The hard work is finished.

The hard work is finished. The first exhibition “Our neighbors Unmasked” is scheduled for mid-September. More details will be coming soon!

Confinement en France

When I was a kid, I loved walking home from grade school down what was then a country road. Today its a college campus, but in those days it was farm land backed by the distant Pioneer mountains and filled with alfalfa and clover. I loved to hear the meadowlarks and watch red winged black birds playing in that field.

While the COVID-19 confinement has proven hard for many around the world it has given me the unique opportunity to once again experience the simple wonders of springtime. I am confined in a very small village in central France but I can take short walks for exercise. A five minute walk just up the hill and onto a plateau, and I’m in pristine farm land with only a few dirt roads that meander through fields of new crops, spring lambs and isolated farm houses. No traffic, no noise, no people and suddenly I can hear the birds again and smell the lilacs in the fresh air again and re-live my childhood just a little. It inspired me to create this short video, a birds eye view of some of the places I get to walk through every day.

The quiet and peaceful French countryside.

Nouveau quartier

Voici une courte vidéo de ce que nous considérons comme l’une des plus belles régions de France.

Christmas at Chatsworth

Once upon a time in the far away land of Derbyshire was Chatsworth, a beautiful house full of treasure. Each year the Chatsworth staff stitched, wove and built Christmassy bits and bobs to decorate the beautiful house.

This year the rooms and hallways are filled with stories both old and new…Cinderella, Princess and the Pea, Sleeping Beauty, James and the Giant Peach, Mary Poppins and Aladdin and the Arabian Nights to name a few.

Check out the picture gallery. May visions of sugarplums dance in your head!

Jour du Souvenir 2018

This Old Town

The present church was built in 1895. But when the old medieval church was demolished, 80 large foundation blocks from the Roman period were discovered. They were arranged so as to serve as foundations for a monument anterior to the medieval church, and were all that remained of the Merovingian church that had been established here in the mid-5th Century. 

Excavations revealed 4 types of blocks forming 3 monuments, a 9 meter tall votive pillar to the Roman God Jupiter, a polygonal temple building and a sacred altar and temple dedicated to the Goddess Minerva. They date to the late 2nd Century AD.

These Roman blocks can be seen in the Minerva museum in Yzeures sur Creuse. This nice little  museum is just a few steps from the site where the temples were originally erected almost 2000 years ago.

Tips on preparing your artwork for display

Decisions about mat and frame style and color are really a matter of personal taste, but here are some tips to consider when planning to display your work. And these are all suggestions based on mistakes I have personally made when framing my photographs.

1. Standardize your print, mat and frame style and size. In the long run it will save you money. No matter how established you are, you will likely have pieces in your show that do not sell. If you have standardized your print sizes, matting and framing, you can re-use the mats and frames for new work. [note: it will be easier to remove artwork from its frame if you do not permanently seal the back of the picture. If the picture finds a buyer then the back can be sealed prior to delivery.] 

2. Use archival acid free "heavy" mat boards. 6-ply and even 8-ply mats will give your work a richer feel and the heavy museum boards will offer more protection for your prints. Make mats that open like a book with linen hinging tape and do not seal the mat window shut. 

3. Cut the window openings 1" (aprox. 25 centimeters) larger than the dimensions of your print. It is easy to center them when mounting and the larger window will create a double mat effect.

4. Attach hanging eyelets on left and right sides with a picture wire. (not sawtooth style hangers.) Sawtooth hangers are weak and will not support larger, heavier artwork. They also show above the profile of many frame mouldings distracting attention from the work. 

5. For wood frames always drill the small holes for the hanging eyelets about 1/3 of the way down from the top of the frame. If you don't use a drill you risk cracking the wood and that could result in a picture falling off the wall when the hanger fails. 

Properly displayed artwork will increase the likelihood of it finding a buyer. It is a reflection on the professionalism and integrity of the artist. 

Karma

Recently, I heard a little story about the church in Yzeures. I don't know if it is true, but it should be. Right above the two windows in the belfry there is a romanesque arch flanked by two gargoyles. 

When the bell tower was being finished (or renovated) it seems there was a man in the village who was either an atheist, or someone who had issues with the church or the nature of its construction. Every day he would berate the workers and generally criticize the substance and quality of their work from the sidewalk below. So to get their revenge the artisans decided on a plan to immortalize this man who was giving them so much grief. On the left side they crafted a gargoyle with the face of a pig. On the right side they made a gargoyle with the face of the man in the village, immortalizing him on the side of the church forever.

So, is the man with the handlebar mustache an atheist, or just a local curmudgeon? 

a few images from Turkey.

Early morning frost on raspberry vines, Silver Falls State Park, Oregon.

...tis the Season

For this years Holiday cards I was inspired to print original images in the darkroom. To give credit where credit is due, many thanks to Steven Louis Ray for the great idea. The time spent in the darkroom was like meditation for me.

These images were made in western Iceland in winter. The solitude and beauty of this place at this time of year is hard to describe. The "ring road" which is the main highway around the Island is so deserted there were several times where I was able to stop in the middle of the road, set up a tripod and make several images over the space of 15-20 minutes, and never see another car. Iceland in the wintertime is the perfect place for a lone traveler to rediscover oneself and see unparalleled natural beauty. "Peace on Earth" just about sums it up, and that is the wish I have for all during this season and in the year ahead.

Film Noir Anyone?

I’m lucky to be living in the same town as Blue Moon Camera, a retailer dedicated to analog photography and one of only four venues worldwide who have the alpha release of Ferrania P-30 film in stock. So, I picked up a few rolls this film along with some interesting advice from Zebidiah Andrews at Blue Moon about what I should expect to see in my first images. 

Ferrania P-30 is a panchromatic black & white motion picture film packaged for still photography. Its the same film that was produced during the 1960s. Ferrania boasts that it has ultrafine grain and a high silver content. I shot my first roll on a walk in my neighborhood. The weather varied between bright sun and dense cloud, with alternating high and low contrasts. I exposed the film at ISO 80 as recommended by Ferrania and developed it in ID-11 (1-1) for 10 minutes at 20C. The film was scanned on an Epson V500 scanner using the same universal settings for all the shots. While the negatives look good to me, the scans of the low contrast subjects were muddy. These were shot at a local park and needed some level adjustments to make the highlights pop (see below, right). The shots with bright sunlight looked much better but the real test will be printing the negatives in the darkroom.

I also did a preliminary zone density test and found my step V density to be 0.60 above film-base fog, which is optimum for printing with a condenser enlarger. But I’m printing with a diffused-light enlarger so would like to see a little more density in my negatives. Zeb warned me that the shadow detail would be less than what I was used to, and he was right. The shadow areas dropped off pretty fast, but P-30 does have a nice film noir quality to it. It might be a good choice for street photography where high speed is not needed, but where one wants an edgy rendition of tones. I gravitate toward landscape/nature photography and prefer a much broader tonal scale most of the time. I’ll change my ISO on the next roll to 40 and adjust development to try and add more detail in the shadows without blowing out the highlights. Adjusting the exposure/development for more shadow detail might make me like this film a little more. Its certainly worth a try.

Autumn in the mountains.

Autumn in Oregon

The colors of Iceland in winter.