Lullabies and Love

I am now the proud aunt to a smooth cheeked, dark eyed nephew!

Last night, I was on the phone with the Proud, Shell Shocked Father aka my brother.  He asked me to teach him a few of the lullabies I know.  I have a whole library of lullabies rattling around in my head, from singing my little brothers to sleep at least once a week during their pre-school days.
My dear brother had only been able to think of one, which he had been singing to his son over and over when he gets fretful.
It's the same simple melody that our mother sang to us.

Mom has a funny, undeveloped alto, and was shy about singing when we were little.
Our father is the singer.  He has a fine tenor that has only grown sweeter over time, if less strong.  He also has an ear for new melodies and harmonies, plays guitar, and knows i-don't-know-how-many songs, including all the words to every traditional christmas carol ever.  He's the one who more or less taught us all not only to sing, but to love music, and most importantly, to love singing together.

However, we demanded that mom sing to us too, and not just dad, so she learned precisely one song, which she would sing over and over at bedtime.  It's the words to the "Hail Mary", set to a simple melody.My memories of my mother singing to me are so sweet.  They are all the more sweet because she sang even though she's not very good.  She gave out of her lack.  So I am not surprised that the one lullaby that my brother remembers clearly is that one, and not the ones my father sang, dear as they are.
If I could only remember one, I'd pick that one to remember too.

one more pic because I just can't resist!

Collecting Inspiration

"The artist is by necessity a collector; 

he accumulates things with the same ardor and curiosity [with which] a boy stuffs his pockets. He borrows from the sea and from the scrap heap; he takes snapshots, makes mental notes, and records impressions on tablecloths and newspapers—why one particular thing and not another, he may not know at the time, but he is omnivorous. He has a taste for children’s wall scrawling as appreciative as that for prehistoric cave painting."

                                                                                                 -Paul Rand, American Graphic Designer

I can't tell you how much that quote comforts me.  I look about at my welter of possessions with a sort of ruefulness.  And so many of them are art-related, which means I find it almost impossible to get rid of them.  
They are either inspiration, tools, raw material, a project in flux, by-products of a past project, or simply interesting (and therefore indispensable to the art-making process.)  It is such a comfort to know that I am not alone in this need to accumulate interesting stuff. There are thousands of people like me who do the same thing, pulling together the intuitive raw material which will become their art.


I am daily thankful for the internet, and for the many many people who post pictures of the things they find beautiful, or the work they are creating.  
I I never tire of looking at other artists and designers websites.  They inspire me and challenge me, and teach me to think in ever-more non-linear ways.


As I wander from link to link, I bookmark pages I find useful, and download pictures that I want to use later for design sources or photographic inspiration.  I thought I'd share what I've been looking at recently:


Perhaps because of the gray weather and the tentative spring plants, I've been lusting after color. Bodacious, glorious color.
These photographers and blogs have been providing my fix:

clockwise from top left: 1. a picture of lichen via chanel no. fly  2. Eric Cahan, sky series via Butdoesitfloat 3. Sarah Ryhanen, being unusually vibrant, via the Little Flower School. 4. Eric Cahan, sky series.


I've been thinking about color and its application to photographic portraiture.  One way to start playing with color is to put colored films over your lights, but I'm not sure how interested I am in that.  There are other, more subtle ways.
One of them is to put the subject against a brightly colored backdrop. Having the backdrop be a field of color also can eject a huge amount of emotion and energy into an image. Also, If the subject is close to the backdrop, then the light bouncing off of the backdrop will bounce onto the subject, creating a color cast to the shadows on the person. 


I have dreams of photographing people against fields of vivid red and seeing the way it interracts with their personalities.  However, few people's skin tones can survive infusions of red.  It makes them look flushed, like they ran around the block a couple times before you snapped their picture.  Pink on the other hand, makes everyone look good.  Baby blue is also frequently nice.


Here are some pictues I've been looking at that have been giving me ideas.

I've done about 4 different types of searches, trying to find the source of these images, but to no avail.  I'll keep looking, and update if I find them.

