Quercus Design

White Shell Valentine

2012-02-06T11:57:00.001-05:00

I think these are Common Dove Snails (Columbella mercatoria).

Shark Tooth Valentine

2012-02-04T12:04:00.001-05:00

Shark Tooth Valentine (available in my etsy shop)

I've made three valentines this year. This is the first one. I started out trying to make a heart out of sea urchins, because I liked the christmas tree I made with them and thought I might have a series of sea urchin holiday photos. They didn't work out well though - I didn't have enough variety of sizes - so I started pulling jars off my shelves. A box of mussel shells, mason jars full of little shells from Florida, several jars of white shells ... at the back of a shelf I found my collection of shark teeth. Aha! Fortunately it is a huge jar so I could pick out just the right shapes and sizes. It took about an hour and a half to sort them and make the basic heart shape.

How did I get so many shark teeth? Well, you know what a scavenger I am. Not just on the beach, but I also love yard sales and thrift shops. A few years ago I was visiting my sister in New Hampshire, and we went to a yard sale in an old barn. The owner had a huge copper maple syrup cauldron that I still remember longingly. But what the heck would I do with a cauldron? (More to the point, it wouldn't fit in the car.) Anyway, I dug around in the barn and way way in the back, buried under dusty boxes and spider webs, were five or six open cardboard boxes piled into each other, full of paper bags and shoe boxes. Everything was heaped with shells. I pulled them out into the daylight and tried not to scream while dusting off the spiders. The owner (who was in her fifties) said her mother had vacationed at the same beach in Florida for fifty or sixty years. She would bring the shells back every year, admire them for a while, and then dump them in the barn. (I could totally sympathize - I did something similar until I started photographing my finds, except I don't have a barn.) I bought the lot, and took them home to sort them and see what I had.

I ended up with many jars of seashells, and one huge jar of shark teeth. I wish I knew more about the teeth. I think a lot of them are fossilized. There are (or were, until my son snitched them) a few really big ones. I tried to count them once and got bored around 500, so there are over a thousand in the jar, ranging from less than a quarter of an inch long to an inch and a half. Some are broken, many are chipped, but there are still hundreds in perfect condition. Every now and then I pull out the jar and my kids and I play with the teeth. It is one of the few things about me that my teenage kids still think is cool.

And man, would I like to know what beach that woman went to!

A Long, Wandering Post in which I Have an Adventure

2012-01-18T15:36:00.000-05:00

If you are too cold, too hot, hungry, thirsty, lost, hurt, frightened, nervous, or in new territory, and you are not sure when things will improve, you are having an adventure. I say this to my kids when we're in the middle of something unpleasant like walking through a blizzard, and they usually roll their eyes, because when you are hungry and lost it sure doesn't feel like an adventure! To me, an adventure is an event that is no fun at the time, but teaches you something and makes a great story when you are safely home again. If you think about the adventures kids have in books like Treasure Island or Harry Potter, you'll see what I mean.

My latest adventure happened a few days ago when two game wardens knocked on my front door. I hadn't been expecting them, but I was pretty sure I knew why they were there. See, back in December I got an anonymous email. I had just opened a second etsy store to empty out my studio of all the collections that have been piling up, and one of the things I listed were the feathers I'd picked up on the beach over the years. Here is what I read:

Oh dear! Well, I followed the links and did some further reading and determined that there are indeed laws regulating the feathers of certain birds. The writer was obviously confusing the actual feathers that were for sale with the photos I sell. Most of my feathers were probably fine since seagulls (the common Herring Gull, that is) are not protected birds, but to be safe, I immediately removed my feather listings. The email left me feeling very uncomfortable: I really dislike anonymous communication. Why would someone hide their identity when sharing important information? Notice their faux email address even uses my own name. If you are reading this, my anonymous emailer, thank you for letting me know the law, and take note that I consider "anonymous" a synonym for "coward."

At any rate, when two tough-looking game wardens in very official uniforms arrived on my doorstep I was pretty sure my anonymous friend had been at work again. Sure enough, it turns out that around the same time I received that email, someone called the Fish and Wildlife Services' anonymous tip line, and reported me as a Game Thief! (A Game Thief kills game out of season or kills protected animals.) Now I am a little bit of a Goody-Two-Shoes and I get very flustered when I break the rules or am suspected of it. I got a detention once, and I've been caught speeding twice, all of which I found very traumatic, and that is the extent of my contact with The Law. So when the wardens told me why they had come, I'm pretty sure I turned pink or red or white or mostly likely an unattractive mottled combination. They were very very nice about the whole thing. They had already looked at my website and seen that I was a beachcomber selling photographs, and were pretty sure before they came that I was not killing birds. Once I got over the initial shock that some stranger felt so strongly against me, I brought them up to my studio to see for themselves, and we had a nice chat.

What I was left with was that most of the feathers I find are probably not affected by the law, but that it is hard to identify them so safer to assume that they are. It is illegal to possess protected feathers, but photographing them is fine. So is selling the photos.

I was very impressed by the wardens - they were super knowledgeable and helpful, but I also got the feeling they were pretty tough guys, and I'd sure hate to break a law that would put me on their bad side! (Well, I kind of don't like to break laws anyway, but you know what I mean.) They gave me a great source for feather identification which I haven't had a chance to look through yet, but next time I do find a feather I plan to look it up as well as photograph it. And then put it straight back on the beach!

I have to confess that I have very thin skin, and I'm feeling very self-conscious now that I've had a couple of unpleasant emails. You know how an barnacle yanks its feathery arms back into its shell when it feels threatened? That's my first reaction. My second is to storm around telling people what I think in very strong words (inside my head, that is.) Then, when I calm down a bit and realize that it is only another adventure, I write it all down for your amusement and edification.

Day Mountain Hike on New Year's Day

2012-01-11T14:15:00.001-05:00

We lazed around the house for most of New Year's Day, but the sunshine beckoned us out in the afternoon. (Well, it beckoned me, at any rate - the kids had to be bribed.) Day Mountain is a nice, easy hike, and you can go most of the way on the Carriage Trails (always a good option in winter when the ice makes rougher trails dangerous.)

