Last month I returned to Cuba, 14 months after my last visit, and saw that things are really changing. The reforms put to paper by Fidel’s younger (80-year-old) brother are visible everywhere on the streets – mobile fruit stands are popping up on street corners, mini-markets are appearing in the doorways of people’s apartments, and more (and bigger) private restaurants are emerging offering quality and variety much appreciated by this hungry gringo photographer.

This image is from the Cuatro Caminos market in Havana’s gritty Centro district.  It’s a huge indoor market hall from the 19th century, the size of a city block. I arrived after dawn while workers were offloading fruits and tubers, and vegetables and flowers, from dumptrucks, horse-drawn buggies, and the insides of beat-up 50′s classics. Besides the usual produce, beans and grains, and snacks and sandwiches, you could come away from Cuatro Caminos with all the floral arrangements, live chickens, and pigs’ heads you can carry.

More photos from the new Cuba will be coming soon.

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It was the throne featured in the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” and arrived by forklift to the site of an event I shot last week about innovation in entertainment at Sony Pictures Studios. Event guests would be able to pose for photos in the throne, but in ordinary light the bad-ass chair looked a little dull (right).

Inside, the setup crew covered the background (the cashier line of the Sony Pictures commissary) with red velvet curtains and added a couple hot lights on either side — better, but still didn’t do the throne justice (left).

I would have gone for multiple strobes in key spots for the right highlights and shadows, plus a fog machine. But I had to cover the red carpet activity outside so I kept it simple with a two-strobe semi-wireless setup.

On top of my camera I had a 580 EX II and Lumiquest promax diffuser throwing some light forward onto the throne sitter. But on camera right I set up a second 580 on a tripod and covered it in a blue gel, throwing cold light onto the throne from nearly 90 degrees.

My on-camera flash triggered the off-camera slave with its infra-red beam, and the two worked together to light the subject and add those cool blue highlights. I kept the ambient exposure low to keep the backdrop dark and maintain deep shadows between the throne’s swords.

The result was a fun photo prop that the guests loved (right). These included the First and Deputy First Ministers of Northern Ireland.

I’d say it wasn’t their typical parliamentary photo op.

Other times though, it’s batten down the hatches and fire up the power packs.

I was getting ready for a road trip and preparing to cook dinner for six when I was asked to shoot some tech executives for an upcoming media announcement. Time was short, but they would be happy to come to my studio (and sample the nearby beaches immediately after).

A seamless backdrop gives the viewer no context, but sometimes you really do want all the focus on the subjects. In this case, it was the subjects and what they brought in their aluminum custom briefcase – samples from their company’s really neat 3-D printer.

And while a late-afternoon sun can give a warm, personal feel to a shot, 1,100 watt seconds or so of strobelight filtered through a large softbox can light a large space and spread a soft, flattering light on the subjects. (And, in this case, a very lifelike quarter skull printed out in three dimensions.)

The execs got their publicity, and their beach time.

Tech executives on the announcement of new venture funding

The client, based just outside of Santa Cruz, ordered large-size prints of scenics and landscapes of Santa Cruz and the central coast for the lobbies and hallways of their workspace.  Printing involved a refreshing return to the analog world – the texture of paper and the permanence of inks; producing proofs and working towards a perfect print; cutting mats, glazing, and assembling final, framed pieces for display.

At twenty pieces in total, it involved sore fingers, aching muscles, and many hours of labor. But to be commissioned to produce photography for the sake of art alone is a rare joy and a labor of love.

Shooting products or objects in a studio, the lights and modifiers you use are critical, but you can open up a whole realm of creative possibilities by incorporating various surfaces under the object with interesting properties.

One word: plastics.

Translucent, transparent, clear, frosted, smoky, absorptive, reflective. A lot of materials scientists have spent a lot of lab time concocting wonderful chemical recipes to produce a smorgasbord of these synthetic wonders. I only recently learned of a store near me dedicated entirely to the medium of plastic (TAP plastics). Browsing their selection I felt like a kid in a plastics shop.

Here’s just one of many possibilities: a semi-translucent 1/8-inch thick piece underneath the lightbulbs, a single strobe firing from below and through the plastic, near-zero ambient light turning the white seamless backdrop to black, white balance set to incandescent providing a blue tint to the entire frame, and the edge and corner of the plastic (mmm, plastic) picking up just enough from the strobe to add a sort of blue horizon.

Ce n’est pas magique, c’est plastique!

From the outside it looks a bit like a bell jar; from the inside, it’s a giant lightbox illuminated with natural, too-cheap-to-meter light from the sun. Four white translucent sheets filter and soften some of that light before it hits the interior.

It makes for great natural portraits inside, and instead of a white painted ceiling with fluorescent tube lights, this is what you see when you look up:

Light filtering into rotunda at City Hall in San Jose, CA

How about wife carrying?

In the little town of Sneem on the Ring of Kerry last year I came across the Sneem festival and pulled my camera out, expecting some of those stereotypical Irish traditions. Sure, there was plenty of Guinness going down the hatch on picnic tables in the town square, but more interesting was the Wife-Carrying contest. It was being held for a very important cause:  to decide who would represent Ireland in the World Wife-Carrying Championship in Finland, of course.

The men were to carry their wife (or their neighbor’s wife) around a circuit featuring hurdles and hazards like raised pipes and a three- or four-foot-deep water trench teeming with yellow rubber ducks. Despite the obvious gravity of the competition, at least one team had a little fun with it, a young couple from Japan in traditional dress who seemed to be part of a Japanese reality show. When the male, who lacked the brawn of an Irish farmer, collapsed halfway round the course, his teammate yelled at him in Japanese for a bit before throwing him over her shoulder to finish the last leg of the race.

Keep your camera in reach and you never know what you’ll come across. Though next year, I may put my camera down and compete myself. Just need to find a very, very light wife (or neighbor’s wife).

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I returned nearly as confused as I was before about the Revolution and its ongoing legacy. While I was there, whatever I would learn about the people and their government I soon learned that the opposite was also somehow true. Even after acknowledging the contradictions in revolutionary Cuba, you need asterisks beginning with “but,” “also,” and “nevertheless.”

The Revolution may be a complicated beast, but less so is the embargo. An island nation unable to trade freely with its neighbor 90 miles to the north is a sad sight in the 21st century, or any other, and “trading is illegal” is a bizarre message when packaged with lectures on freedom.

Still, what helps to keep the island frozen in time also makes it fascinating to photograph, an irony that floated in my mind throughout. The photographer in me would love for this living museum of classic cars, mechanical technology, and commercial isolation to endure, but the rest of me knows that something needs to change, and soon.

The following images may reflect a Cuba that will continue largely unchanged for decades more, or one which in five years could resemble a faded sepia photograph. Time will tell.

Images from Cuba