Monday morning momentum missing

Posted by VickyTH on January 30, 2012
Posted in: photos, photography, Travel, Newfoundland & Labrador, photo, nikon D70. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment
Canonized

(Focal length 18mm, Shutter: 1/1000, Aperture: f4)

Kick-starting the week is harder in winter. In summer, I leap out of bed, game for just about anything, but this is January. January and February are the months in which I officially celebrate the wonder that is coffee.

I also get myself the heck out of the house as much as possible, which seems counter-intuitive, but actually works. Plus it gives me something to talk about here, which is far more fun than saying, “Today, I stared out the window and moped. How about you?”

These pictures were taken in Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, a few days ago. There’s a church there, the Church of St. Peter & St. Paul, that has four upright canons in front of it, forming the gateposts. Atop these formidable historic munitions stand four saints. The standard joke is that they are the “canonized saints,” which is, of course, true regardless of the saint’s pedestal. Still, it’s the local joke and tourists love it.

I had two purposes in bringing up the canon of Bay Bulls. Three, actually, if you count posting the photograph at the top of this post. But two real points. Firstly, the picture below… look at it.

DSC_3952_032

Church of St. Peter & St. Paul and their electrical lines. (Focal length 18mm, Shutter: 1/750, Aperture: f11)

It’s not bad, right? Nice church, unique feature out front (canon with statues, always fun) and the white contrasts nicely with the sky, et cetera. Except for those blasted power lines. Now I know I could spend a deal of time taking them out, but I left them in this particular shot for a purpose.

Dear municipal planners and folks who decide about electrical services, please take note. If you have a limited number of  major tourist photo opportunities in your community (and while there are others in Bay Bulls, this is the one to which the buses gravitate), for the love of those saints there, run the bloody lines on the other side of the street. Or behind the building. Or anywhere else. Really.

I’m not so arrogant as to say that all such decisions should be made with a thought as to the aesthetics but…. actually, yes, I’m going to say it. For tourist attractions, consider the aesthetics. It will make you a better person.

The other point I wanted to make is about the numerous canon that can be seen all over Bay Bulls. Ask locals and they’ll point you to bogs, headlands and coastlines where old canon, relics of historical confrontations in the 1600 and 1700s rest easy. Rather than reiterate them here, I suggest you have a look at Jason Crummey’s post of a few years back. Some may have moved and there may still be more to find, but it’s a starting point.

One poor girl statue (Mary, maybe?) appears to have lost her head at some point. On Monday’s, I can empathize.

_DSC3942

(Focal length 70mm, Shutter: 1/1500, Aperture: f4.5)

Keeping space

Posted by VickyTH on January 30, 2012
Posted in: craft, nikon D70, photo, Photographers, photography, photos, studio space, work space. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment
One Ring

One Ring (to bring them all). (Focal length 70mm, Shutter: 1/500, Aperture: f4.5)

One of the perils of working in your own home is that your workspace and the household’s space often blend and merge in ways that challenge the sanity and work habits of the occupants. I know some craftspeople manage to completely segregate their work and living quarters, but I’m just not one of those. I’m not sure that I want to be. I like spinning in the living room.

There’s also the issue of mental space. I feel strongly that mental and physical space are intimately connected. I believe that working through creative details on a project is infinitely more difficult when you don’t physically have anywhere to work that is dedicated to the task.

I get claustrophobic quite easily (I’m working on this – I want to scuba dive some day), so closing the door to my studio doesn’t give me the warm, fuzzy feeling of shutting the world out, but rather the cold, clammy feeling of panic that screams things like, “You’ll die in here!” or, “You REALLY have to pee. Then you need coffee. Then you should clean the bathroom. Or you could just OPEN THE DOOR, you nincompoop. (Note: My mental self can be a little abrasive to my mental self sometimes. I’m used to it.)”

So shutting myself in a box doesn’t work for me.

But open doors are dangerous things.

They allow for the passage of matter.

In both directions.

This means that my craft stuff drifts across the house, into the living room and kitchen, settling on flat spaces everywhere. It also means that household items gallop full-speed into my studio and keel off all over, draping the spinning wheel with dress pants and running gear and dumping boxes of Christmas décor all over the floor.

Mondays are, for me, days of reclaiming space. I put things back where they belong. I take my crap out of the living room and take the living room (or laundry room – why do people take their clothes off in here??) out of my studio.

Recently I bought several sets of white shelving for the studio.It was a real eye-opener to me to finally have places for everything. Do you know how much less cluttered rooms are when there are places???

Shelves, full of stuff.

My design boards often sit atop the white shelves, although if I felt the need, I could stack another set of units atop the extant ones.

I also painted a cabinet white (which also sealed the wood in, preventing the acidity of the wood from affecting the textiles therein).

Old cabinet, reclaimed for wool and fabrics. More shelves. Spool rack #1. Toolchest of fabric paint on floor. Little wooden man, bought in New Brunswick at a flea market, but originally from Bavaria, sits on shelf.

My bags of raw fibre are in the closet. I have a filing cabinet for papers and trays in which projects and their oft-itinerant bits are stored while in-progress.

But it was the extra shelves, all of the same sort, that made the difference. The space now feels organized and full, but not insanely and derangèdly cluttered and stuffed. The consistency of one type of shelving unit, in a neutral colour, makes it possible for this chaotic space to seem organized since it pulls all the disparate items together.

And speaking of pulling, I must haul that drum carder over to the work table. I have a project to finish!

Sun or moon?