The mountain was covered in frozen waterfalls and since the weather was warm, meltwater was flowing under the ice.

See the patches of lichen under the ice in this one?

The low afternoon sun made photography a challenge, but I couldn't resist the sparkling ice flows.

Hulls Cove, Maine; January 2, 2012 (Beachcombing series No.59)

2012-01-10T22:21:00.000-05:00

Hulls Cove, Maine; January 2, 2012 (Beachcombing series No.59)

It was the last day of winter vacation, and I had just dropped my daughter off at her friend's house for the afternoon. On the way home, I stopped at Hulls Cove to enjoy the warm spell and the fitful sunshine. The temperature was about 50ºF and the sky was overcast, but the tide was low, the sun kept breaking out, and the wind was not very brisk. I wandered over to the creek edge where it empties into the cove, and was surprised to see footprints in the mud. There was no one in sight. There were two different print sets, although I couldn't tell if they were walking together. One of the prints was bigger than mine, and I have big feet, so it was probably a guy. And they only went in one direction. As I wandered, I daydreamed about who else had walked there and why. A man and a woman, maybe, out for a romantic stroll. (In the smelly tidal mud? Maybe not.) Teenagers up to mischief? (On a midwinter mudflat? Unlikely.) Gotta be more beachcombers! (I wonder what they found?)

Further down the beach, where the mud gives way to firmer sand and small stones, I found signs that lots of people had been enjoying the mild weather on the beach, including a child's footprints playing a hopping and dragging game in the damp sand.

Ice

2012-01-04T08:21:00.000-05:00

Oh cool! It's the most awesome half-frozen mud puddle! Wow, this is amazing. I could stare at it all day. Seriously. All day. Ooh.

What, you don't see it? Look closer:

Frozen bubbles!

And bubbles trapped under the ice!

Wow.

I could do this all day.

Except ... brrr.

I think I might need some hot chocolate now.

Rock Stars

2012-01-03T19:55:00.000-05:00

These are by far the coolest shots I've ever taken at the school's Winter Concert. Usually the kids are lined up under ordinary fluorescent lights, but this time they did a grand finale marching around the gym with light sticks and funky rock star lights.

I love it when people shake things up a little. Three cheers for the music teachers!

Harborview Park, December 2, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.56)

2011-12-28T15:26:00.001-05:00

Harborview Park, Bar Harbor, Maine; December 2, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.56)

The Bar Harbor Harbormaster's office sits on a small wooden dock next to the Town Pier. It's a little tricky to get down there, and you have to watch the tides carefully to make sure you can get back, but not a lot of people bother, so there's a lot to see. (The Town Pier itself is built of enormous stone blocks, so you can't beachcomb under it.) There's a restaurant on the pier next to it, and it always shocks me a little to find so much restaurant trash down on the shore. Usually it's generic trash; lobster claw bands, bottle tops, plastic lobster forks, and so forth, but down here I find broken pint glasses with that particular restaurant's logo printed on them and other identifiable refuse. Makes me want to bundle it all up and bring it back to them! I think the oyster shell in the photo is also restaurant trash.

On the brighter side, the round bottle bottom (middle row) was a popular form in the late 1800s, so that's been in the water for a long time, even though it was broken pretty recently (very sharp edges). There's also an old Coke bottle (2nd row from the right) and a pair of binoculars (bet there was some swearing when those got dropped in the sea!)

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-19T22:51:00.000-05:00

Inspiration strikes at the oddest times, doesn't it?

I hope you have a lovely holiday season, whatever religion or country you hold dear.

Clam Dip

2011-12-15T13:50:00.000-05:00

knit Santa by Michelle Souza

The Bizarre Bazaar turned out to be an awesome craft fair, and I did even more shopping than selling, because I was surrounded by so many beautiful things. So instead of showing off my booth I'm going to show you little snippets of the things I spent the weekend coveting. I can't show you everything because so many of my photos were fuzzy, and all of my people photos were fuzzy too. (I was trying to work without a flash, with very mixed results.)

Antique button jewelry by Quench Metalworks

Fantastic little dioramas - I'll have to add the artist's name in later. Sorry! But you can always email Spruce & Gussy and ask.

Needle-felted elves by Patti Savoie, the other shop owner.

And here are Patti and Michelle, the owners of Spruce & Gussy, who hosted the Bazaar. Thank you, ladies! It was a whole lot of fun.

All the artists brought snacks and wine, so it was a real party. I made clam dip, which was very popular (in fact my daughter asked for a spoon) so I'm passing it on here. It is based on the clam dip in The Joy of Cooking, but I am a very improvisational and opinionated cook:

2 c. sour cream
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp black pepper ( I left this out because I don't like pepper.)
2 garlic cloves, minced (I went a bit light on this because I didn't want customers to be smelling garlic on all of us. Probably only one clove, maybe a little more.)
1/2 tsp salt
grated zest of 1 lemon (I also skipped this because I was too lazy to grate a lemon.)
3 to 4 scallions thinly sliced
1 c. chopped, drained canned clams (FYI, this works out to two cans.)
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce (I was very generous with the Worc. sauce because I like it. Might have been closer to 2 tsp.)
You can also add 1 tbsp prepared horseradish, which I think I will do next time.

Mix well in a large bowl.
Dab a little flour behind your ears, and try to look worn out with your labors.

Choosing Frames and Print Sizes

2011-12-14T11:55:00.003-05:00

photograph by Jennifer Squires (not Jennifer Booher!)

