All posts by Joan Rudder-Ward

Take a minute and be encouraged!

This little video is just 77 seconds but it has some great encouraging thoughts! We’d like to thank JoJo Tabares of Unique Copywriter Services for creating this from memes we’ve shared on our Silver Sage Instagram and Facebook pages.
JoJo provides article writing services and social media management. If you know someone who could use those services they can check her website (link above) and Facebook page.

Who says you can’t start a new career after 50?

In my long career as a professional image maker, I’ve been to countless conferences, workshops, and seminars. One of my favorites is Imaging USA, put on annually by Professional Photographers of America(PPA), and it’s always a grand affair. For the past 6 years I haven’t missed one. It’s always good to connect with old friends while making new ones, in addition to attending the workshops and presentations.

 

These Photographers Started Their Photography Careers After 50

This time I went with a different purpose–to interview photographers who had started their photography career after the age of 50. What an interesting variety of people and stories! We interviewed a retired pediatric surgeon, anesthetist, radio engineer and school teacher,to name a few. We had a total of nine individuals passionately pursuing their second dream career of photography. Their specialities ran the gamut: pet photography , children and families, photojournalism, and even weddings! ( Weddings, which I personally stopped when I got closer to 50 because I just didn’t want that particular hectic pace any longer).

They inspired me!

Never too old, Never too late..

You will meet them in an upcoming episode of Silver Sage, and we know their stories will inspire you!

Tips to Unlock Talents in YOU

In the meanwhile, check out this article I wrote for the online community Sixty and me and get some ideas on how to pursue the hidden gifts and talents in you!

3 Ways to Unlock Your Talents After 60 and Embrace the Perpetual Gift of You

 

 

 

 

 

Getting a bird’s eye view in Bagdad

 

We had a drone photographer accompany us to Bagdad recently, so we could get some aerial views for the travelogue piece I’m creating about the location. We thought we’d get there early in the morning and avoid the heat, but nope! Early morning and the sun was still intense. Just no mercy.

Bagdad? Bagdad, California, that is. Located in the middle of the Mojave Desert. A ghost ‘town’ with not even the hint of a building anywhere.
How do you know when you’ve found it? Well. there’s a single salt cedar tree that stands as a marker, a tombstone, an “x marks the spot’ — a lone testament to a once bustling community that was home to a few hundred people in its heyday.

Here’s a few interesting tidbits about Bagdad, CA
–In the late 1800s thru the early 1900s it was an important watering stop for the railroad. There were homes, hotels, stores, a school, and even a Harvey House restaurant. By the 1940’s, population began to dwindle, and somewhere in the late 1960’s the town gave up the ghost.
–It holds the record for the longest period of drought in the history of the country… from July 1912 to November 1914- it had 767 consecutive days without precipitation.
In the 1940’s, people would come from all around the desert to the Bagdad Cafe, which was the only place for miles around that had a jukebox and dance floor.
–Mysteries are encased in the landscape… is it merely folklore or is there some truth to the story that 50 Chinese railroad workers, who died during a cholera epidemic, are buried in an unmarked grave at the location?
What other mysteries does this place hold? Aha! We’ll let you know what we discover!

Lost in Space

One of my favorite TV shows as a child growing up in the 60’s was Lost in Space–the  adventures of  an astronaut (space pioneer )family named Robinson whose mission was to colonize different planets in outer space.  However,  their spaceship got off course and they traversed around the universe discovering strange, new, and sometimes hostile territories.

Though I enjoyed all the characters, my favorite was the robot who I remember as a constant companion to the youngest Robinson, Will, who was about 12 years old. Whenever something was amiss, that robot would start waving his arms, flashing his lights, and shouting something like  “Warning! Warning!”  And my favorite  “Danger! Will Robinson, Danger! ”

We could have used that Robot on our latest journey.

