best of 2011: still life and windows

Blogger uploaded the pictures for this entry in the order I shot them in, throughout the year.  I decided to leave them that way.  It seemed fitting somehow.

Happy New Year everyone!

More lovely pictures after the break!

Best of 2011: Portraits

It's been a good year for portraits. Tons of friends and families, and friends with families.
I've found babies are especially fun to photograph.  They're ridiculously spontaneous.

It was also the year I finally started getting decent portraits of my best friend, Ann.  I've been trying to photograph her for years, and they've all been less than satisfactory.  Either I was making it too "arty" or she was too conscious of the camera, and subtracted some of her personality from her face in order to "pose."  Somehow, we both became comfortable enough, and I got some we both really like.
I also managed to get a couple good pictures of my father, who is also hard to photograph well.

this is my mother, working on pottery late at night.  I doubt she even knows I took this picture.

 smooches,

 smooches,

smooches!

 The thing I've noticed about photographing new mothers, is that their attention is so completely not on themselves.  Their life seems to be one unending vigil, overseeing their child.

 charming isn't she?  I love how her face looks like rubber.  We were in the middle of her engagement shoot and all the smooching was making her giddy.

best of 2011: Landscapes

I've been sifting through the photographs I've taken this year, deciding which were most successful, which ones have something in them worth exploring further.

I take a lot of photos of people, and these ones are the ones that end up copied to a disc, shown at family gatherings, or printed out.
However, I also take other pictures.  I shoot what I see, and I'm not always gazing at people.  Sometimes I'm gazing off into the middle distance and finding something there that is well worth capturing.

These pictures don't get shown off so much.  I keep them in a file on my computer, edit them at my leisure, and critique them later.  I don't have many people around me that I can discuss the relative merits of a photo with, so I have an interior discussion with myself about its composition, lighting, whether it captured what I saw, whether it still captures my interest, and originality of the subject matter.  It's good practice, and keeps my mind fresh.  Most importantly, it fills up that well inside of me: the one that I must pour raw beauty into, lest I run out of beauty to pour out.

Some of these photographs are more successful than others.  Here's the ones that I feel have been most successful this year, organized by subject matter into different posts.  Here's the landscapes:

dream a little dream

A few days ago, I stumbled across a picture of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (of Finding Neverland fame)  and just loved the soft femininity of it.
I put the photograph in my photography inspiration folder, vowing to shoot a picture of a woman that looks as dreamy as that.  Then, when sorting through my photos, I found that I already had.

It's a funny old world isn't it?

I found the portrait on a blog run by one of the librarians of the Beinecke Rare Book Collection.  It's a lovely blog, full of interesting pictures and book related tidbits. I stumbled across it while doing a google search on wombats, of all things.

Count the Blessings that are Real.

"If I cannot bring You comfort,
Then at least I bring you Hope.
For nothing is more precious
than the time we have, and so
We all must learn from small misfortune.
Count the blessings that are real.
Let the Bells ring out for Christmas
at the closing of the Year!"

-Hans Zimmer, "At the Closing of the Year"

That quotation has been running through my head the past couple weeks.  I think it's because my family is going through a period of change, and all of the discomfort, confusion, and opportunities that come with it.  We don't have much comfort this Holiday season, but a great, great deal of hope.

This is a strange Christmas in my family.
We are at once more, and less than we have always been.

We have 3 new spouses, 2 new neices, and a couple more little ones on the way.  Our year has been such a year of abundance.
However, all this abundance has caused certain deficits.  Less time for doing homemade stuff, less flexibility in schedules, leading to fewer scheduled family events.  Less energy leading to less baking, less decorating, or any of the other finishing touches that make Christmas feel that much more...Christmas-y.

However, some traditions remain constant.

We always decorate our parents house on the 24th.  This is because, as my parents explained to me when I was very young, before the 24th, it's not Christmas; it's Advent.
This lead to such a pleasant sense of expectation throughout the month of December, and to marvelous memories of Christmas Eve.  Each year, we cheerily cover every available surface with decorations of every kind, ranging from beautiful victorian angels collected by my Grandmother, to the cheesy, paper things we made while still in pre-school.

So tomorrow, despite all the changes, we will be decking our halls, and preparing the way for the Christ-child in a blaze of light and joy.

In preparation, my sisters and I went to the Christmas tree farm to pick up some swags and a wreath for our parents door.  It was lovely, and they were so very silly, so I felt the need to share.

Story telling, and stories told.

My little brother Paul reading "Bearskin" (ill. Trina Schart Hyman) aloud.

My 7 year old Korean niece is creative, a trait she inherited from her mother.  Her drawings are full of detail, and are beginning to show active observation of the world around her. Most kids are busy drawing "symbols" of the world around them. (ex: the lolly-pop shaped things every child knows is a tree) My niece is beginning to observe reality, and incorporate details from it into her drawings. For example, she drew me as a princess surrounded by a cloud of diamonds, and she got my hair-do right. I don't have much contact with her, because they live, quite literally, on the other side of the world.  However, I do whatever I can to fan that spark of creativity.

I've sent her art supplies, but have been waiting until Christmas to send her some inspiration.  Various of my siblings pooled our money, and bought her the same books that inspired and enthralled us as children.  Some are still in print, but a fair amount of them are not, which makes finding good copies an "adventure."  We picked some books illustrated by Trina Schart Hymen, The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, and of course, some Dr. Suess.
Now here's the problem with our little scheme: my niece can't read english.

She can understand spoken english pretty well, though. So, I decided to record family members reading the books aloud to her.