Here are a couple of links that will be very useful to anyone who wants to display photographs in their home. Jennifer Squires is a fantastic photographer who produces the most otherwordly landscape images. If you don't know her work, you are in for a treat when you go over to her website. I read her blog regularly, and recently noted that she has pulled together several very practical posts on framing and displaying photos. Each post is about a standard print size, and lists the frames available in that size from a variety of large suppliers, including Michaels and Ikea. She also has suggestions for displaying photos in that size. Definitely have a look - I've bookmarked all of these for my own reference:

8x10 Prints

11x14 Prints

Choosing Print Sizes for your Space

Added 1/5/12:

16x20 Prints

20x24 Prints

The Bar, November 17, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.55)

2011-12-13T13:14:00.000-05:00

This one is about a month old - I'd forgotten to post it! The weather had been very warm in November, but the day I decided to hit the beach it dropped to 42 degrees (F). It was overcast and damp with a brisk steady offshore wind out of the north. An occasional shaft of sunlight would break through the clouds and shimmer on the wet stones. I hadn't been out very long when I began to wish I'd worn long johns! Even the gulls, my winter companions, weren't as raucous as they often are. They sounded creaky, like old doors.

The Bar is a mix of stony sea floor and marine mud, exposed at low tide and linking the main island to Bar Island. It's not a great mix for sea glass - the glass tends to get mired in the mud for fifty years with minimal weathering, then when it is washed free it smashes on the rocks. I find an awful lot of very old broken glass. You can see some of it in these photos. The piece near the top center is a pale purple that looks like it came from an old square bottle. It was probably clear originally, but the old bottles have manganese in the glass, and exposure to sunlight will turn it purple. I'm probably going to put that piece back in the ocean since it isn't very weathered. In another twenty years or so it will be a much stronger purple, and (one hopes) rounded and weathered by salt and waves.

The Contents of the "Cars and Trucks" Box

2011-12-04T18:41:00.000-05:00

I think I've mentioned the wall of boxes that lines my studio. Well, lately it's been overflowing, so I'm going through all the boxes and trying to be ruthless with the contents. I had one large box labeled "Firetrucks." You can see the results above. Here are the first photos from the box labeled "Cars and Trucks."

The photos are for sale in my Quercus Design shop (if you click on the photo it will take you there) and the actual cars and trucks are for sale (well, most of them) in the Quercus Detritus shop (so we don't all get confused about whether I'm selling a car or a photo. You've got to be careful when you set out to deal in used cars!)

Beachcombing series No.54

2011-12-03T19:28:00.000-05:00

Hulls Cove, Maine; November 9, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.54)

The weather was still unseasonably warm (this was back on November 9), and I snatched a few minutes between chores to wander on the beach. This is one of the coolest pieces of driftwood I've ever found - I love the seaweed growing on top like a matted thatch of hair, and the perfectly placed barnacle! I'm seeing faces everywhere now - even that bit of bone is starting to look like one.

The Bizarre Bazzar

2011-12-01T13:20:00.002-05:00

Attention, please: the Bizarre Bazaar is coming up next week! There will be a fine selection of artists (including me), yummy things to eat, and good wine both red and white, so come hang out with us. You can do your leisurely Christmas shopping at a small business with local artists, with a glass of wine in one hand! Pretty much the exact opposite of Black Friday. (Just so my friends on other continents don't think all Americans like to fight crowds at Wal-Mart in the middle of the night.)

Here are some of the other artists who will be there (check out their work, even if you can't make it to the party):
Jennifer Judd-McGee
Jenny Nelson
Jennifer Atkins Lisa
(and me, Jennifer Booher, for a quartet of Jenns)
Kathy Johnson
Julie Havener
Tegan Curry
Erin Leonardi
Heather Murray
Carrie Cross
Nancy D'Agostino
Scott Haseltine

Gosh, hope I got everybody!

Hope to see you there....

On the Beach in a Snowstorm

2011-11-23T14:38:00.001-05:00

We were supposed to drive south today so we could spend Thanksgiving with my family, but a nasty storm blew in overnight and we decided to stay put. It's wet, driving, sleety, slushy stuff; not the kind that's fun to play in. I've certainly driven in worse storms, but just did not feel like tackling this one. Must be getting old.

I took my daughter over to a friend's house and on the way back noticed the tide was out at Hulls Cove. I figured I'd earn myself a cup of hot chocolate by going beachcombing. Total fail! The sleet stung my eyes so I couldn't look around much, and there was just enough snow accumulating to hide the bits of flotsam that I could see.

So I had a brisk, muddy walk and snapped a few pictures with my eyes squinted shut against the sleet. Here you go - Happy Thanksgiving from Maine!

Autumn Leaves - Barberry and Fothergilla

2011-11-14T21:37:00.001-05:00

Village Burying Ground, Bar Harbor, Maine; November 13, 2011 (Woodland series No.4)

Fall just keeps lingering on this year. Usually by November all the leaves are gone, the wind is bitter, and the skies are grey. With the snowstorm we got just before Halloween, I thought for sure we were in for a long, dingy winter. But no, the days have been warm, in the 50s and 60s, with sunshine and lots of beautiful colors still in the woods. The peculiar weather has coaxed fantastic color out of trees that often slide straight into muddy browns, like the oaks and the Norway maples.

Barberry

Barberry and fothergilla, on the other hand, never turn muddy brown! These two are always spectacular, but usually they are brown sticks at this time of year. If the weather weren't so delightful, it would be a little creepy. I was walking through the Village Burying Ground (aka "the cemetery") in the middle of town and saw these beauties glowing at me beside the path.

Barberry & Fothergilla

I started out intending to make one entry for the Woodland series, but got carried away playing with the little barberry leaves. Looks like a mini-series now!

Barberry & Fothergilla (version 2)

P.S. All this autumn splendor has me dazzled and distracted for the moment, but I'll get back to beachcombing soon, don't worry.

Clematis Seedhead

2011-11-13T20:26:00.000-05:00

I just had to get in close on this one.

More Seedheads

2011-11-10T20:35:00.000-05:00

This is the poppy seedpod that started me off.

And here's another composition. The longer I look at it, the more I love that clematis. I think it needs a portrait, don't you?

Seedheads

2011-11-08T19:53:00.004-05:00

Seedheads, a photo by quercus design on Flickr.