We were on a road trip  to the Old Woman Mountains wilderness area do some hiking and filming for a project I’m working on, and the area we were in was quite/very desolate. Saw nary a soul and the only signs of wildlife I saw was a lizard and a big green bug scurrying across the dirt road. I was surprised to see NO ONE. No campers, no hikers, NOBODY.

And as it generally is in these remote areas… there is NO cell phone service.

About 20 miles into the wilderness (i.e. 20 miles away from a real road that would take us away from there) the unthinkable happened.. we had a flat tire!

Bah!

Hiss!

Booooo!

And there we were… lost in space.

Fortunately we were able to get that taken care of which made for a happy ending. However,I realized there were a few other things we could have done/had that would have made us better equipped. We’re going to be making a short info-film giving some safety tips for road travel, and will also cover the things we didn’t think about before that would have made us better prepared. Coming soon, in a future Silver Sage episode!

Where the #@%$ is Pie Town?? WE know!

We found it!

And we’ll share our good fortune with you! 🙂

We traveled to Pie Town, New Mexico, to celebrate the mathematical Pi (π)  Day, which is held on March 14 (because π =3.14159265359)  and March 14 is  my birthday! (So we went to Pie Town to celebrate my birthday, which is on Pi Day).

Pi Day is a big thing in Pie Town and we were there to film an episode for Silver Sage.  We met some wonderful people, heard interesting stories, and… ate pie!  Our new favorite pie is the New Mexican green chili apple pie with pine nuts!  Sweet and spicy (REAL spicy!)

We camped at the Pie Town Cafe where we interviewed the proprietor, Lori Elliott, met the awesome crew there, and learned some interesting history about Pie Town.  All of which we will share with you in a future episode!

Having my first piece of New Mexican green chili apple pie with pine nuts. Yum!

 

 

We bid adieu to Marta Becket

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Collage of images of Marta Beckett displayed on a table top in the Amaragosa Cafe.

An artist stranded in Death Valley stayed
To paint and dance her way on starry skies
And brought new life peaks through her art and dance
By sharing wellsprings deep within her soul

We were saddened to hear of the recent passing of Marta Becket, the woman who created a wellspring in the desert of Death Valley Junction and called it the Amaragosa Opera House.

Marta’s story is an inspirational one– As a traveling dancer from New York, in 1967  she and her husband were camping in Death Valley National Park when their trailer got  a flat tire.  To get it repaired, they were directed to Death Valley Junction, a tiny desert community  just outside the park.  The town was once a Borax mining station and though not considered a ghost town, it was sparsely populated. While waiting for the tire to get fixed, Marta explored the old adobe buildings there and discovered an old abandoned theater.

“Peering through the tiny hole, I had the distinct feeling that I was looking at the other half of myself. The building seemed to be saying…..Take me…..do something with me…I offer you life”  To Dance on Sands: The Life and Art of Death Valley’s Marta Becket

She and her husband stayed and restored the building to hold her performances there. She painted an  audience on the walls inside the  theater, and other beautiful artwork on the ceiling. The opera house became famous and people from all over the world came to see the opera house and her performances.

We recently visited there! — the eve of this past New Year’s Eve– to film inside the opera house and around Death Valley Junction.   We’re producing a piece on the Amaragosa Opera House for our Finding Beauty in Dry Places segment– coming soon!   We’ll be sharing beautiful imagery and an amazing story encompassing the history of this remote, desert area!

(Inside the Amaragosa Opera House)

Leaving Las Vegas

The Alamo San Antonio, Texas

 

The title is not totally accurate as Las Vegas was in the middle of my trip home– the stopover city after leaving San Antonio. But a title such as Leaving Las Vegas sounds more poetic ….like… a movie or something

I bid a fond adieu to San Antonio this afternoon as Imaging USA ended last night with the usual, great closing party.  I did have time this morning to visit the Alamo to do  some filming there to include in my San Antonio missions piece.
Did you know the Alamo was actually a mission? The Mission San Antonio de Valero.