Posted by VickyTH on January 29, 2012
Posted in: nikon D70, photo, photography, photos. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment
Eerie

(Focal length 60mm, Shutter: 1/250, Aperture: f11)

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. It’s the sun, in mid-afternoon. I shot this one while skiing this afternoon in Pippy Park. And hey, I remembered to change the camera to ISO 200!

The neutral-density filter let me use a slower shutter speed and a wider aperture than would otherwise have been possible.

I’ve often wanted to capture that strange darkness that comes in the winter when the sun dips behind a cloud. It’s like an eclipse of sort, that diminishing of the least light into an evening of mid-day. This is a deliberate exaggeration, of course, done by underexposing the image. This is how it came out of the camera. All I did was crop it.

Here in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (Longitude = 52° 43.8′ West, Latitude = 47° 34.2′ North), we get only9.4 hours of daylight (10.5 if you count dusk and predawn). This is a rough time of year if you have a solar dependency. Troglodytes enjoy it, I suppose, but even trolls require the services of the sun, if they don’t like the thing itself.

Sunset now is at 4:57pm. Sunrise is at 7:32. We get up in the dusk and get home in the dusk. We run in the dark, unless we can sneak a day-time session in.

Weekends in the sun are even more important at this time of year.

If you’re wondering what sunrise and sunset times are in various spots in Canada at different times of the year, the National Research Council has a neat little page that will tell you.

Reflections on a watermark

Posted by VickyTH on January 29, 2012
Posted in: copyright, nikon D70, photo, photography, photos, professionalism. Tagged: , , , , , . 4 comments
DSC_3733

(Focal length 70mm, Shutter: 1/1500, Aperture: f8)

I have generally not used watermarks on my photos. I’ve never been entirely keen on how they look and didn’t really think that anyone would bother nabbing any of my shots for use elsewhere.

I was wrong on this second account.

People have rather liberally filched my photos from my website. A lot. Without attributing them to me or linking back to me in some way. And while I’m a nice person, this gets my back up just a tad.

Now truthfully, I’m pretty okay with people using my photos and directly linking back to my Flickr account or website, since by linking to me, they are effectively crediting me.

I’m also pretty laid-back about groups like charities using my shots. Anytime a not-for-profit group emails, asking permission to use one of my dog photos (for instance, for an SPCA fundraiser), I generally say yes and send them a nice high-res copy. These shots get a lot of requests and usage that way:

Whadda ya mean I'm in trouble?

Whadda ya mean I'm in trouble?

We're out of food!?!?!?!

We're out of food!?!?!?!

And I’m good with that. Great, even. When local community groups or small-scale tourist-generating community agencies come a-knockin’, I’m generally more than happy for them to use my photos for credit. The groups that I’ve dealt with have been really good about that, for the most part.

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

-attributed to Napolean Bonaparte

Incompetence. Or laziness. Mostly the latter, I believe, although the two are bedmates.

There have been a few times when my photos were used elsewhere, without credit, and without the user linking to me in any way. I’ve contacted a few and gotten everything from a profuse apology with the image properly credited and a box full of gifts (true story – I’ll tell you sometime. It ends well for everyone.) to no response at all.

Since I really haven’t the time or energy to track every single usage of my work down and since I choose to believe that people aren’t intrinsically evil, just often fundamentally lazy, oblivious to manners when it comes to strangers, and often lacking in the knowledge of Internet etiquette or coding, I’m stamping photos from here on in with my website address.

I know that some feel it detracts from the look of the photo. To that end, I’m making the watermark as unobtrusive as possible.

I also know that it’s perfectly possible for someone to obliterate the watermark digitally or crop the photo. I’m not an idiot. This won’t stop criminals from stealing my work (gosh, does that ever sound romantic, eh?).

What it will do is compensate for those who simply don’t know how to add captions to blog posts or who somehow download my photo to their hard-drive and can’t remember where it came from and then reuse it willy-nilly.

And I still have clean copies available for myself or for groups who might want to use them, with permission, of course.

Thoughts? Opinions?

Cabin Fever

Posted by VickyTH on January 28, 2012
Posted in: clay and pottery, craft, Humor, photos, sheep & turtle posts. Tagged: , , , , , , . 1 comment

I’m not entirely sure what happened. I thought things were going well. Everyone seemed happy. There was balance. There was unity.

Early this morning I wandered into the studio and saw this:

Uh-oh

A gift, from the turtles to the sheep. Gingerroot. Unusual.

I thought it was simply a generous offering at first. You see, the turtles are evidently used to more exotic foods than are the sheep and I simply assumed that they were sharing their cultural experiences.

Then I saw this:

Uh-oh

"Honeyed Lamb". Requires minced ginger root. Hmm.

It may have been my sudden gasp of horror or perhaps the sheep aren’t quite as oblivious as the turtles suppose, but I think the flock caught on.

Fast-forward to this afternoon. Things are escalating.

Uh-oh

Catapult. This. Is. Not. Good.

I think the turtles were surprised by the swiftness and concentrated sense of purpose of the ovine reaction.

Uh-oh

I'm not sure why they're hiding behind a can of paint. Frankly, I'm afraid to ask.

Who knew that sheep could work a catapult? Then again, how many houses have a sheep-sized catapult just lying around….

Uh-oh

Where there's a wool, there's a-weigh.

I’m really not sure how they’re going to get out of this one…..

Uh-oh

Ready, aim.....

… but I think I might go lock up the matches.

P.S. For newcomers, a link to more Sheep & Turtle Posts…..