Here's a few other things I'm loving:

• dreamy, interesting paintings by Phillip Haager, found via Butdoesitfloat.
• Delia Creates.  She's expecting a baby girl, and has done a series of beautiful, unfussy DIY tutorials getting ready for her little one.  My sewing machine broke halfway through sewing a strawberry baby hat based on her tutorial, and now I have to wait 2 whole weeks to see what it looks like! So frustrating for me.
• Aunt Peaches.
• She always makes me laugh.
• Jessica Hische's design work.  You've seen it most recently on February's exquisite Love stamp.

P.S. Sorry for the rambling quality of this post.  I blame it on my cold.  
Also, as you can see, I've been experimenting with making gridded digital collages, especially when citing another person's image.  What do you think?

Black Velvet and a Little Girl's Smile

Last week, I did a short portrait session with my sister Mary.  She needed a good picture for a work related website.
It was late, and I was feeling lazy, and I knew I only needed one good shot.  So I whipped out my favorite go-to backdrop: black velvet and a tension rod.

After a little silliness...

 well, actually a lot of silliness...

 ...we got the pictures we wanted.

I love black velvet. I love the way it looks in a picture
Black velvet just looks so classy every time.
It soaks up light, so that all you get is a pure, unadulterated black wherever it is, and beautiful detail wherever it isn't. You can swaddle babies in it, and just get their adorable arms and legs and squidgy faces.  You can put someone in front of it in a black shirt, and they will instantly look artsy.  If you put a woman in front of black velvet in a black shirt, they always end up looking like an opera singer: all soul and possibility.

It's only downside is that it's a little fiddly to get a "hair light" or "back light" to work properly, because the velvet won't bounce any light onto the back of the person.  For all of you I just lost due to the usage of technical terms, a back light is the light that, when you're lighting a portrait, lights the back of the person to add definition to the edge of them and separate them from the background.

Black velvet is also killer for taking pictures of objects.
This is Mary's most recent project, a crocheted recieving blanket for our nephew, who is due any day now.  She forgot to take a picture of it before she gave it to me to put in a package, so I took a few for her.

Lovely, no?

Speaking of things wrapped up in dark, velvety beauty, here's what the moon looks like tonight:

Solid as a rock, and just as heavy...

The best sort of sunday afternoons always feel warm to me, regardless of the weather.  The warmth comes from the egg-yolk yellowness of the late afternoon light coming through the curtains, the warm tea or coffee I slowly sip as I go about my tasks, and from the calm tempo of family life on this holy day of rest.

I'm sewing bassinet sheets for my sister. The machine I normally sew on is in the shop for the first time in its life.  After 34 years of family service, the tension knob finally decided it had enough and died, smack in the middle of a baby hat I was making. I miss it's stretch stitches, but not much else about it.

You see, I dug out my grandfather's sewing machine, and am sewing with that instead.

It's a lovely machine, and somehow very masculine.  Perhaps the masculinity comes from its solid steel construction (not even an ounce of plastic), and the spare elegance of its lines.  It reminds me of a well maintained vintage 50s car.  It runs like one too, with a quiet, efficient hum.
It reminds me so much of everything my grandfather was.  He must've bought this machine early in his marriage, somewhere in between 1940 and 1947.  My parents got it from him when my grandparents moved into an assisted living community, and eventually gave it to me.  I imagine he was attracted to the simplicity of its design and it's ruggedness.

The son of a brilliant carpenter, my grandfather was a consumate craftsman.  He loved clean lines, warm woods, the intricacies of machinery, taking care of things, and my grandmother, all with a quiet, practical passion.  He was constantly making or fixing things in his immaculately ordered workshop in the basement.  He's the first person I've ever seen plane wood, and the only one outside of a historical reenactment.
Thinking of him always makes me think of the word "husbandry."

Both my grandmother and grandfather used this sewing machine, but Grandpa maintained it, as he maintained the rest of the house, furniture and grounds. When I opened the carrying case for the first time since we got it, he had tidily included the manual, a spare belt, and the necessary screwdrivers for changing the needle and other maintenance.

The motion of the machine is smooth and easy, the tension perfect.
It ceaselessly makes stitch after precise stitch.

Low, the winter is past...

...or at least all the crocuses think so.