I started weeding the front garden today while waiting for the school bus, and the coolest, lacy poppy seedpod rolled right in front of me. Then I noticed how frilly the empty daylily seedheads have gotten. And then I completely lost interest in weeding and started rooting around looking for more pods. (This minimal attention span would be why my garden looks so unkempt.)

We have here the seed pods of daylilies, bellflower (a wild one that pops up whenever my back is turned, maybe Campanula rapunculoides), coneflower, Allium cristophii, hyssop, veronica, a small poppy, and ~~those really tall yellow pompoms that nobody has heard of that start with 'c'~~ Cephalaria.

The Bluffs, October 26, 2011

2011-11-07T21:25:00.004-05:00

The Bluffs, Bar Harbor, Maine; October 26, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.53)

I've been drawn to ropes lately. I always pick as many of them off the beach as I can, since a lot of animals can get tangled in them. As you may have noticed, I often incorporate the smaller knots into these photos. But ever since Valley Cove, I've been wanting to play with the calligraphic sweep of the larger ropes. I may have to abandon the grid entirely one of these days, and let them go wild. They come in such amazing colors, too, and the algae that grow on them give a wonderful patina to the gaudy shades.

Ropes & Tags, The Bluffs, Bar Harbor, Maine; October 26, 2011

On this expedition I also found a wider variety of the plastic tags. (I think these were originally attached to lobster traps. If you know for sure, tell me in the comments, please!)

Notecards!

2011-11-01T20:04:00.000-04:00

Drum roll, please....

Just in time for the holidays, I have notecards ready in my etsy shop!

There are two sizes, regular and super-size (look at the size of the pen to compare them.)

The extra-large cards are packaged in clear plastic boxes (as above). The smaller cards are in clear plastic sleeves (as below).

There's even a special "vintage Santa collection" card!

After all, it is November 1st!

You can see the whole notecard collection in this section of my etsy shop.

Rainbow Buttons

2011-10-30T20:27:00.004-04:00

Rainbow Buttons, a photo by quercus design on Flickr.

Blustery, wet, snowy rain today - a good day to stay inside and play with buttons! Most of them are vintage. They came from my grandmothers' sewing boxes. The little green mother-of-pearl one I bought in a market in Soreze, France. And the dark green one with two holes I found on the beach! So this is sort of a beachcombing photo, well-disguised.

These antique cards of buttons came from the tailor shop my husband's great-grandfather owned in Minneapolis. The brown ones are the most beautifully heavy glass, full of highlights and swirling tones of amber. They are all so lovely on their cards I can't bear to take them off for a mere sewing project. I should frame them, but I've run out of wall space!

Pressed Flowers

2011-10-28T22:06:00.002-04:00

Pressed Flowers, a photo by quercus design on Flickr.

Found this collection in one of my studio drawers last week: flowers I pressed when I lived in Virginia. A little bit of spring from 1996, forgotten in an envelope. Maybe it's time to clean out my hoards...

The Searsport House Under a Full Moon, Part 2

2011-10-25T08:39:00.000-04:00

Here's a more recent edit of the Searsport house photo shoot. I know Photoshop has a bad rep from all the over-edited and distorted images that are out there, but it really is a digital darkroom, and using it takes skill and practice. When I first started taking photographs, I thought I needed to get it right in the camera. Then I read Ansel Adams' book, Examples, and realized that half the work he did to achieve a great photo was done in the darkroom. If Ansel Adams, who I think everyone agrees was a great artist and a technical master, needed to lighten parts of a print and darken others, then I don't feel so guilty about needing to do that, too. It feels less like cheating and more like part of a process. A perfect photo right out of a digital camera is as rare as a perfect one out of a film camera. Now my goal is to get my digital photo as good as I can in-camera, and learn to use the digital darkroom tools more gracefully. The more I learn, the better my images look.

P.S. Right now I use Photoshop Elements, and have just bought Lightroom.

P.P.S. I don't get any commissions for mentioning this.

The Woodland series No.3

2011-10-20T23:11:00.001-04:00

"Horse Chestnuts, Ledgelawn Avenue, Bar Harbor, Maine; September 28, 2011" (Woodland series No.4)

When I was little, I used to fill my pockets with horse-chestnuts. I loved the smooth feel of the glossy nuts, and was always surprised and disappointed when they shriveled up. It still surprises me. They seem so solid, more like wood than a fruit, and watching one pucker up like a raisin feels so strange.

More Framed Photos

2011-10-19T22:04:00.000-04:00

The most recent batch of framed photos is in my etsy shop now.

Clicking on an image will take you to the listing, or you can click on this link to see the whole collection of framed photos.

I love the way the collections look in these shadowbox frames.

You can see how deep they are! A lot of people comment on how three-dimensional the photos look, and I think the shadowbox adds to that illusion.

The Searsport House

2011-10-16T16:24:00.004-04:00

There's an old house just north of Searsport, Maine, that I've been watching decay slowly for the last 20 years. When I first saw it, I dreamed of rescuing it, restoring the fanciful dormers, polishing the wood floors ... no question now that it's too late for rescue. Now it is a waiting game - how long before the ell's roof caves in completely? When I drove past it last month after taking the show down in Portland it occurred to me that it is now a classic haunted house, and I began to wonder where the full moon would sit in the sky near it.

I have a neat little app on my iPad called LightTrac, which shows you the location and angle of sunrise/sunset and moonrise/moonset for any given date.

I did my best to figure out my haunted house's location on Google maps, and got the moon angles for the next full moon, which was October 11. Using LightTrac, I decided the moon would most likely be close enough to the house to photograph around 5am. So I lured another photographer along with the promise of unique lighting, and we left the island at 3:30 in pursuit of the full moon. (Next time, the rainbow?)

Found it, too. Unfortunately, there's a car dealership across the street that is not a member of the Dark Skies school of thought. They banish shadows from their lot with sodium streetlights, which cast a garish yellow orange glow over my lovely ruin. NOT what I had hoped for. On the other hand, the facade was certainly well-lit.

