs with fat white tourists, but in the parts that are a little harder to get to, traditional life goes on, families sit on ancient doorsteps and fishermen pull in the night’s meal.  I enjoyed glasses of fabulous Turkish wine at sundown and breakfasts of cheese and sliced tomatoes and cucumbers overlooking seaside mosques with a gentle salty breeze carrying with it the sound of the surf.  The only problem was, that by the time I got here I was starting to get tired.  Seven months of travel and twelve countries later, everything was starting to blur together, and the lazy holiday pace of this delightfully first world country seemed like cheating.  Buses run on time, hotels are clean and signs are posted in convenient places.  Idyllic really, but it felt like I’d gotten trapped in paradise.  I stopped in Kaş and Ayvalık then Fethyie/Butterfly Valley where I slept under the stars on a hidden beach between soaring cliffs and hiked up to rinse off in a waterfall.  I kayaked around sunken cities and drank far too many Turkish coffees.  A few days were well spent here floating around the Mediterranean before taking the hydrofoil to Rhodes (Greece) to catch my onward flight.

In the middle of the Western side of Turkey, there’s a hot spring that has deposited brilliant white travertine terraces and pools, calcium dripping over ledges and piling up like snowbanks.  The ancient city of Hierapolis once sat above the spring, and you can still wander through the ruins.  They thought the hot springs would cure the sick, but given the immense number of tombs, clearly it didn’t quite work as well as they had hoped.  The water in the pools is warm at the top, and all down the backside are pools that have been emptied to let the sun bleach them white again (apparently they alternately drain one side then the other to keep it looking spiffy).  There’s not a lot else in the town, but it’s pretty cool to walk up the brilliant white slope with bubbly white formations looking like something out of a Disneyland ride.

I ended up heading back up to Istanbul for Hande and Arda’s openings.  Both having just been signed to galleries, Hande had sculptures up at ArtBeat Istanbul and Arda at Pop Art Extended during fashion week.  I had an amazing time sitting around having drinks with their friends and dressing up all fancy for the openings.  They all welcomed me as if I’d always been a part of their group and for the week it felt like home.

Atop an inactive volcanic site have grown fields and fields of phallic boulders.  Twisting valleys lined with ripe apples, grapes, blackberries and pears proffer eerie moonscape trekking sites where cliffs carved up into Flintstone-esque cave castles wait to be explored.  Some of the cave sites are several stories high with little passageways leading to secret rooms and worn staircases that pop out onto landings at dizzying heights.  As if all the above-ground terrain wasn’t enough, several underground cities lead as many as eight stories into the earth, mazes of dwellings, churches and wine cellars that once provided protected housing for the Byzantines.  I wandered up one of the valleys exploring hidden caves and plucking fruit along the way, crossing paths only with a few German hikers (and their nordic trekking poles) the entire day.  Try as I did to admire the landscape like a grown-up, giant phalluses standing erect, glowing brightly in the sunlight like a menu of shapes to chose from made me laugh and laugh.  It felt like I’d gotten stuck in a dirty comic book or the doodles in the margin of some middle school boy’s math homework.  While I was in Cappadocia I also went to see the Whirling Dervishes.  This time the experience was quite different from the Sufi dancing I’d seen in Cairo.  This ceremony was much more reverent, much less for the audience.  Most of the time I felt sort of uncomfortable for being there.  It felt like I was intruding on a personal ecstatic experience.  No cameras were permitted inside, and even if they had been, it would have been inappropriate to record the event.  After it was over, still slightly dazed by the experience, the hotel driver asked if I wouldn’t mind waiting for the “Turkish Nights” folks to finish, I said I didn’t mind, so we went and watched some crazy touristy dancing that culminated in an old-folks dance party.  The people from our hostel busted out on the dance floor when YMCA started playing, and a rather large Frenchmen tried to drunkenly swing dance with me to some hits of the 80s.  If ridiculously silly, it was well worth the laugh, and somehow between the driver and the workers there, a dinner that I most certainly did not pay for arrived in front of me – all five courses in thirty minutes!