Today is almost preposterously balmy.  There were thunderstorms last night (thunderstorms! in February!) and more thunderstorms are predicted for this afternoon.  However, sandwiched in between the tumultuous weather, is this little slice of spring bliss more suited to May 1st than Leap Day.

I simply had to capture the loveliness and share it with you.

The crocuses are little colonies of woodsy color in amongst the weathered seed pods and stalks of last year.  They are so small that they just add grace notes to all the browns and dull greens without displacing them.

There are signs of new growth, too.  My sedum is sending up its first little clusters.  It will be a verdant, hanging green carpet come April.

 Mom puts plastic cutlery in some of her planters and beds to keep the stray cats out of it.  It works, but it always look as if teenagers had been playing pranks on us.

The daffodil buds are already blushing yellow.  They might start blooming as early as next week.  Below are some of my favorite tulips.  They bloom a variegated pink, but they have such fun leaves!

Isn't the striping at the base of this crocus delicious?

I germinated some bachelor's buttons seeds that were at least 3 years old, expecting about a third of them to sprout.  Instead, they ALL did.  I'll just have to be extra careful when I transplant them outside, teasing them apart so I can space them properly.

 they're so twisty and cute!

I've been growing bare-root plants in hanging containers (mostly glass soda bottles).  Their vibrant green has cheered me through the long winter months.  I love the sinuous curves they make.
They seem to really like their glass vessels.  They have grown and thrived.

Last, but not least, are my bonsai seedlings.  I only got two of them to sprout effectively, but I look forward very much to nurturing them into adult bonsais.

Grace notes.

I took a photo walk today around my neighborhood.
It was and was not pleasant.  The day was beautiful, for February, but my neighborhood is not.  There are so many well-built houses, but many of them are abandoned and actively decomposing.  There is litter everywhere.  The houses that are lived in and kept up look pretty good, though a lot of them are obviously maintained on very little money.  The decomposition is rampant, with as many as three condemned houses in a row, or half the houses on a block.

These houses used to shelter families.  They each had character and were quietly proud of themselves.  Now...

Anyway, the pictures make me too angry, so I'm not showing them to you yet.  It was hard enough just photographing them.  Instead, I'm showing the beauty I found, even among the wreckage.

It's a somber, melancholy beauty, mostly because the only thing that's looking rich and luxuriant right now are mosses clinging to gnarled tree roots or shady bits of lawns.  It's the end of february, and the bare stalks of winter are slowly disintegrating into incoherent muddiness in preparation for the new growth of March and April.
The damp and gray matched the neighborhood, and my mood.

editing wedding pictures

I've been finishing the final edits for my sister's wedding photography.

It's been an interesting time.  I learn more and more about the nuances of color correcting as I go.  It's a cold sort of task, all sliding bars and numbers, rebounding numbingly off of my visual intuition.
It's frequently frustrating, because of the way each color is intertwined with the next, and the way the color casts of light sources interact with each other.

However, there are moments of obscure triumph.  They are moments that no one else is impressed with, because the best result is an ordinary photograph, but a perfectly exposed one.

Then, there are the exceptions.  While I'm processing away, there are a few photos where I spontaneously try something, just to see what would happen.
I should explain: I don't much believe in digital editing "tricks" like sepia toned vignetting, fuzzing out the edges, only saturating a single color, or randomly turning things black and white because it looks more "arty." For me, if one of my pictures needs a "trick" to look interesting, then it's probably not a very strong picture.

However, some pictures cry out to be black and white.  Others go from ordinary/distracting, to stunning with selective saturation.  I'm still not sold on random sepia tones.

These pictures are the exceptions, and incidentally, were the most fun to edit.

In the original, the background of this is all bright greenery.  I feel the desaturation lets you focus on his face.

I like these pictures so much better cropped.  Without the crop, they're just snapshots.

 there was a picture hanging on the wall. I felt it distracted from the subject.

 It's a subtle edit, but I crowed aloud when I got the color balance of the people and the yellow lit ceiling agreeing with one another.

 I can't decide which version I prefer.  I like them both for different reasons.

I loved recovering the blue of the sky, with the streaming clouds. Such lovely weather, for November.

This one is edited too, but I won't tell you how. ; )