Category: Nostalgia

Day 35 – Lamp

Lamp

Things kind of fell apart at the last hotel in France because the internet was so slow I couldn’t even upload a picture. So, now I’m playing catch up. This light fixture was captured in Carcasonne using the Sweet 50 on a camera walk around the Cite (sic) walls. I don’t really remember how I processed it all those days ago but I believe there was a vignette involved.

Day 21 – Levi’s

Levis

So my guidelines for this project are that I have to post an image that was captured within the 100 days, not necessarily on the day it is posted. Ideally it should be processed on the day posted. Today was a busy day and I decided to go back to the Jacksonville images to see what came up. I photograph this sign almost every time I go to Jacksonville, sometimes more successfully than others. Sometimes with cars or trucks parked in front of it. Sometimes with the lamp post included, sometimes not.  I buzzed by this image the first time through but then I decided to work on it and see what I could come up with. I added saturation and clarity, pumped up the saturation in the blues and greens to help the image int the circle come out more, cropped and adjusted the perspective. Then I took it into Topaz studio looking for a little more vintage look. This was captured, by the way with the Edge 35. The focus has a slight diagonal going from Copper Riveted to the CO’s. But, as you can see it goes off into blur at the top and bottom which is just what the Edge is supposed to do.

 

Day 7 – Give me a ring

Telephone2

So, how fun is this? I went to breakfast this morning at a restaurant in Newport called La Maison, which I highly recommend by the way. It is a little off the beaten path a block from 101 in a neighborhood they are now calling the Deco District after about three Art Deco style buildings in the area. I decided to take a walk with the sweet 50 and stumbled upon an antique store that specializes in old telephones.

I learned a lot about the telephone industry and snapped away with the Sweet 50. The out of camera image was pretty dull so I kept heaping textures on it to try and get some color into the background. I wasn’t completely happy with it so I took it in to Nik Color Efex Pro for a border. Well I had been experimenting with maximum detail on an early image so Nik offered that up to start me off and I went “that’s what I’m talking about.” I added my signature because this is more of a digital art piece than a photograph.

Day 3 – Typewriter

Typewriter1

I’ve been a little annoyed with Facebook lately for insisting on telling me what activities my friends were interested in attending. However, this weekend was the Barnstormers Vintage Fair at the Expo and I would not even have known about it if  my Facebook friends had not expressed interest. So score one point for Facebook’s invasion of my friends privacy.

I decided to take the little walk around camera with the Sweet 50 Lensbaby attached. Sweet 50 is arguably my favorite Lensbaby. It gives sweet spot of very sharp focus and then fades off into blur. But just to make things interesting you can swivel the lens to determine where the focus will be so it doesn’t have to be right in the center.

I cannot ever walk by an old typewriter without taking its picture. So I have images of at least 5 or 6 typewriters along with many other interesting things from the fair. The Sweet 50 gave them all an interesting twist. I also scored some fun props for still life photography so stay tuned for those to show up somewhere along the line. I had to limit myself to what I could carry back to the car in one trip. Otherwise, I might have gone bankrupt! (I know I’ll be kicking myself for not grabbing one of those vintage windows when I had the chance! But they were heavy and it was a long way back to the car.)

Anyway, this typewriter (which by the way was sold right after I photographed it so I’m glad I pulled the camera out of the bag when I did) took a trip through Topaz Studio 2 to enhance the vintage look. Then I used Nik Color Efex Pro to add a grungy border.

Water Bucket Bodie

WaterBucketw

I’ve been neglecting the image of the week again as I have been working furiously on a scrapbook of images from 2018. Ten more pages to go. But I challenged myself as I go along to find images that would look good processed in black and white. I really like how this one turned out. In color the bucket kind of got lost in the building. This was captured in Bodie, California.

Old Car, Bodie, California

OldCar

I had a fun morning shooting the old cars and buildings in Bodie, California, a ghost town I have wanted to visit for some time. I’ve seen this car in my pictures of Bodie so I was on the lookout for it. Shot with the Canon M3 and an 18-150mm zoom. I was shooting most of the interiors with my Lensbaby Trio28 because it came with a polarizing filter which made it easier to shoot through the windows. You can see more of my Bodie shots on my travel blog at http://jeannehoadley.com/Travel. Enjoy.

Where it all Began

Camera4w

In spite of it being Nature Photography Day I have been playing in the tiny studio again.  I was inspired by an online workshop in still life photography. The background is from a photograph I printed and put behind the scene. My Dad’s old Brownie Camera and a book my Mom gave me when I first started taking pictures at about age 12. Took it through a couple of Topaz programs to get the vintage look. I think I may have to print this one to hang on my wall.

Day 85 – Applegate Valley

AValley

But I, Too, Want to be a Poet

But I, too, want to be a poet
to erase from my days
confusion & poverty
fiction & a sharp tongue

To sing again
with the tones of adolescence
demanding vengeance
against my enemies, with words
clear & austere

To end this tumultuous quest
for reasonable solutions
to situations mysterious & sore

To have the height to view
myself as I view others
with lenience & love

To be free of the need
to make a waste of money
when my passion,
first and last,
is for the ecstatic lash
of the poetic line

and no visible recompense

-Fanny Howe

So, the fog finally cleared, only because it is so windy it blew away and so it’s still impossible to do any outdoor photography. I’m not feeling too inspired for the studio either so I started backward through the files and got to November 17 before I found something I liked. A nice scene from the Applegate Valley. There used to be a huge white barn on this site but sometime in the past two years it just vanished. At least they left some of the old farm equipment. I got a couple of new poetry books today so instead of looking for something to fit the photo I just paged through until I found one I liked.

Day 83 – Feather

FeatherRSw

Nostalgia

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

 

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

 

The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

 

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

 

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

 

-Bill Collins

 

 

Well, the sun is trying to come out but not having much success. Last I looked the temperature was still in the 30s. So, I finally decided to see what I could come up with in the studio. All summer, on my walks I was picking up feathers. I have quite a collection so tried out one with an old book. Then did some magic in the computer. I googled nostalgia poems and came up with this one which gave me a chuckle and decided to use it even though it is a little longer than I generally prefer.