Today, the Alamo is designated a shrine and sacred ground, and no photography of any kind is allowed inside. However you can photograph to your heart’s content the outside of the building and grounds.

Some tidbits of info about the Alamo:
Before  the Texas revolution,  the Alamo was home to missionaries and their Indian converts for nearly 70 years , beginning with the construction of the mission in 1724. –

In the early 1800s the Spanish military stationed a Cavalry unit there and soldiers referred to it as the Alamo in honor of their hometown of Alamo de Parras, Coahuila.
The  Alamo holds the distinction of housing the first recorded hospital in Spanish Texas. It was established in 1805 to care for soldiers stationed on the frontier. –

The  famous battle saw the 200 defenders  holed up in the Alamo besieged by an army of 1800-6000  soldiers led by general Antonio Lopez Santa Anna. The siege lasted 13 days ending March 6,1836 with all of  the defenders perishing. — The Republic of Texas joined the United States in 1845 and the army used the Alamo as a supply depot until 1878. The military presence helped create a safer climate in the dangerous frontier town of San Antonio.

The Alamo is remembered worldwide as a heroic struggle against overwhelming odds–a place where men made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.

Finding Beauty in Dry Places

 

I live in the desert.

What imagery does that bring to your mind?
Brown. Mono. Wasteland. Barren. Cactus. Sand?
Wind-tossed tumbleweeds hurled across a bland
Dry monochrome expanse of untamed land?
Chastised Hebrews wandering forty years?
A soul’s deep cry for its vision to clear
An unquenched thirst of vision? Spirit? Soul?
A solitary place where dreams unfold?

The Mojave desert is where I dwell
The driest desert in North America
It stretches across four states, with extremes
Of arid cold and arid heat, being
The only place the Joshua tree grows.

There’s beauty and wonder in dry places

We seek, to find, to highlight to share that
The desert indeed blossoms as a rose
With tales from conquerors of dry places
Who squarely faced the challenge of the bland
Prevailing to bring untapped fresh waters
To satisfy the dry and thirsty soul

“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well…”
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Helping Foster Children Find Forever Families

I’m a volunteer photographer for the Heart Galley of Los Angeles. The Heart Gallery LA is an online photo gallery as well as a traveling photographic exhibit created to find forever families for children in the Los Angeles county foster care system.

Recently, the photo shoots were done at the LA Arboretum. These two sisters were my first ones for the day. They were 10 and 7 and they were a hoot. Not afraid to speak up and tell me what kind of photos THEY wanted to take. That’s what was going on in this clip. “can we take pictures looking at the water?’. ‘can we take pictures looking at the sky?’ can we take pictures ‘like this’ (striking a pose). I told them once I got the pictures I needed, yes.. they could give me some direction as to what they wanted. and we spent about an hour checking out different locations in the garden.

When photographing the children, requirements include getting standing full-body shots, smiling and personality images, and siblings must be photographed together… no individual shots.

You can find out more information about the Heart Gallery, and the children looking for Forever Families, here

Amunique & Alisha_MG_2109

Recent Memories from the Historic Summit Inn

Wow. What a shock for the historic Summit Inn to become a casualty of the Blue Cut Fire that raged through the Cajon Pass and surrounding areas August 16.

summit inn good food sign

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We were just there in July, filming my interview with Route 66 expert Jim Conkle. This was my first time being there.

summit inn gift shop

I perused the gift shop full of Route 66 items. (I had another first — I bought 5 lottery tickets from the gift shop– they were all duds.)

guitar man summit inn

He had his first ostrich burger with a big chocolate shake.

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I had an orange soda float… reminded me of the 50/50 ice cream bars I used to love as a youngling.

Word is they’re going to rebuild. Glad to hear that.

Strictly from the South – or Straight Outta Compton?

