Author: -N-

Time to Pause

Time to Pause

Over the next few weeks, expect more pictures of the local scenery. When I went out, at last able to do more than a hobble because of my foot, I went up to the botanical garden. With the seasonal changes come color changes, even here in Southern California. The local garden is always changing, and autumn and spring are the seasons with the most changes.

On this trip, I was determined to finish up a couple of rolls of film – the Olympus Trip 35 had Fuji Superia 400 in it, and the Agfa Ambi Silette, loaded in 2019, still had a lot of Kodak UltraMax 400 to be used up. The Agfa, too, had never been tested – it was one of those vintage cameras that intrigued me, so, being me, I bought it. The Trip 35 and the Agfa are small, but compared to the Trip 35, the Agfa is a tiny tank. A nice tank, but still a tank. It has no lugs, either, so I had to use a wrist strap that screws into the tripod mount. Awkward, but it works.

I always play with my photos, digital or analog, in Lightroom. Post processing is part of the way I see photos – like pictures and paintings – I want them to show what I want them to show, not what is straight out of the camera. One of my friends says this is cheating . . . ah, well. It’s autumn and time to show those colors and textures!

Wheel Barrows

Wheel Barrows

I busted a toe about 5 weeks ago and am finally able to wear more than a piece of tape around my 3rd and 4th toes and tight shoes. I have been hobbling around and taking, slowly and surely, short walks. I think I am out of the woods for the most part, and last week I was able to walk, very carefully, along the trails at the botanical garden. These wheel barrows reside behind their maintenance building, and I rather liked their colors and lines, so neatly stacked upon each other.

I took these with my Olympus Trip 35 and Fuji Superia 400 film. I picked up the film today and scanned and edited in post. The little Trip 35 does a great job for a camera ca. 1967. Some of the roll didn’t advance right, but when it did work, it did a pretty darned good job.

I save a lot of money on film since I don’t process it myself by scanning my own images in either my vintage Pakon 135 scanner, Epson V600, or Pacific Image scanners. Here I used the Pakon and my old eMachine XP laptop. It’s a pretty easy process. Once scanned, into Lightroom, and the rest, as they say, is history. There is something about film, even when edited in the digital darkroom, that a totally digital experience cannot replace – not even those great Fuji films mods in the X100V.

A View of the Past

There is a channel on YouTube called “Life in the 1800s” that brings to life the proverbial days of yore. This video, from a voice recording made by Julius Franklin Howell, gives a view of the Confederate side of the Civil War, in which he fought as a young man. As today is Thanksgiving in the US, I think about our history, real and fabricated. What we think today is not necessarily what was thought when history was being made. This was a fascinating video, an oral history, of someone who was there.

Abandoned in Winter

Well, this one sure had me going for a while! The idea was to avoid angles, and look squarely into the building, and so I did . . . and then came along the Esposo who said, “Nay! This does not work!” And, damn, if he wasn’t right! So, I had to pull out some gouache to overlay a roof on the tree in the background, and make the roof look rather beat up and weathered, with beams and such visible. Sort of a success.

And, I wanted to paint falling snow. Falling snow in a photograph varies from white, sharp dots to elongated shapes. Time to experiment. I used some gouache, diluted, and applied some streaks – I wanted a sense of wind blowing from upper left to lower right, with snow pushed by the wind. It was okay. So, I got a fan brush and made a wet mess of the white paint and splattered and splattered and splattered. I even got it my coffee. Luckily the paint isn’t poisonous, so I shall return.

Overall, this is not a great success as a painting, but it was fun. I rather like the composition with the tree in the very front of the painting. The barn is w-a-a-y off as far as believable perspective, but such is life. But, I have been sticking to my snow themes, and perhaps it is time to do one more and then move to a different season different subject, or put it away for a few days and get back to sewing or doing photography. I can now hobble forth on my partly healed broken toe.

Arches rough, 140#, 10×14. Watercolor with a splash (well, several splashes) of gouache.