Category: images

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Photo-etching course

oil can

Above are the vital accoutrements of the etching press snugly attached to its inside leg.

I didn’t get to make a plate today, the first of the three Saturdays of the course, but learnt a great deal about preparing images in Photoshop for the etching process. Fascinating. I’m (badly) self-taught on Photoshop Elements. It was a real education seeing the full programme used by a professional.

Most interesting about the overall process is the conjunction of ancient and modern. The computer high-techery brought together with such centuries-old pieces of equipment as powdered resin and feathers.

In the course of this week I’m going to prepare a couple of images on the computer here at home in the hopes that I’ll be able to make a plate and a decent print next time.

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Frizzy photography

There is an additional variable to be taken into account if one takes pictures and has unruly hair. Not only is the direction of the light important, so is that of the wind.

frizzy hair, following wind

Those bits above are the particularly self-willed sections which, despite the locks being firmly brushed and fettered, insist on their freedom. With a brisk following wind such as there was this morning my already deteriorating sight is further obscured by a frizzy filter.

Not only sight. The “finger in front of the lens” problem easily encountered when using a small camera is compounded by the “entire picture obscured by hair” effect. On one side of the frame the grotesque balloon of a giant out-of-focus digit complete with disturbing close-up of its nail, on the other side a smear of some sort of striated material like bleached washed-up seaweed.

Luckily my lens is as proud and phallic as a trumpet so only the very longest wayward clumps make their way into the edges of pictures nowadays, unless I set out to capture them. And, I confess, I have sometimes used photoshop to remove the evidence.

The sky was profoundly, glintingly, infinitely blue this morning. The sun was low but strong.

sunlit whippet

The dogs enjoyed their walk.

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The starving cat and the pizza Margherita (with a knitted back)

Cat is no longer denying himself food. He’s now so hungry that some time during the night he scaled nearly seven feet of bookshelves to hunt down the remaining half of a pizza Margherita I’d put up there out of harm’s way because there was no room in the fridge. He loves tomato, when he’s himself. Also bread. And cheese.

He must have knocked the whole thing off its perch and this morning we came down to find the board and covering on the floor but not an atom of pizza. Unfortunately I assume that, appealing though it is to think of the animals forming a cartoonesque team to predate on the leavings of humans, as soon as the pizza hit the floor it immediately disappeared into Maizy. She is certainly looking more than usually rotund today with that combination expression of self-satisfaction and hang-dog guilt that can only be seen on the face of, yes, a dog.

A final (this time round at least) trip to the vet early this morning. Another injection and a pill. He’s put on weight. He’s playing. He’s curled, as I type this, in his accustomed position on my lap with his head in the crook of my left elbow.

hmmm feeling a bit better now

His spine is still knobbly but there’s a layer of flesh, albeit thin, between it and his fur, which is back to its usual extraordinary silky softness.

So, one gets better, another gets worse. Secondspawn, who was home yesterday with a cold and sore throat, is home again today feeling worse. Still, nursing the sick is conducive to knitting. Yesterday I finished the back of the austenesque. It’s only short and aran weight wool knits up in seconds.

the back of the austenesque

On, on with the left front!

The possibility of a fur trim still remains. If Cat doesn’t stop eating outrageously expensive tins and sachets of choicest organic talking fowl hand reared by virgins in the garden of eden and get back to the dry stuff that comes in 15 kilo sacks, and soon at that, then he’s for the collar and cuffs.

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Cat update (with a knitted tail)

He had three more injections at the vet’s this morning, two pills and some kaoline paste. She was encouraged that he’d eaten a little last night. Said we could hold off on the drip until this afternoon and if he ate more during the day then maybe he wouldn’t need one at all.

Eating – refused sardines this morning before going to the vet. Deigned, some hours after we got back home, to eat something resembling duck paté but only when fed to him in a small, pre-warmed dish placed on the chair under the table he was occupying having earlier refused it from his bowl at room temperature on the floor. Hg – please attempt the most humiliating caption possible, although I’m afraid this isn’t a very inspiring picture.

cat eats

Puking – zero.

Crapping – twice, noisome and viscous at best but no sign of blood.

Vet bill to date – £356.41

Chances of saving money by cancelling pet insurance – zero.

Chances of Cat living on duck paté for the rest of his life – zero.

Chances of Cat ending up as cardigan trimming if he doesn’t go back to eating cheap dried food – very high indeed.

Despite the suggestion from acb below that it is demeaning not to knit a garment purpose designed for a cat-fur trim I am still of the opinion that the current WIP (the austenesque) would be ideal for such adornment. The yarn in question is thick and warm and has a multitude of white hairs in its makeup which would be well accentuated by Cat pelt, as can be seen in the picture below.

austenesque wip back

For those of a knitting disposition – the Kochoran tension square came up at 14 sts x 20 rows to 10cms on 6mm needles, so close to that of the recommended yarn (Louisa Harding Castello, 15 sts x 20 rows) that I started in good heart on the recommended needles. It may end up a little wider than the advertised garment but that is definitely a fault on the right side.

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Louise Bourgeois rocks. Hard.

Too tired for words. Rather breakable right now. But it was just wonderful to go to the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Tate Modern with a wonderful friend. And… the camera!

cell 1

There is its shadow poking, in a rather sinister fashion, into one of Bourgeois’ “cells”.