I learned a good deal about color-correction in Photoshop while working on these shots. I also learned that there is an amazing amount of traffic on Route 3 at 5am. Seriously. I started out trying to take shots from across the street, to get the moon in the shot with the house. I was doing 25 second exposures, and I only managed to get one in which a car did not come through and leave a red line of taillights across the image. That means there was a car or truck at least every 25 seconds. Fortunately the headlamp I had with me has a red setting (which I like because it helps keep your night-vision), so I kept the light on and facing the road, so the drivers wouldn't have any excuse for flattening me. Or my tripod! So if you drove through Searsport around 5 in the morning last week and saw two dark figures lurking in the shadows with suspicious equipment and a lurid red light, that was me!

Framed Photographs

2011-10-02T16:52:00.000-04:00

Four of the photographs I framed for this summer's shows are in my etsy shop now. I'll be adding more as I get them photographed.

Clicking on a photo will take you to the etsy listing.

Today I Ironed Leaves

2011-09-23T08:27:00.000-04:00

I found these beautiful, lacy things on an afternoon walk through Glen Mary Park. They were curled and crumpled in damp piles, so I brought them home and tried to flatten them for a photograph.

They resisted, so I ironed them.

First with steam, because I was afraid they would crumble, then with a dry iron because the steamed leaves curled as they cooled off.

I did pause at one point and think, "I am ironing leaves. Most people don't iron leaves." At least I didn't say it out loud, because I would have been talking to myself and that would really be kind of, you know, weird.

Beach Plant Class

2011-09-20T08:49:00.000-04:00

About a week and a half ago I drove down to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Harbor for a class on wild beach plants. It was well worth the drive! Our teacher was Melissa Cullina, formerly of the New England Wildflower Society in Massachusetts, who not only showed us how to identify the plants, but told us about their cultural histories, reading us poetry, excerpts from colonial diaries, and talking about the various botanists who came from Maine as if they were personal relatives. It was charming and enlightening, and the time went quickly. We spent four hours in two very different habitats - the first was a marshy wooded shoreline and the second was a rocky headland. The sun was intense and straight overhead, so the photos I took during the class are so overexposed or flat that they are barely even educational, so I'm not including many.

Here are my favorite tidbits from the class:

1. Rushes are Round and Sedges have Edges. (That's very helpful, you should remember that, too.)
2. Plantago maritima - a plant I see all the time. I finally know its name! If you've ever been introduced to someone at a party who previously you had seen around town but not known, it is a similar feeling. Ah, so that's who you are! Early sailors in this area used this as a salad green. One of my classmates tasted it and said it was salty. No surprise there.

3. Seaside Goldenrod (Solidago maritima) - note that the leaves have smooth edges, while most (non-seaside) goldenrod have toothy leaves. I see this one everywhere, too. They are blooming now, and look very picturesque clinging to the rocks by the ocean.

4. The Plants of Acadia National Park is an incredibly useful book, with much better pictures than the ones I snapped on the run. It covers all the plants we discussed during this class, and I plan to order it and take it down to the shore for a class review.
5. There are a variety of ways that plants cope with a saltwater environment. Some salt-tolerant plants keep the high salt concentration from interfering with respiration by storing it in their protoplasm, which keeps the water flowing through membranes. Succulent plants store lots of fluid which dilutes the salt concentrations. And still other plants drop their leaves when the salt in them gets too concentrated. Some native grasses, like Spartina, actually exude the salt through special glands.

If you live north of Boston and haven't been to the Botanical Garden yet, make a point of it. It was a bit of a drive for me (three hours) but then, living where I do just about everything is a long drive. I'll leave you with one last photo from the gardens:

The Woodland series

2011-09-18T19:37:00.001-04:00

Glen Mary Park, Bar Harbor, Maine; September 16, 2011 (Woodland series No.2)

A new project for your entertainment and edification - voila, the Woodland series! I expect it to get more colorful as autumn progresses, and then very monochromatic during the winter. The Beachcombing series will continue, never fear, but I've already been surprisingly single-minded about pursuing it for the last year. I also want to pay close attention to ice as winter comes. I don't know if you remember some of the close-ups I did last year, but I'm planning to work more on that. For once I'm really looking forward to the first deep freezes! So that's three series to juggle through the next two seasons. I'm also developing a set of holiday cards ... hope to have them ready to show you by the end of the month.


The Long and Winding Road, Bar Harbor, Maine; April 21, 2010 (Woodland series No.1)

(And yes, there really is a Long and Winding Road here in Bar Harbor. It is in the village of Eden.)

The Blue Hill Fair

2011-09-16T15:48:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the Blue Hill Fair! Held on Labor Day weekend in lovely Blue Hill, Maine, the Fair marks the official end of summer in these parts. The kids start school the day after Labor Day, so this is their last hooray.

I get dizzy on the rides that go in circles, so I let the kids go on and I hang out and take photos.

The only livestock that caught my kids attention long enough for me to take photos was a stall full of piglets.

This year my daughter and I went back for the fireworks show on Sunday night. I brought my tripod and had lots of fun playing with long exposures on the Midway.

If you do a long enough exposure, you can make people disappear!

And if you do a long exposure during the fireworks, you get this:

Summer really did go out with a bang this year!

Sea Glass postcards

2011-09-07T18:37:00.001-04:00

The seaglass postcards are available at last in my etsy shop. There are five cards:

I've also added the Sea Glass Spectrum series to the shop as prints.

Crown of Maine Balloon Fair, Presque Isle, Maine

2011-09-01T14:34:00.003-04:00

The fair was wonderful. The weather was perfect. The balloons were pretty and it was not at all crowded. Unfortunately I took at least 1500 photographs. It has taken three full days to select the ones worth editing, and my eyes are red, bleary, and kind of crossed. I'm also heartily sick of balloons, photography, and my Mac. OK, my original post was a little cranky. Sorry about that! What I really meant to tell you about was how beautiful Aroostook County is. I hadn't been north of Machias since our high school trip to Quebec City, oh, twenty-something years ago. Presque Isle, the site of the balloon festival, is about 4 hours north of Bar Harbor. Not much further on to Canada from there! The countryside is lovely, and even though Presque Isle is a good-size city that includes a University of Maine campus, the farms and fields seem to go right up through it so it feels rural almost everywhere. Ironically none of my countryside photos came out, probably because I took them from the car.