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This past weekend, we filmed a long-planned trial segment to see how we’d do with a baking episode.  My partner in crime creating, is my cousin Paula. She and I started baking together when we were quite young… somewhere around 9 and 10 years old.  And we usually conducted our joint baking ventures   when we were babysitting our  younger siblings  .  All us kids (8-12 of us) would be together in one house…either hers or mine… while our mothers were out shopping (or just enjoying themselves with a kid-free time).  We had already been cooking and baking at a young age with our mothers, so we were quite responsible and knew what to do unsupervised. (In the photo above, Paula is on the left, me on the right, and that’s her oldest brother between us. She and I were about 19 & 20.)

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We mostly baked what we call ‘box cakes’… the Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines cake mixes.  It was always a 2 – layer cake, with frosting made from powdered sugar mixed with a little butter and milk, and tinted with food color.
We’d assemble that two layer cake with frosting and hold our breathes… to no avail.  That darn top layer would always split in half and slide off ! We started using toothpicks to keep it anchored, however that split top layer continually plagued us.
Those times of making  ’box cakes’  has been long gone for years now, and we each do all of our cake-baking now from scratch.  So we did enough footage for 2 episodes… I did a German Chocolate Cake, and she did a Coconut Pineapple Cake.

Oh, the title of this blog post?  We were both born in Mobile, Alabama. Our families are southern and our mothers’ taught us the Southern way of cooking. So Paula came up with the name for this fledgling cooking venture –Strictly from the South. Though we were both born and lived in the South in our young years, our families migrated to California to a little blue-collar city called Compton. Here is where we began and completed our k-12 education.  So we joke … are we indeed strictly from the South, or are we instead,.. Straight Outta Compton?

Photo-Traveloging Route 66

We’re taking on Route 66! How far will we get and how long will it take us?

We started with an interview with Route 66 expert Jim Conkle, who has traveled the iconic highway from one end to the other over 200 times.
Jim shared his knowledge and experience as a tour guide for Route 66.
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Interviewing Jim Conkle at the historic Summit Inn on Route 66

 
And we will be sharing our exploration of Route 66 in our photo travelogues.

We started this week, taking a day to travel from Victorville to Needles. We decided we’d make stops at the Bagdad Café in Newberry Springs, and visit the GHOST TOWN OF Bagdad, searching for a tree and a sign that I read was there to mark the former location of the town (there was no sign to be found)

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Inside the Bagdad Cafe

We’d always wanted to visit the Mojave Preserve, so we decided we would visit there since we’d be out that way.
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At the Mojave Preserve

This did turn out to be an interesting trip, and it was rather ambitious of us to try to do it in one day, because there’s just too much to take in. We’re doing this stretch again– in smaller chunks. And then we’ll move on to the next..and then the next. We expect to have a lot to share in upcoming episodes.

So… come along for the ride!

Creating Art for Healing

peace rose r

Something that has interested me for a few years now, is creating photographic art and videos to be used as healing tools in the healthcare industry. There’s growing research in this area, confirming more and more the healing power of art.

We spent the day at Huntington Gardens in San Marino, with the main purpose of creating this type of art, following the guidelines outlined in current research. I also shared photography techniques that I use in creating nature images. All to be shared in an upcoming episode! Watch for it! 🙂

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The Fine Art of Earth Architecture

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How do you build an environmentally sustainable home, that is energy efficient and weather tight? A home that withstands earthquakes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters? And you build it with your own two hands, using the earth beneath your feet?

That’s what I went to find out when I took a workshop at the California Institute for Earth Architecture and Art- Cal Earth, is “ a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to providing solutions to the human need for shelter through research, development, and education in earth architecture.” An institute that shows you how earth turns to gold.

An Open House tour prompted my initial visit (Cal-Earth generally holds these tours the first Saturday of the month). Being there can sort of feel like you’ve stepped on the set of something akin to a desert space odyssey (Star Wars, anyone?).  I found the tour fascinating, viewing a variety of earth structures- from a 400 sq-foot emergency shelter dome that can be built in a day, to a 2,000 sq. ft home with 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a 2 car garage.