Here’s part of another cell. That blue and that red seem to be very important colours in Bourgeois’ personal palette.

cell 2

I hadn’t seen any of her sewn fabric sculptures before. Incredibly powerful.

head

Apparently she met my all-time sculpture hero, Constantin Brancusi, in 1950. The inspiration is clear.

brancusi phase

Couldn’t resist the (belated) halloween appeal of this hanging sculpture, at least from this particular vantage-point. Move in any direction, though, and all was changed utterly.

hanging

The big (huge) spider sculpture which was commissioned for the opening of the Tate and dominated the Turbine Hall is back, straddling a substantial area outside the building. It is, of course, called Maman (mother). This spider is small, about the size of my camera, but was something I could relate to powerfully nonetheless.

spider

And here’s a picture that isn’t someone’s art, merely a street. But I liked the way the building and its reflection talked to each other.

mind the gap

It is so, so good to have the camera back. And I shall be going back to the exhibition if possible. It’s unmissable.

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A great wave of happiness

I mentioned earlier that the poet George Szirtes has contributed to the online culturezine qarrtsiluni.

I’m absolutely delighted that the editors have used one of my images to illustrate his most recent contribution, Say, which is published today.

I think it’s a really beautiful poem, please read it if you have time 🙂

(Actually delighted doesn’t even come close. But it will have to do since I’m trying to be grown up.)

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Flying saucers in the sunshine

Well that was a particularly gloomy previous post. Today has been a bit weird. I made complicated childcare arrangements (it’s half term and the boys are on holiday) in order to go to a particularly important meeting on the outskirts of London at 11am, got there and discovered that it was actually supposed to be at 1pm. I couldn’t hang around because 1pm was the time the childcare arrangements expired.

At least it was a lovely sunny day.

flying saucers

Remember flying saucers? Sweet bubbles of thick rice paper enclosing a rustling sizzle of sherbet powder? I always thought the best way to eat them was to stick them to the roof of your mouth with your tongue and allow them to dissolve slowly, the sharp fizz of the sherbet working its way slowly but ever more insistently through the glutinous layer of deliquescing rice paper.

Obviously there’s some uncultured oik in the neighbourhood who seriously lacks discrimination in the finer things of life. These sad, broken saucer superstructures had been discarded on a bench at the station, eviscerated and left to, well, dissolve probably, eventually.

But they looked quite pretty all the same.

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Ooooh Skitchy!

Applications

Uploaded with Skitch!

Not itchy, Skitchy! like shiny and sketchy! I take a lot of screen grabs and only ever use shift-command-4. Never have got the hang of any of those complicated screenshot thingies. I downloaded one once and it was so complicated I couldn’t even work out how to do the most basic things with it. This really appeals because of the kind Aussie who gives me a personal three-minute video tutorial and because I can do childish things like drawing multi-coloured facial hair on pictures of people I don’t like.

The fuzziness of the image above is my fault, I made it smaller (thus degrading the quality) thinking it would be displayed at those dimensions whereas the above is a thumbnail (adding another layer of quality degradation to the mix) linking back to the original on my Skitch page.

Also, to be vaguely serious for a moment, it’s another possible tool in the armoury of steganography as a freedom of information tool (a great word I only came across the other day in this Slashdot post which discusses whether bad people are using the technique).

My broken tooth is beginning to hurt. I’m about to administer whiskey.

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Not entirely eyeless

It’s true that I feel adrift and discombobulated without my camera. There is no stand-in whilst it’s being mended since I traded in all my other gear to get it.

But… I have my phone! which has a camera more sophisticated than my first digital snapper. So all is not lost. I do not have to attempt to assemble words, slippery slithery creatures that they are, wriggling down into the sediment of my mind and leaving only blurred coiled casts which disperse with the following moon.

This morning on the way to school secondborn breathed a barely-audible “wow” as we turned a corner in the park. The sight was superb. Long, low, warm light reflected off thousands of tiny spheres of silver scattered thickly across the grass which was punctuated by gleaming pools of orange leaves lapping around the trunks of flaming trees.

“It is beautiful isn’t it”, I murmured in response, appreciation of the sight mixed with maternal pride at the obvious acquisition by spawn of the beginnings of an aesthetic sense.

“What is?” he asked, absently. Turns out he’d been contemplating the workings of a particularly sophisticated replica gun he’d seen on the internet.

dew

This was the nearest I could get to capturing that dewy moment, some time later on the return leg. And only after my carefully selected leaf had been trampled over by not one but two marauding hounds.

Every day I pass this thick clot of what I take to be white road-marking paint spilt onto the pavement.

big hit

At some point before it completely dried I presume an itinerant piece of newspaper blew over and got stuck on it. The negative newsprint has survived months, if not years, of feet and weather, its message tantalisingly incomplete. Only today did I actually pull out the phone and take a picture of it.

ready to pounce

This camouflaged and predatory van, on the other hand, is not a familiar resident and is probably visiting from a neighbouring habitat.

Recently on one of the miscellaneous photoblogs I follow I read the following wise advice: Learn to enjoy beautiful moments when you don’t have a camera with you. That’s something I aspire to. As is a practical grasp of point 97: A better camera doesn’t guarantee better images.

Cough.