I went to the fair hoping to get lots of shots of balloons floating together in a deep blue sky, something like the one above,

but I found myself much more interested in the assembly and inflation process.

As a photographer, I was also intrigued by the translucency of the balloons, which led to all kinds of tricky lighting situations. Faces illuminated by flames, balloons backlit by the setting sun...

The afternoon sessions had us lined up along a fence shooting straight into the sun. I learned a lot this weekend, oh yes I did.

The number one thing I learned, and it took a while, is walk around. Move!

I have a great zoom lens, and it makes me lazy. I can get shots from clear across the field.

But to get the light where I wanted it, I had to actually walk around and try different vantage points.

Another thing I learned is that at 5am it can be seriously cold, even in August. I'm talking fleece and jackets and gloves sort of cold.

Also, note to self: if you've filled the 16MB memory card, you have enough photos.

There are a lot more photos of the balloons on my Flickr stream

Hot Air and Old Age

2011-08-25T22:10:00.000-04:00

To celebrate my 44th birthday (yeah, yeah, I ain't no spring chicken) I'm dragging my family up to Aroostook County for the Crown of Maine Hot Air Balloon Festival. We'll be camping for two nights (yeah, in a tent), and I'll be attempting to photograph with husband and two kids in tow on a fairground. Should be interesting... Weather is scheduled to be nice on Friday afternoon and Saturday, but we may be packing up in the rain on Sunday as tropical storm Irene makes her way north. Cross your fingers that not only does the sun stay out on Saturday, but the wind speeds are below 9 knots (or the balloonists won't take off.) If I get anything good, I'll definitely show it off here!

A Change of Focus

2011-08-22T22:05:00.001-04:00

Time Pieces

Several months ago, my sister's former mother-in-law sent me a large package of pocket watch mechanisms to photograph. (I traveled to India with her, so we now have a friendship that transcends those broken family bonds. Once you ride an elephant together, you never forget.) At any rate, I finally tackled the watch parts.

Deconstructed Pocket Watches

There weren't quite enough to make a square, so I dug into my own collections, and was amazed at the amount of stuff in my "Clocks" box. I filled in the square, and then went on to take two other photos of clock-stuff.

Clock Faces

These were all taken on the new lightbox contraption, and I will say that metal is an absolute bear to light. I struggled for ages with trying to adjust my (extremely primitive) set-up so the lights would not glare off the glass faces or burn out the edges of the (highly reflective) metal cases. I've jury-rigged an inexpensive lighting system that works well for a very simple and specific type of photograph, but does not adapt easily to new directions. This is the first time I've had to deal with reflections, since the ocean does a wonderful job of sanding, weathering, eroding, rusting, and dulling all the shiny things that fall into it. Betcha if I threw all my clocks into Frenchmans Bay for a few weeks they'd be much easier to photograph (and believe me, by the end of this session I was tempted!)

Coffee by Design, Portland, Maine: Part 2

2011-08-17T15:35:00.000-04:00

Here we are at Coffee by Design again, this time at the Congress Street location.

I just love their iced coffee with a shot of caramel syrup.

It helped keep me awake for the long drive home.

My husband came with me this time to help set up, and we managed to shave an hour off the installation time - three hours, a new record!

The center photo is a 12x12 print and the smaller ones are 5x5s.

The center one here is a 20x20. They are all in Ribba frames from Ikea. (The 20x20s have to be trimmed very slightly to fit.)

Lamoine Beach, August 9, 2011

2011-08-13T20:42:00.002-04:00

Lamoine Beach, August 9, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.48)

It's been a busy week, catching up with the piles of flotsam from the summer's beaches. My Photoshop skills have improved dramatically over the last 6 months, and so have my photography skills. Funny thing is, I still don't like any of my photos instantly. I sort of take it on faith that they're decent, and it takes a month or two for me to see them for what they are, rather than what I meant them to be. I have to put them aside and not think about it for a while. On the other hand, I kind of like this one. Something about the grass and the feathers appeals to me.

I find very few feathers in the winter. I suppose there are fewer birds, and they are holding tight to their warmth! In summer, there are feathers everywhere.
___________________________________
August 17 addenda:

Lamoine Beach. Not enough sand to make my daughter happy, no waves or rocks to please my son. Beachcombing wasn't too bad, although I only had a few minutes.

Indian Point, Bar Harbor, Maine; July 27, 2011

2011-08-12T15:16:00.000-04:00

The Blagden Preserve is a piece of land out on Indian Point that is managed by the Nature Conservancy. I'd heard that seals often bask on the rocks, so I packed up the family to go check out the beach.

You park just inside the entrance off the Indian Point Road, and walk down a paved lane to the shore. There are some paths through the woods, but we took the easy way. You can see the kids have run way ahead of slow old Mom here. They weren't happy about having to walk - it can't have been more than a mile, and took about 10 minutes. I forbade whining until we were out of sight of the parking lot. It was a lovely walk, with moss-covered stumps and fern glades in the spruce forest.

The beach turned out to be very pretty, mostly small stones with some huge outcrops. It was sunny and warm (in the high 70s), with a light breeze, and the most amazing towering cumulus clouds.

The water was surprisingly warm. The kids wouldn't swim with me, though, because the seaweed was pretty thick. At high tide it would be a better swimming spot. No seals showed up while we were there, but there were plenty of crabs!

This little one has red legs. It is hiding inside the bladder-pod of a seaweed.

I couldn't stop staring at the clouds. They were surreal!

On a beachcombing note, this is the place for smooth periwinkle. It's only the second place I've found them, and they were everywhere.

Valley Cove, Southwest Harbor, Maine; August 1, 2011

2011-08-11T21:25:00.001-04:00

Valley Cove, Southwest Harbor, Maine; August 1, 2011

A friend and I dragged our children out for a walk in the woods. You go over Flying Mountain to get to Valley Cove, but then around it to get back, so it is a little bit of a hike in parts, but a short one, and an easy walk back.

