Flavors of Ethiopia

Flavors of Ethiopia

Image by gwilmore
I participated in my second Flickr meetup in three weeks, and this one, like the one in mid-December, took place mainly at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. All of the photos I took at this event were shot in RAW, which I had never used until that very day. I am quickly becoming hooked on it, but I think RAW might generate some basic changes in the way I do photography. First of all, I will probably continue sticking to JPEGs for most of my work, reserving RAW mainly for portrait shoots. Second, whenever I do use it, as I did today, I will be bringing home fewer images. Today, after this 4-1/2-hour meetup, I came home with barely 30, although I had taken many more that were deleted on the spot. RAW files are enormous, and my camera cannot handle a memory card larger than 2GB. So with all of that, I simply need to learn to photograph more judiciously.

This shot was actually taken at an Ethiopian restaurant in Tempe, where six of us got together for a meal after we left the Garden. It was the first time I had ever sampled Ethiopian food, but I was actually more interested in the restaurant's decor, including these figurines standing atop a wall about three feet from where I sat.

Cobalt123 and I were the oldest participants in today's meetup, and during the dinner conversation, the subject of my favorite 1960s television program came up. It was "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.," and I mentioned that my favorite character in the series was Napoleon Solo, who was played by Robert Vaughn. Part of his appeal to me -- a very big part, in fact -- was that in every episode, he got to kiss a girl every two minutes or so. Cobalt reminisced about her crush on Illya Kuryakin, the David McCallum character who was Solo's sidekick. She talked about seeing him in a parade when she was a young teenager, and taking pictures of him with her Brownie. McCallum now stars on "NCIS" -- currently my own favorite program -- as Ducky Mallard, the endearing and somewhat eccentric autopsy surgeon. I believe he is better suited for this role than he was for Illya; after all, I wondered even at age 13 how a Russian agent for a supersecret spy organization had managed to develop a Scottish accent.