 

Afterwards, I signed up for the introductory. day-long workshop.An enlightening experience that I enjoyed.

Amazing what you can do with earth, water, sandbags and barbed wire. Of course any reason to get my hands dirty (or should I say ’earthy’ since the word ’dirt’ is not used at the institute). At this time though, my plans of using my newfound knowledge and skills extends to replacing a retaining wall around the patio area in my backyard.

A future episode is coming soon!

Leap of Faith

Roxy PPJMany boomers know all to well about childhood passions of pursing artistic-type careers being discouraged by well-meaning elders for more stable  professions or ‘real’ jobs.  And hey, can’t blame our parents for wanting us to have stability and not live the ‘starving artist’ life.

At 18,  Roxy Gantes did get accepted to  the Art Center of Pasadena–but her dad said ‘no’,–  and she went on to study for, and have, a fulfilling career as a psycho-therapist.

But when three of her cousins died in one month, Roxy decided it was time for her take that leap of faith and pursue her ingrained passion of being an artist. So she left her 25-year career as a psycho-therapist and began painting a new canvas for her life.

Join us for the personal interview in her studio, and we also take you to one of her popular paint parties where you can witness the magic that happens as she encourages and instructs her students– and they discover a deeper dimension to themselves as they bring out their own artists within.

In the midst of Gorillas in the Mist

A trip to the nearest zoo just wasn’t enough!
Christine Pence just had to fulfill the passion burning within to photograph gorillas in the wild–in Uganda.   And when she couldn’t find any one to go with her, she decided to just do it alone. So what that she’s 66!

In our interview, she gives fascinating details of what it takes to spend an hour with a gorilla family in the jungles of Uganda.  They are in the wild, but are used to humans being around. Caution is never tossed to the wind because these are still wild beasts.  She was, however, able to get within 4 feet of one of the creatures– and the little ones would run around and get even closer, unhindered and unmoved by the humans in their midst.

©Christine Pence
©Christine Pence

 

Her travel tale includes additional adventures she experience–using her international entrepreneur skills and experiences:  she was able to give business know-how assistance to the ‘aunties’ of a children’s orphanage, a bird guide who could greatly benefit from being able to produce a photographic book of birds, and a cultural tribe of basket weavers.

 

©Christine Pence

 

©Christine Pence
©Christine Pence

 

 

In the closing of the episode, we’re  treated to beautiful imagery of  photographs she took  while there.

An Oldie but Goodie Valentine’s Day

We were in Lancaster, California on Valentine’s Day, filming several scenes for a documentary we are producing From the Heart of A G
The setting for this particular scene is  a  hidden, hole-in-the-wall,  club,  with an oldies crooner providing the entertainment. The oldies crooner hired was Norma Carter of the Delfonics–a group I started following when I was in junior high school!.
So, I guess that puts me in the ‘oldie’ category, eh ?
_me with norman carter

Christmas Moon Rise

full moon rising
Ah, the breathless wonder of a gorgeous full moon! Relishing the rare full moon of this Christmas season.
The last time there was a full moon on Christmas was in 1977, and the next one is slated for 2034.  Carpe diem!
This moon image above was taken on Christmas Eve, and I decided to do something different and film the rising of the moon Christmas night.

And so I did.  Staying close to home I went up the street and set up on a corner that gave me the best view possible from that location. This corner is on a road that joins two main streets (that are 4 miles apart), so it gets quite a bit of use.  So the flashes of light in the film are headlights of  passing vehicles.

Watching a moon rise from the warmth of the inside is quite a bit different from standing outside in the freezing cold…on a corner… in the dark. The 20 or so minutes it took for the moon to ascend seemed stretched beyond an hour. But I stuck it out, got my footage, and compressed the time so you can enjoy the moon rise in a mere 14 seconds.