I knew it would be a good gift to give, and one full of familial tradition.
For me, opening these books feels like coming home, the same way Southern Ohio hills are what looks like home, or the way bread rising smells like home, to me.

I was read to a lot as a child, and it was a wonderful, warm experience. My father read to us a great deal.  By the time I came along, many of my siblings had learned to imitate my father, and read aloud to the children younger than them.  My sister Mary was particularly enthusiastic about this.  There were probably hundreds of nights where she read to us while we worked on the dishes. We loved being read to, but hated doing dishes. We liked to stop mid-dish and just listen. I can still hear her saying "I won't keep reading unless you keep working."

I made sure that my father was one of the ones who I recorded.
He read "The Sleep Book" by Dr. Suess.
It's a book I can remember being read to me by his father.  Apparently my grandfather read to my father when he was a little boy, and so my father learned to bond with us by reading to us frequently.  We would perch on whichever of his limbs were most available.  Little kids got precedence over big kids, especially if it was a picture book.  The best spot, if he was lying on his stomach on the floor, was straddling his back, and peering over his shoulder at the book.

Teach me to love.

I'm preparing a christmas package for my brother, who currently lives in China with his Korean wife and daughter.  It should, if all goes reasonably well, be mailed out today.

There's so much love being shoved into that box, along with the various gifts. There's love layered in the pages of the children's books, and nestled in the folds of the wrapping paper, laid to rest beneath the bows.

Some of that lovingness is made up of handmade gifts. Handmade caramels.  Cards hand drawn by my other neice, handmade earrings, and the most beautiful tiny hand-knit sweater and socks for the new baby they're expecting.  My sister B made the sweater, and pictures of it are probably up on her blog, or will be shortly.  I also decided to give my brother a folio I made, to store precious images and/or documents.

It was a cozy, warm process, making what I did, and then packing up my carefully wrought gifts with those of my family.

Inside the folio, I nestled the program from my sister's November wedding, and a print this:

I miss my brother, and his family quite a bit.  It's too much love to keep to myself, so I must export it, and hope they receive it in good condition, all intentions properly interpreted, unmarred by the distance it must travel.

A gift for you.

In the spirit of the season, I made a printable to share with you.

In a fit of post-wedding-I-can-now-do-whatever-I-want-with-my-spare-time madness, I staid up until 3 am the other night, scanning in the fronts and backs of Victorian, Edwardian, and 1920s era postcards my mother has collected over the years.

Then I realized that I actually have no spare time to do whatever I want with, because Christmas is right around the corner, and most of my Christmas presents this year have to be shipped, which means I can't exactly spend an all-nighter the 24th, getting them done. Well, I could, but then they'd get them for next Christmas instead of this one.
(Which is exactly what's going to happen with some handmade aprons I promised my gal-pals last year. Sorry ladies.)

So, I've had these lovely Victorian images, and decided to turn the only Christmas related one into a free, printable Christmas card for you peoples.

My printer was behaving, for lack of a more technical term, wonky, so it may print a bit more vibrantly for you.  It kind of glows in an old-timey sort of way.
to download the printing proofs, follow this link.

The fonts I used are Maxinitiale and Heart Sweet Heart.

I also just love this postcard, not for the image, though the holly is lovely, but for the mushy things that the sender scrawled all over every available bit of the front.
Here's the original:

In case you're finding it hard to read, it says:
"With best wishes"
"Doz oo love me yes?"
"Oh, you kid!"
"How about this? xxxxx xxxxx"
"From you little Honeysuckle Tessie"

I don't know who this Tessie is, but she sure wasn't afraid to let the whole world (and the post-man) know about the depth of her affection.
She sounds perfectly lovely and enthusiastic.  Plus, she has lovely penmanship.

Stars, keep the watch. When night is dim
One more light the bowl shall brim,
Shining beyond the frosty weather,
Bright as sun and moon together.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the star, is on the way

I've liked posting these verses.  However, I've gotten impatient, because I have at least 3 post's worth of things to show you.  Some are things I'm working on, and some are just beautiful.

So, I'm posting both verse 3 and 4 tonight, and then tomorrow I get to finally give you a free printable of Christmas cards.

people look east... verse 3

Birds, though you long have ceased to build,
Guard the nest that must be filled.
Even the hour when wings are frozen
God for fledging time has chosen.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the bird, is on the way.

The artist is Ernesto Cailvano.  I stumbled on him while perusing butdoesitfloat.com, one of my favorite art blogs.

There's just something about his imagery that I quite like, every time, whether he's doing a floral study, or something abstract and geometric.


Have I mentioned how much I love using Google to search for images?   I frequently download hi-res images so that I can look at them again, organize them into collections, and hopefully use them as inspiration for later work.  It helps to have them culled out, rather than loosing track of where they are.
The problem is, once I've done so, I frequently lose track of who the original artist was or where I found it. Or, sometimes, I got it from a location where the source wasn't properly sited in the first place.  Enter Google to Save the Day, and let me learn more about the art I love.

another ernesto Cailvano link.

his artwork at the Marker Heller Gallery.

People Look East... verse two

Furrows, be glad. Though earth is bare,
One more seed is planted there:
Give up your strength the seed to nourish,
That in course the flower may flourish.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the rose, is on the way!

Glorious, aren't they?


the roses are scans I took from Edwardian era postcards, so they're copyright free.  Feel free to download and use them for whatever suites your fancy.  
I think I'm going to turn the red and yellow roses in to the background on my computer.