Punam Bean Photography (observations)

I just came back from CA and I still have mud on my feet. I still have In-n-Out in my belly. I’m still wearing the same clothes. We traipsed in puddles of muck and mud, I walked into a lake with my only pair of shoes, we crawled into bamboo caves, and she took off her dress as a very surprised biker drove by and offered to give us his address for some odd reason. We walked for miles to this secluded hideaway, this magical place, where all the light seems to melt into the leaves and mud and hairs like butter on a hot biscuit. If I haven’t responded to your email – You’ll here from me tomorrow evening!

I wanted to post some of these. There are just so many I can’t decide, so you can expect more in the coming days, but I wanted to get at least of few of them up. This is my secret place, in the back woods of a tiny town where I, and Bill and Ted, hail. And this is my best friend. We are in synch. She knows what I’m thinking, her expressions are my expressions, her inhibitions are my inhibitions. I take pictures of her but it’s like we are one person, and it’s a portrait of both of us. That’s my inspiration. And this is part one.

WARNING! there is one nude image below, but I consider it pretty PG-13, but I just thought I’d give you a heads up.

 

(something weird is going on with the bottom of this photo – I’ll fix it later!)

Is it snow?

more to come in the next few days!

ps. My brother in law and his wife had a baby! Her name is Lilly!!!

One single image.  Out of the camera (beacuse my dear photoshop is at home in NYC).

More to come tomorrow night! (late.)

In a fit of inspiration the other evening (morning) around 4 am, I awoke from my slumber with this intense thing in my stomach. It’s the slow season, so they tell me, and I can’t sleep at night. I spend my days doing mostly administrative tasks, and I haven’t touched my camera in a couple of weeks. This cannot go on! That little machine that I love the most of all things (except for Husbone, of course) and I need to reacquaint ourselves. And so in this frenzy, I bought a ticket to nice old fashioned Southern California for an epic and day long trip. I have inspiration I plan to execute among bamboo forests and fields of flowers with a certain blonde who shall not yet be named, and I’m not sure what color her hair is at the moment, because I haven’t seen her in a year. Not since I was a photographer, mostly. I will unite with warm weather, day long sun flares, in a pretty dress I can squat in with out disturbing the neighbors.

And so, in my scheming, you may not see a post from me until Tuesday. But on Tuesday, it’s going to be awesome.

An old picture many of you might have seen before.
 

I am in love with Leopard (MacOSX). It’s AMAZING! And to celebrate the upgrade, I did a little spring cleaning, organizes all my files into a nice system, and in the meantime, I discovered this image.

I like it. And I love Leopard.

At the request of Leah, and in lieu of Valentine’s day, today we’ll have a love story. I call it, the story of Husbone and Wifeybones, as I am so named.

In June of 2004, I used to be a waitress at the famous Coffee Shop in Union Square, and I also Cocktailed at a tapas bar in Long Island City, only on Wednesday nights. These were not fruitful evenings. Most of the time I’d make about $6 in tips, and then they’d charge me for a burger, for which I was starving at the end of the night. It was a fantastic job. I didn’t really get paid by the hour, so i guess it wasn’t really a job. It was just hang out time, with all the quirky regulars from the neighborhood, before LIC got all fancy. I felt like a series regular on a prime-time sitcom about friends. I was still an actress at this point (but more of a waitress than anything else.)

As an employee of the Coffee Shop, I had many suitors, all of them very nice looking, wealthy, and sometimes famous. These were all suitors who courted me on Manhattan Isle. I was growing weary of the games Manhattan men would play.

I was all gussied up from my shift at the Coffee Shop. I wore a high dress, I had bright blue eyeshadow, dangly earrings and a feaux hawk. I read Harry Potter at the bar, for the tenth time (I’m extremely obsessed) and a very handsome man in a three piece suit, and a similarly clad man partner came in, looking very much from another time. They carried instruments and warm smiles. They wore hats from before JFK, and he in particular had candy store eyes and a wide open smile.

“What are you reading?” He asked.

“Harry Potter 5.” I replied.

“Oh, I thought you might have been reading Bill Clinton’s autobiography.”

silence.

A shiver ran through me. I rubbed my arms. Days passed.

I was in the kitchen, putting away some dishes, when Gena, the bartender, burst in with a bit of a secret mission about her.

“What do you think of the man in the blue suit- do you think he’s cute?”

“Sure…” I said, kind of knowing what was to come next and internally rolling my eyes.

“Well, if he asked you out to dinner, would you go?”

I hesitated. Then I smiled. It’s so junior high, it’s actually very cute. “Yeah,” I shrugged.

It was later that evening. My shift was over, and I went to the back patio for a drink. I ordered a rum and coke, but I didn’t really know what to say to this man. This beautiful man in his three piece suit. I thought to myself he would be perfect with a pocket watch. We chatted, his companion was also at the table. I waited for the opportune moment, and he got up to go to the bathroom. That was the moment.

“Well,” I feigned to his man partner at the table. “I guess I’ll get going.”

But I wasn’t getting going. I had a very small purse and I was determined to rifle through it as I just so happened to be rifling beside the mens bathroom. This was utterly convenient as the bathroom was in direct contact with my exit route. I saw shadows in the light that creeped from below the door and I knew I was close. I knew that I must keep rifling!

He glided out of the bathroom as if waiting for me, and made a bee line for me. He smiled.

“So, I’d love to take you to dinner some time.” Candy store eyes.

“Sure.”

And then it was fourth of July. We had spoken briefly on the phone, but only briefly. We just couldnt get our dinner plans to work out. So he met me there, and my shift was over at midnight, and I sat outside, only to be harangued by a certain pushy Queens guy. He came to my rescue. We sat down at that table and suddenly the rest of our lives were before us. We talked. It rained. He leapt across the table and kissed me as I recounted pretty skies in England. The bar closed, and we did a funeral march to the train and to the end of the evening, and suddenly he whisked me away to the East River where we suddenly were planning our lives together. We watched as the sun came up over Manhattan. We didn’t part ways until 11 am that morning. And then we spent the rest of our lives together.

And now I call him Husbone. And the following image is the most accurate account to date.

Happy Valentines day!