Posted: July 13

Back from vacation

Monday morning was actually fun. After spending two weeks in Sicily, my mental resources were renewed and I jumped into work with great energy. Sunday I leave for Zimbabwe where I will help give a week-long communication workshop to Jesuit scholastics . I have four presentations to finish, which is a lot of work, but also a fun project. So it was good to just spend a full day back at the computer, writing and working on photographs. Yesterday I almost finished the presentation on digital photography; today I will work on an Ignatian model of communication.

I went to Sicily with my good friend and former partner, Fr. Mike Harter, who came through Rome at the end of a year-long sabbatical following nine years as novic e master. Before he took that job, he worked with me in St. Louis, Missouri, at Studio J, a design company that we created to serve the needs of province apostolates. We had a good run there until he went to St. Paul, Minnesota, to work with the novices, and I went to Washington, D.C. to work with the provincials. Not sure who had the more difficult group. But we are both photographers, so spending two weeks together exploring the south-eastern part of Sicily was a delight. Most people groan when I say, “Let’s wait a while, the light is changing.” Mike said it before I did; both of us were content to poke along, looking and waiting, and shooting lots of pictures. We were both shooting digitally, so no film was involved, and no processing costs at the end of the trip. On the other hand, the time it takes to sort and decode all the images is considerable. I have switched to shooting in the RAW format and only decoding the images when I want to use them. It keeps the file sizes down from 18 megabytes per photo to “only” six, but the hard drive still fills up quickly. Especially when there are so many beautiful things to see.

Sicily looks like Southern California with history. It has the same hot and hazy climate with incredibly bright light, and it is also amazingly modern with a lot of industrial growth and new apartments, sprawling all over with little planning or order. But it also has lots of historical centers from the Baroque era, and even more interesting, a good amount of Greek ruins. We visited the theater at Siracusa where some of the plays were first performed which we read in our early Jesuit training . And the temple ruins at Agrigento are as spectacular as advertised, sitting high on a rocky ridge overlooking the sea. We waited patiently for the light at the end of the day there and were rewarded with many good photographs.

I hope to get the chance to look at animals in the wild in Zimbabwe before the workshop. The light will be different, and the subject matter, but it will be another great opportunity for photography. What more could anyone ask for?