A birthday on the 4th of July, originally uploaded by LahDeeDah Lu.

Coming to the US, there is no day that is quite so American and so light as the 4th of July. The whole country has a day off in the middle of summer. The weather was great (well, there was a huge downpour in the late afternoon/evening). Bubbles, a happy birthday girl and a red barn in the background just seem to capture the whole spirit of the day.

I had the pleasure of shooting a “Quinceañera” party in New York City. A “Quinceañera” is a latino celebration of a girl’s coming of age, at age 15. It’s similar to a “sweet sixteen”, but it’s planned nearly extravagantly as a wedding.

This is my favorite shot from the event. I’ll be posting a full album of the photos in a week or so.

Ankataa, originally uploaded by LahDeeDah Lu.

From left to right:
Buck, Lucas, Sandy and Guhl

We had a band photo shoot today. I’ll be uploading links in my projects section as soon as I have processed the photos completely.

We’ll be fixing up their myspace page soon because it’s pretty basic at the moment. There should be more music up soon. I guess their music is North African/middle eastern/rock ‘n roll with a dash of funk!

www.myspace.com/ankataa6

Our future and past, originally uploaded by LahDeeDah Lu.

One of the things that struck me about North Carolina when I first moved here was how abandoned a lot of the rural areas are. It’s a feast for photographers. There is beauty in abandonment. It reminds you that time passes and things, and people, grow old and wear away. The contrast can be found in the growing possibilities for the future. The past and the future merge and make our present.

I took the photograph in Bynumm, North Carolina last fall. To date, it has made #2 in Explore on Flickr, which the highest any of my photographs have been. Thank you to the girl, the daughter of a friend, for posing. I’ll definitely have to make a print for them both.

Aerial show at Castle McCulloch Carnivale, originally uploaded by LahDeeDah Lu.

I originally went to the Castle McCulloch Carnivale to watch Guhl play with his band Ankataa in the drum tent, but then some of the organizers of the event asked me to take some photos for me.

The event was great: so much going on and some really great costumes.

I’ve uploaded galleries from the event which can be seen here.

Life around death, originally uploaded by LahDeeDah Lu.

This cemetery is not like any of the others I’ve been to. I had visited it during the winter and decided to show it to Guhl last week.

It’s abandoned. It hasn’t been looked after in years, I don’t know, maybe even decades. You can see human sized dents in the ground. I wonder if the bodies were taken away to another grave or if the earth has collapsed over the bodies. There are nearly no plants growing on the ground, which is full of cobwebs… like stepping stones for very light people. You can sense there is parasitic life underneath. The place was so quiet and it was only before leaving that we realized that there were no birds around at all. The only sign of life we saw was a lonely black butterfly.

The gravestones are marked with dates from the beginning of last century. Most of the gravestones have fallen down. It doesn’t look like vandalism. This place looks like it’s just not visited at all.

I must say it’s one of the creepiest places I’ve been to in a while. It’s a vacuum of death in the middle of this town. The only life seems to be above, from the warmth of the sun.

Durham Carnival, NC, originally uploaded by LahDeeDah Lu.

What a great day this was. I dared to go on this ride with my friend, Baron. He’s the one with the camera in the photo. This is one of my favorite photos and it got chosen as the photo of the week for the State of Things program on WUNC (North Carolina Public Radio) website.

Road kill and the zombie squirrel, originally uploaded by LahDeeDah Lu.

Ok, so this dead squirrel was on the road right by my kids’ school. I passed it and realized that I wanted to take a photo of it, so I stopped and turned around. Just as a turned around, I saw a squirrel walking very slowly across the road… at first it looked drunk. I thought the dead squirrel had come to life… or better yet, turned into a zombie. You can imagine how excited I suddenly got… but then I realized it was just another very slow squirrel, and that dead one was a little more up the road.

It also made me think that maybe there is a family of very slow and depressed squirrels who contemplate suicide regularly.

That’s my son inspecting the squirrel.

um… that’s a kiss , originally uploaded by LahDeeDah Lu.

I was honored to be able to take photographs at a friend’s wedding. I have posted some of the photos from this wedding in my wedding gallery.

http://www.luzitafrancis.com/weddings/

, originally uploaded by LahDeeDah Lu.

The manager of a tire retreading workshop was gracious enough to let a group of photographers (friends from the Raleigh Flickr group) and me inside and take photos.

You can see the photos I took here:
http://www.luzitafrancis.com/projects/franklintontire/