Hmmm…

Wandered over to the East End Street Festival yesterday.

Didn’t work as hard as I probably should have…. other things on my mind.

Like just precisely how in the heck did I manage to set the new PanaLeica to “exposure autobracket” with a HUGE spread in the brackets, rendering two of every three shots almost completely unrecoverable? Dunno.

Fortunately (or not) I didn’t ruin EVERYTHING.

Jessi Sifuentes, Potter and Mosaic Artist, had a table of recent stuff, much of which I like VERY much. He works in earth tones, mostly, and while I’m normally inclined to cool blues and greys, there’s a draw to his simple geometric designs.

(If I weren’t squeezing the budget pretty tight just now, SEVERAL of those pieces could have come home with me…)

And then of course there was this ultra-cool dood peddling some interestingly complex varieties of hot sauce, sold under the Bravado Spice Co. label.

I’m really not sure I want to call them hot sauces, as they were brisk but a long way short of hot, and much more interesting than your usual “vinegar, tomato, and something with capsaicin” variety. I didn’t know it was even possible to do a mild habanero, but the “pineapple habanero” was something special (sweet with a very slight kick at the back edge) and the “jalapeño – green apple” was surprisingly agreeable. (I’m more into smoky peppers than straight hot ones, so it’s rare I find jalapeño ANYTHING to my taste. This was.)

And of course it’s not a festival in the East End or the Northside without artists. It just can’t happen. So I waved in passing at Elvira Diaz Ocampo and Lizbeth Ortiz (though Lizbeth was hiding in the back of the East End Studio Gallery booth and I’m not sure she saw me).

I didn’t get a good angle on Lizbeth as there was some good traffic at her spot and I didn’t want to break the flow… but got lucky with Elvira and only one customer…

And at that, they did much better than the guy at the Kroger booth.

Slow promo day, I guess. On the other hand he was sticking it out; a bunch of the exhibitors either had or were in the process of packing up about the time the festival hit the midway point… But oh well. Their business.

Of course the big thing about festivals is music… and unfortunately the light was ALREADY very harsh and hard, and the camera did exactly what I told it to do. Dammit. There are some things you can fix when you do that, but lots more you can’t. It turns out that the new camera goes VERY hot magenta when it’s overexposed to the point of being blown out, and my photoshop-fu isn’t strong enough to pull the color curves back to anything I liked, so that leaves only one option: drop the color out and say “Yeah, I meant to do B&W anyway.”

Yeah. Meant to do that.