The Remembrance: A Tragedy in One Act
August-September 2007
5 1/8 x 4 3/8 inches
8 signatures of 2 sheets (32 pages with 18 final spreads)
brown paper grocery bags Coptic bound with hemp twine
Month: September 2007
The Remembrancer Finished (Finally)
The Remembrancer: The Third Eye
collage (anatomical illustrations, slide mount mask, child’s dress pattern, diary key, altered Polariod, and yearbook photos) with Neocolors II water-soluble crayons, coffee, pencil, and gesso
The Remembrancer: To Begin, Take the Measure
collage (anatomical illustration, altered photo, child’s dress pattern, architectural blueprint, and book fragments) with Neocolors II water-soluble crayons and gesso
The Remembrancer: Circles and Circles
collage (magazine illustration and yearbook photos)
The Remembrancer: The Bee Chorus
collage (slide mount mask, soap wrapper, child’s dress pattern, and poem fragment) with Neocolors II water-soluble crayons and gesso
And we would have trouble
in picking them out
Babycake!
I’m probably the last person on earth who hasn’t seen this, but just in case, I thought I’d post it. Wow!
Title of the Day
All the facts about South Africa, 1976. It is 62 pages long and measures 21 cm. tall. I’m guessing that the title is a just a wee bit overly optimistic.
Drip Drip Drip
It rained and rained and rained last night, thankfully right after I’d gotten back from my evening Unionville run. At one point, it was so windy and rainy that when I looked outside, I couldn’t tell what direction the rain was going. There were just swirls and clouds of thick grey everywhere. Thankfully, it settled down quickly.
I waited until the rain slacked off, then went downstairs to do a load of laundry. When I got to the laundry room, there was glass on the floor. The globe from the ceiling fan had shattered. There was also water everywhere, because the back wall, where the dryers are vented, was leaking. All over the electric meters! Drip drip drip + electricity = bad!
In other news, my last post got stuck in la-la land, and the RSS feed is not picking it up. Hrmf!
More Cemetery Blogging
Come Ye Blessed
Grace Rutherford
Died Mar. 19, 1901
Aged 24Y 11M 4D
Elmo Son of
J. R. & G. Rutherford
Died Jul. 26, 1901
Aged 4M 13D
I wend back to the Mount Gilead cemetery earlier this week, intending to take another look at what appeared to be a veteran’s headstone. I got sidetracked looking at infants’ and women’s graves, though. This one caught my eye. It wasn’t until I got home and did the math that I realized that Grace died not in childbirth, as I’d assumed, but six days afterward. Her son, Elmo, lived for four and a half months. I assume Grace’s death was related to giving birth. I wonder what killed her son? Disease or malnutrition?
Something else that caught my attention is the lay-out of the graves in the cemetery. Most of them are in orderly rows, but in the older section, there are doubled rows, where the headstones are either stacked one in front of the other, or staggered slightly. There are also half rows of children’s and infants’ graves, which I thought was clever. The first row of graves is right up against the dry stone wall, with at least one headstone facing the wall. I have no idea whose grave it is, because there isn’t enough space between the stone and the wall to see the inscription.
Thompson
Silas E.
1866-1949
Mary A.
1871-
Where the heck is Mary?!
The rest of my Mount Gilead photos are here. I did a little Googling, and it appears that the church was founded by a member of the Skirvin family, which would explain the plethora of Skirvins buried there. Supposedly they are linked in some way to Hoagy Carmichael.
Low Light Close-up Tip
Harvestman Spiders (mating or fighting?)
Crane Fly and Moth
Both of these photos were taken in low light. The first one turned out a little blurry and grainy, the second, much clearer, but in need of some tweaking of saturation and contrast.
I have a higher end cheap, consumer grade digital camera. Meaning, it’s pretty decent. It’s flexible, has a nice lens, and the color tends to be pretty good. However, it’s not a DSLR, and it’s incapable of doing as good a job as a high-end camera. I’d like to get a digital SLR some day, but even the cheaper ones are way out of my price range. Besides, I just can’t justify spending that kind of money on what amounts to a hobby, so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about my current cameras, in order to get as much out of them as possible.
One of those things I’ve been working on is figuring out how to get usable close-ups in low light conditions. The problem is that low-end automatic cameras don’t allow you to control the shutter speed. If you try to take photos in low light conditions, you are either forced to use flash (ptoui!) or a tripod (not always possible), or your image will be blurry because the shutter stayed open too long, trying to accommodate for the insufficient light. It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t territory.
But! You can trick your camera into a short shutter speed without the flattening effect of the flash. All you do is set your camera to close-up/macro mode, compose your shot, then, before pressing the shutter release, cover the flash with one or two fingers[1]. Et voila, the shutter is fast enough that your image is sharp, but the flash is not allowed to flatten and wash out the image.
One problem, though. Your image will be a little dark. Because it is sharp, though, you can correct this in post processing. There are several ways to go about it in Photoshop, including levels, curves, saturation, and color balance layers
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[1] You can also put a piece of electrical tape over the flash, but then you’ve got adhesive residue on your camera, and that’s no fun. Something else that might be interesting to try is to use colored fabric (silk scarves or layers of dyed cheese cloth) over the flash.
Fungi
These fungi were growing on a tree stump. I nearly decided not to photograph them, because there were much cooler red fungi on the other side of the stump. But those photos didn’t come out, so boring white fungi are all I have to offer.
Tin Roof and Flag
Nests
I thought I posted these here, but I guess not. The other morning, while I was in the shower, Harriet dragged the comforter off the bed, into the living room, and made herself a nest. Miss Brown is all about Teh Comfortables, but it was 5am and a little early for me to find it amusing.
Nest-making is something she does fairly regularly. Her most amazing nest was made from two brand spanking new bags of pine cat litter. I thought for sure that cat litter would be of no interest to her, so I left them sitting beside the couch when I went to work. I came home to a mound of cat litter with a Boxer-shaped depression in the center. Again, not very amusing!
Last week’s nesting was not a singular event. When I got home, this is the sight that greeted me.
She’d dragged two blankets from a Rubbermaid tub in my bedroom into the studio, and built herself a cozy little nest in the middle of my studio floor.
Not bad, considering she doesn’t have opposable thumbs.
red paper boat 