There's a gorgeous view along the top:

It was a beautiful sunny day on the mountain, but the fog was moving in through the mouth of Somes Sound far below. Can you see the way it swamps the little point of land at the center, almost like a big wave?

When you get down the other side of the moutain, there is a lovely cove. The water was pretty darn cold, as usual. This is one of the girls trying to swim without getting salt water on her peach. I had about five minutes for beachcombing while we prodded the kids to dry off and get their shoes on. Looking forward to school starting for them, and longer beachcombing sessions for me!

Hutchins Camp/Donnell Pond, Franklin, Maine; July 23, 2011

2011-08-11T20:55:00.000-04:00

We went out to Donnell Pond in Franklin to have dinner with old friends. A sunset cruise in a classic 60s motorboat, chauffeured by our 10-year-old daughter (who drove very slowly, with an occasional burst of speed that toppled us sideways) followed by food, wine, and conversation...life is good.

One advantage to put-putting along with a new driver at the helm ...

the loons were not troubled in the least, and let us putter right up next to them.

My girl drove slowly, but not quite slowly enough for a hand-held camera at dusk, so I didn't get many clear shots.

I'm still obsessively photographing water, especially waves.

Can you see the clusters of black dots on some of the leaves?

The water striders were resting at the end of a long day.

There were plenty of empty leaves, but they seem to like company as they were all crowded onto a few leaves.

As I was beachcombing just before dinner, this little guy hopped out of my path just before I stepped on him. Granted it was dusk, and the light was dimming, but I was beachcombing - looking intently at the ground by my feet - and I still didn't notice him until he moved. That's some pretty effective camouflage!

New Photo Technique

2011-08-11T19:59:00.005-04:00

Aquamarine Sea Glass

I've been using a new photo technique I thought I'd share with you. I got the idea from this very useful (and short) video by Bryan Peterson, but I didn't want to run out and spend four or five hundred dollars on flashes and wireless. So, as usual, I cobbled together my own version.

I built a box of foamcore, put 4 lamps in it with Ott Lite (daylight spectrum) bulbs, and topped it with a piece of white acrylic (the kind used for making signs).

I line up my subjects on the acrylic, and voila, no shadows, and lovely backlighting on the sea glass.

For your entertainment (as opposed to edification), here is the full setup. My flat files are in the center of the room, and I put my tripod on top so I could get farther away from the lightbox. I put a piece of plywood on top of the flat files so I don't dent them when I stand there. It isn't elegant, and my "studio" is packed to the gills and will never be featured in any magazine, but I get a LOT of exercise jumping up and down from this contraption!

Olive Green Sea Glass

Pretty, ain't they?

Back Beach, Bernard, Maine, July 16, 2011

2011-08-05T19:59:00.000-04:00

There are THREE photos from this beach because I found such pretty things I wanted to focus on their details.

Feathers: Back Beach, Bernard, Maine; July 16, 2011

Feathers and stones and pine cones! And the day's adventures:

Beach Stones: Back Beach, Bernard, Maine; July 16, 2011

My daughter finished her scuba certification course this spring, and will do her Open Water dive in September to earn her certificate. (We're waiting for the warmest water we can get, because she is such a thin little thing without an ounce of insulation.) My husband, who is also a diver, and my son, ditto, agreed that she should practice moving around in a wetsuit before trying to dive in the ocean. The wetsuit is very awkward and constricting, and both of my guys hated their first dives outside of a pool. It takes some getting used to. Me, I am not a diver. I'd love to get down there with a camera, but feel claustrophobic in the mask.

So to jump straight to the point, we went over to Back Beach to let her try things out snorkeling.

It was a gorgeous day, 83 degrees F, a deep blue sky scattered with puffy cartoon clouds. We got there as high tide was beginning to ebb. Back Beach is a great place for stones - nicely weathered, rounded cobbles of granite and basalt. It is popular, but not over-populated. There were two rambunctious families with water guns and one blonde sunbather in a bikini who looked as if she had dropped in from some other universe entirely.

My husband and son helped my daughter into her wetsuit, which is quite the athletic process and involved a lot of screeching and complaints. It was an old suit we had borrowed for the afternoon, and was awfully stiff and rather too big for her. The water was quite cold (it usually is, up here) and apparently it seeped in through the gaps and chilled her quickly. They snorkeled for about ten minutes before she struggled out of the water declaring that she hates diving and is never going back in the water again. I think we need a better-fitting and more flexible suit. Why do my children's favorite sports require expensive equipment that has to fit well? Why can't they just play tag? At any rate, we're looking for a 7 mil wetsuit for a 10 year old girl, if anyone's got one hanging around.

Update on Jesup show

2011-08-05T15:50:00.000-04:00

The Big One is back from the frame shop and hanging in state at the library. Look at the size of this guy! He makes the 20x20 print on the next panel look itty bitty.

It's kind of awesome to step back and say, 'Whoa, I made that.'

Upper Town Dock, Southwest Harbor, July 11, 2011

2011-08-04T20:44:00.001-04:00

White on White, Southwest Harbor, Maine; July 11, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.41)

The Clark Point Road runs from the center of Southwest Harbor out to the Coast Guard station at the end of the point. To get there you follow Main Street down from the head of the island til you reach the hardware store in Southwest Harbor, and turn left at the blinking light. There are two actual traffic lights on the island and by the time you reach this one you'll have passed them both.

Upper Town Dock, Southwest Harbor, Maine; July 11, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.40)

After the turn you'll go by a restaurant, a variety store, a small shopping plaza with three storefronts and a post office, several small houses, then an assortment of large and gracious houses, some of which are still homes but many of which have become inns. Look for the street sign that says Upper Town Dock. If you reach Hamilton Marine Supply and the old warehouse that houses the sailing school you've gone too far. Park at the Town Dock and walk down the stairs. You might see a barge tied up at the next dock over.

