On Sunday afternoon, scattered along about a quarter mile of our road, we noticed an invasion of snow people.
They seemed to rise phoenix-like from the slowly receding snow pack. Or maybe they stand guard like the Moai monoliths of Easter Island. Take your pick of metaphor!
We are grateful (for this bit of fun) to the suspects involved in their construction; you know who you are!
I would not, in any way, describe myself as a portraitist.
However, some times one needs to get out of one’s comfort zone. Thus, I have volunteered to make portraits at the Antrim Senior Center for Valentine’s Day.
Last week, I bought a lighting set (LED lights, stands, umbrellas, etc.) suitable for portraiture.
This afternoon, with a 33 degree drizzle happening outside, I decided to get some portraiture practice. I set the lights and camera up in the basement and corralled the closest subject… ME!
The last of these photos is modeled after a late nineteenth century ancestral portrait which hung in my in-law’s house. The stern look and the unusual pose always intrigued me.
These days, I often walk the mile between our house and the bridge down by the lake.
Some times, I take my camera along on the walk.
This sort stretch of rural road contains much of interest if one looks closely.
Passing vehicles, leave traces on our snow covered dirt road that would be missed if it were paved.
There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.
To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.
To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week-end in town astride a radiator.
The words above are the first three paragraphs of the entry in Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Journal titled “Good Oak”. Among the many memorable passages in this classic work, this one is always foremost in my mind.
Recently, Joan and I had occasion to visit the Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
These folks are the caretakers of the Leopold family’s “shack” and of the Parthenon. While we were visiting, I was delighted to find that the site of the “good oak” whose demise under the saw Leopold goes on to describe in his essay had been marked for posterity.
Thursday evening I found myself in Brattleboro with some time on my hands.
The only camera I had with me was my digitally “enhanced” camera obscura. Thus, this is what I used to make photographs; all were made within a couple of hundred feet of the Vermont Center for Photography’s front door. (The last two photos were conceived as a diptych.)
Yes, you read that correctly… this post is about onions, well really photographs of onions!
A couple of days ago Joan harvested all of the onions from the garden. They are sitting on a tray in our breezeway drying.
Yesterday, I borrowed a couple of them to use as models. I spent an enjoyable few hours (split between yesterday afternoon and this morning) playing with the lighting and making photographs.
This is the fourth year*, I have picked an “Adams Dozen”… that is, twelve of my favorite photos for the year.
The process seemed more difficult this year that it was in years past. I “exposed” 16,914 frames in 2015**. On my first pass through, I ended up with nearly eighty candidates for this years “Adams Dozen”.
Here is my final selection:
* See this post for the first year’s selection and for a more detailed explanation; see this post for last year’s selection.
** This is maybe a bit more than the recent past. My LightRoom catalog says I exposed 12,832 frames in 2014 and 11,735 frames in 2013.
This afternoon was middle-of-summer hot and sticky. I headed to the cool of the basement to make a photograph that has been rattling around my skull since about February.
The subject of this photo is the only piece of nine cords of firewood that we did not burn this winter. When I came across this piece of wood, I placed it on the mantel instead of in the stove.
Truly a fine piece of New Hampshire firewood!
A few years ago (before I retired), I bought a book titled Book + Art. Handcrafting Artists’ Books by Dorothy Simpson Krause. At the time I read through it but I did not find the time to experiment. Now, I have the time… so I have been experimenting!
My proximate motivation, was the series of “Autumnal Abstracts” I made this fall. I was interested in finding a way to display a set of images from this series and a small book seemed like a good solution.
My first usable book (Photo A1, below) began with two small photos printed on a half sheet of regular inkjet photo paper which was then folded in half. This makes for a final a page size of 4.25″ x 5.5″. Three of these folded sheets were then sewn into a card stock cover.
This construction is very nontraditional…the open ends of the folded sheets are placed at the crease of the cover and sewn in place. More usually, the creases of the pages are place into the crease on the cover for sewing. However, the “odd” construction worked pretty well and I did not need double sided inkjet photo paper. One small snag with this construction is that the book is very stiff… it does not lay open by itself. (This is why there is not a photo of the inside!)
I was so pleased with the result that I made seven more copies for an edition of eight!
After my “success” with the Autumnal Abstract series, I decided to try a similar but larger book (see photo A7) with photos from my “Flow” project. The construction is the same as above but I used 11″ x 17″ sheet of paper; again printing two images per sheet. This results in an 8.5″ x 11″ page when folded in half. For a cover, I used a very nontraditional material… a sheet of thin “craft foam” from one of the chain stores.
Emboldened and wanting to experiment further, I switched back to the Autumnal Abstract series.
The next version (Photos A2 and A3) of was a more traditional construction. I made, using traditional methods, a small booklet (4.5″ x 6″) out of bristol board and I glued photos on to the pages.
In looking though my stash of photo paper, I found that I actually had a package of double-sided paper. It is not high quality paper but it sufficed for another experiment. I printed two photos on each side of a half sheet of this paper and trimmed them so that the pages were 5.25″ square when folded in half, Three of these folios were stacked together for the final book. I added a card stock cover and bound them all together with a traditional pamphlet stitch. The result (Photos A4 and A5) is a very traditional looking booklet.
About this time, I visited Zephyr Designs, an art supply store over in Brattleborough, Vermont. I came back home with a number of sheets of decorative paper with which to continue my experiments!
Photo A6 shows one result. The construction is similar to the second version described above except that I again”went square” (6″ x 6″) and the cover is made from a piece of heavy and woody paper rather than simple card stock.
Long thin (i.e. panoramic) photos are often difficult to display traditionally (i.e. matted and framed). In thinking about this “problem”, I decided that an accordion book might be the solution… so I experiments some more!
I won’t bore you with all of the failed experiments. Suffice to say that most photo papers have coatings that crack when folded and that a number of the resin coated papers contort into all sorts of interesting shapes when glued to more traditional papers! (Plastic coated papers don’t react to moisture the same way as regular papers do.)
My first successful attempts at accordion books involved printing on regular watercolor paper (a half sheet that measures about 7″ x 20″) and adding decorative paper covers to the end panels. (see Photos A and B below; these are showing up at the end of the series for some reason…. #%@$ computers!)
This was a good start, but not every photo looks good with the muted contrast one gets when printing on “plain” watercolor paper. So I continued my search for an ink jet paper that would work in this context. I also was interested in completely covering the back of the print (i.e. not just adding covers) with decorative paper.
I think that I have got all of the problems solved! The remainder of the photos below show the front and back of five different accordion books (measuring about 5.75″ x 16″) that I have made over the past few days.
Last week, Joan “won” an auction for a 40″ loom.
It was donated to the Grapevine (a social service agency located in Antrim) and included in their recent fund-raising auction. Thus, a good cause was supported.
She picked up the disassembled loom on Sunday afternoon and by midnight that evening we had it assembled even sans manual. Not bad for two people had never really examined a loom up close before.
On Wednesday, we were finally able to make the short trip to Harrisville Designs, one of our local purveyors of all things “fiber”. Joan needed to get some “stuff” necessary to use a loom but that was not among “stuff” that came with the loom. (As you can see, I am up on all the technical jargon associated with weaving.)
My presence on this excursion was not essential. However, I decided to accompany Joan on her trip for a number of reasons…
1) To get out of the house during this stretch of miserable weather.
2) To, hopefully, keep the expenses associated with the “stuff” to be acquired as low as possible. This, of course, leaves more cash available for photography stuff tools!
3) To have a chance to photograph interesting “stuff”!
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