The night bus from Plovdiv dropped me in Istanbul in the wee hours of the morning, which meant that I got to the ferry dock at dawn; well before service began; so I sat watching sunrise over the iconic Istanbul skyline, listening to a pleasant singsong call to prayer.  I like how different call to prayer sounds in each country.  I got super lucky and found myself couch surfing with some very cool artists.  They walked me all over the city showing me the sites to explore and introducing me to the best baklava in the world.  In the evenings they cooked feasts of fabulous Turkish food and we hung out sipping wine and raki with friends.  Istanbul is a fabulous city.  The food is delicious, the outdoor markets sell fresh produce and fish (and bread and everything else), and the whole area breathes a cool creative vibe.  On the Asian (less touristy) side where I spent most of my time, cafés line the streets and the waterfront, and a walking path stretches something like 20km up and down the Bosphorus.  At night we walked for a while along the water where we bumped into some friends of Hande and Arda’s, and suddenly we found ourselves sharing a drink and a laugh looking out over the moon’s reflection in the water with the dull thud of an open air nightclub in the distance.  I could live in Istanbul.  As I waited for my night bus down to Cappadocia, a dance party broke out in the bus terminal parking lot.  Instruments appeared from nowhere, and the crowd formed pulsating circles blocking the passage of incoming bus traffic.  Pretty soon there were firecrackers and members of the crowd were getting tossed skyward.  I have no idea what they were celebrating, possibly nothing at all, but the energy of the evening stayed with me throughout the bus ride.

Bulgaria hadn’t been on the itinerary until a bit later, but it turned out my friend Georgi was in Plovdiv visiting his family, so I rerouted a bit to go say hello.  Arriving from the craziness of developing countries and the heat of the desert, Bulgaria’s temperate last days of summer weather was a refreshing change.  Georgi’s family has an extra apartment in the center of town where they let me stay, and his mom cooks some pretty amazing food.  I spent the week sampling local cheeses, pastries and incredible produce, sipping coffee in outdoor cafés, and generally enjoying having properly fresh laundry.  One morning we all went out to pick figs and grapes from a field behind a friend’s house and returned with buckets and buckets of delicious fruit.  The last night I was in town, we watched an orchestra and traditional bulgarian folk musicians play in an ancient Roman Amphitheater on the hill.  Despite intermittent showers, the musicians played on, pulling out umbrellas to wait out the rain.

Back in Cairo before catching my onward flight, I climbed one of the minarets at old the city gate to look out over the sea of mosques and went to see Sufi dancing by the Al-Tannoura Egyptian Heritage Dance Troupe.  Just a few days before the end of Ramadan, Cairo pulsated with a tangible excitement in the evenings.  I ate dinner at Iftar with the throngs of people breaking the fast at giant communal tables erected on streets outside of cafes and queued with the masses pouring in and out of sweet shops in search of pastries and ice cream.  The party continued in the streets with people lighting off rockets and firecrackers until the wee hours of the morning.  The Sufi dancing was incredible, and despite a sagging tourist industry was packed wall to wall with people sitting in the aisle and standing all around the edges.

The other thing I did in Cairo was, embarrassingly, probably the first thing I ought to have done upon arrival in the Middle East a month earlier: learn to properly wrap/pin a hijab.  I had been covering my head with a scarf most of the time when I was walking alone, but it never seemed to do much to dissuade the constant stream of wildly inappropriate shouts or endless stream of suitors.  Walking down streets – even wearing long loose fitting pants and long sleeved shirt with my (loosely tied) head scarf – meant running a gauntlet of sex-proposals that made it extraordinarily challenging to see places as a fly on a wall.  With the scarf tied properly, however, I immediately became invisible.  No one even looked at me, it was like i had donned an invisibility cloak that granted me immunity.  It was a refreshing and relaxing change, and it made my last few days in Egypt a whole lot more fun, if decidedly warmer.  When worn correctly, the hijab wraps tightly over the head and jaw, preventing any breeze from penetrating.  I was drenched in sweat instantly in the 40+ degree desert heat, but at least I was free to move about the city freely.  It was well worth the trade-off.