Today’s photos and video are of Rachel and Marlies and what is currently the Eden Bakery associated with Restaurant Eden in Windwardside, and soon to be Bizzy B Bakery. Rachel–the bakery founder and owner–is striking out with her own shop across from Saba’s legendary Swinging Doors saloon. Marlis came from Holland in December, and I met her on my New Year’s Eve walk to Windwardside just days after she had arrived to help Rachel. These two ladies are a hoot and a holler to hang out with, having sunny dispositions, great senses of humor, and fast bakery hands to turn out high demand bakery items for most of the restaurants and grocery stores in Windwardside as well as a steady influx of walk-in customers who come by in the early AM hours to get fresh hot bread and croissants straight out of the oven for the working day. So what motivates someone to open a bakery on a five square mile island in the Caribbean? The short video below has Rachel and Marlies telling their own story along with ample shots of the goodies and process of their current ovens. Enjoy and make sure if you’re on Saba or planning to be here to look them up…your taste buds won’t regret it!
Weekly Supply Ship At Fort Bay, Saba, Dutch Caribbean
A Short Treatise On My Photographic Approach
My commitment to a new picture each day on the blog until I leave this tiny island in the Caribbean demands a degree of photographic creativity; I’ve rejected a number of pictures that look too much like direct repeats…same color palettes and/or too similar views from a particular location. Saba is five square miles of paradise, but any creative photographer like me still needs to keep an eye out for transforming even the mundane aspects of their surroundings into something new, fresh, or dramatic for a compelling image, and that can happen in a few different ways:
Macro or Micro Zooming in much closer than the level of detail the brain normally pays attention too or vice versa, zooming out for a far wider perspective than most photographs.
Geometric Perspective Much is written about having a photographic”eye”, and while some talent is undeniable, I still believe certain aspects of pleasing visual geometry can be taught or learned through the glory of digital image trial and error, myself as one example. The trick for me was learning how to flatten the 3D my brain perceives the world with into the 2D world the camera sees, then take a boatload of pictures and figure out why I did or didn’t like a particular image, which in my reptilian simplicity, was figuring out how my brain was reassembling a 2D image back into 3D perspective. A big part of that is geometry within an image frame, and how it leads your eye to construct depth.
Digital Post Processing Folks who’ve been reading my blog a long time know my philosophy on images, and opinions of images…you either like a picture or you don’t, you either hold on it and take it in longer than a few seconds, or you move on with a Ho-hum. “Did you Photoshop that?” seems to be a question that implies something about the image is false, or faked, and therefore either too good to be true or not worth looking at. But that’s at odds with images as art, which is that digital post is part of today’s creative imaging process. Leave the f-stop and technical discussions to photographers who feel that’s important stuff. In any case, digital post might be as simple as taking the clutter of colors on a photo competing for eye attention and making it black and white and shades of gray, which gets immediate oohs and ahs. Lots of creative options in the post.
3 Original Images Used For Today’s Final HDR Blog Picture
Today’s photograph takes on a mundane subject–the 60 meter 681 ton supply ship Mutty’s Pride
that arrives in Saba’s Fort Bay harbor weekly with essential food and supplies. I’ve taken a bunch of pictures of the ship over the months, but never had one that rung my bell. This time I took 3 pictures exposure bracketed for the different light…the dark mountains, the clouds, and the brightly colored ship, and combined them to create a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photo that attempts to balance the contrast that our eyes can see, but cameras can’t, then played with exposure and saturation to rebuild the true colors washed out by the intensity of the Caribbean sun. The result takes on an painting quality I like, and I hope you enjoy it as well. I won’t always yak on about process like this, but for the new and learning photogs out there, maybe this will be a helpful post. Cheers!
A very full and foodie crazy day on Saba, rambling down the ridges and across guts and snapping pictures of Spring Bay/Kelbe’s Ridge in the early AM, an afternoon enjoying the splendid lunch made by our friend Marie Petit at her and Bob’s home in Hell’s Gate: a passion fruit-grape-banana smoothie, walnut-spinach-apple salad, seared tuna, grilled tomatoes and spices, capers and cream over mahi mahi.
Homemade Lunch After A Hard Saba Hike, Yum!
Later on, dinner at Brigadoon netted us fennel-tomato-onion sauce over dolphin tail snapper. Finishing up the evening, we chilled with our Sea Saba friend Becca and her man Johnny, who’s a chef at Ecolodge. More premier barbecue fixin’s….and a little suds to wash it down. So many premier cooks on the isle. Food is love, is it not?
A Tangled Mind In Motion 