Climb carefully over the railing, and drop down onto the mussel beds under the dock.

You're there.

You'll notice the ground underfoot alternates between patches of small, angular stones and wide swathes of silty, fine-grained mud. The odor of rotting seafood does not come from the lobster pound three docks to the left. That's just the smell of low tide on a mud flat.

You'll find lots of evidence that this is a working harbor, like bits of the old tires that are used as bumpers on many docks, random pieces of machinery and industrial debris picturesquely covered in barnacles and rust. There is a lot of broken glass, but no sea glass.

The duality of Maine shore life is particularly compressed along this shoreline. Utilitarian docks piled with lobster pots jut out right beside docks decked out with flags and pots of geraniums.

On a bright summer day, the summer folk and the working folk seem to co-exist peacefully. In many communities the bed-and-breakfast guests do not care to be woken by the fishing boat motors when they roar to life at the crack of dawn. Take a good long look around you. If the general trend along this coast continues, the barges and lobster pots will be pushed out by the flags and geraniums. For the moment, though, there seems to be a balance here. Savor it.

Georges Pond, July 10, 2011

2011-08-03T13:57:00.001-04:00

Georges Pond, Franklin, Maine; July 10, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.39)

Freshwater!

We visited friends who have a camp out on Georges Pond in Franklin, and spent a lovely afternoon splashing and swimming and kayaking. I've become obsessed with photographing water this year.

I've been trying to capture the weight of it, and the tension between the surface and the volume below it. The camera doesn't want to see both - it wants to focus on either the lake bottom or the surface reflections. I want to show both.

Working on it!

Jesup Memorial Library, Bar Harbor

2011-08-03T12:23:00.000-04:00

I've just mounted a new show at the Jesup Memorial Library, Bar Harbor. It's a small show, and I'm still waiting for the centerpiece to come back from the framer's - the first photo I've printed at 30x30. I couldn't get far enough away from it to really get a good look at it before I brought it to Ahlblad's Frame Shop last month, so I'm anxiously waiting to see how it looks framed and hung. I'll post pics as soon as I have them!

2011-07-25T22:20:00.001-04:00

I've entered a big photo competition. There are some amazing photographers, so come over and take a look here. There's a popular vote in addition to the judged competition, so if you like my work, please vote for me!

Bob's Camp, Trenton, Independence Day 2011

2011-07-22T22:13:00.001-04:00

Bob's Camp, Trenton, Maine; Independence Day, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.38)

Fourth of July in Bar Harbor is about as close as I've ever gotten to living in a Norman Rockwell painting. The parade starts at 10am, wandering down Main Street, filled with my friends, my childrens' classmates, people I've worked with, and people I know from places like the post office or the pharmacy.

My husband is in a Dixieland band, and they have a float every year.

Sometimes one of my kids ends up in the parade. They're always a little sulky about it because a lot of the paraders throw candy, and if they are in the parade, they can't catch candy! Granted, all this small-town fellowship is watched by, I don't know, maybe 6,000 strangers who are here on vacation doubling the size of the population, but its still very much our parade.

This year the kids did a little decoration of their own:

After the parade there's a huge seafood festival on the town Athletic Fields, but I've never gone. We usually have our own lobster festival over at Bob's camp on Union River Bay. You may remember Bob's camp, if you've been reading for a while. This year the weather was perfect,

the lupine were in full bloom,

and my father-in-law read the Declaration of Independence out loud to all of us.

When he finished, I tried to recite the Preamble to the Constitution, and got out a pretty mangled version of about two-thirds of it. Then one of the kids started singing the Schoolhouse Rock song - do you remember it? Those were awesome videos. I can't believe "kids today" still watch them. And they remember the Preamble! "We the people".... la la la. It's still stuck in my head and July is almost over.

In the evening the Town Band gives a concert in the bandstand on the Village Green, and then there are fireworks. After the fireworks there is a massive traffic jam that lasts til long after midnight, so people who've done this before hang out at the ice cream parlors or the bars, depending on their personal preference, and the locals go home and stuff their heads under their pillows trying to drown out the horns of people who think honking will help 5,000 people move their cars faster down the single road out of town. We usually put the younger kids to bed and open a bottle of wine with friends who live outside of town. When the jam clears up, we all tumble into bed, happy to be Americans.

Daily Candy

2011-07-21T12:45:00.000-04:00

Do you know the Daily Candy site? There's an overall newsletter and several city-focused ones - they send you a short email featuring things they've found interesting. And I'm on the Boston site today!

Thank you, Daily Candy!

Driftwood, July 4, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.37)

2011-07-20T22:27:00.000-04:00

Driftwood, July 4, 2011

I gathered so many cool things on July 4th that I had to make two separate photos. This is just the driftwood (and one drift-acorn for punctuation). I'll tell you all about the day with the next photo. Just for fun, though, here are a few of the photos I took that night at the fireworks.

In the fog! That's one drawback to living on the ocean - high chance of fog.
When the fog got really thick you could hardly see the fireworks, just a red glow in the clouds.

I love this one. I think it looks like shooting stars.

When the fog started to roll in, I almost packed up my photo gear thinking it was a waste of time. I've been determined to "really learn to use this fancy-pants camera," though, so I stuck it out figuring it was good practice. I'm so glad I did!

The Bluffs, Father's Day 2011 (Beachcombing series No.36)

2011-07-20T09:21:00.000-04:00

The Bar Harbor Yacht Club is a small, uninsulated cabin perched precariously on a rocky outcrop over a substantial dock. There is no sign marking the steep, unpaved drive. It is frequented by people in practical clothes and sensible shoes with weatherbeaten skin and permanent crinkles at the corners of their eyes from peering into the wind. Most of the members seem to be sailors, but there are a handful of motorboats moored there, too. I have trouble saying the name with a straight face. I've always thought it would be more accurately called the "Well-Hidden Place to Moor your Boat without Fuss." I'm not a member myself, but my father-in-law is, and we seem to congregate at the club for special family occasions. There's an almost-level crushed-stone terrace in front of the cabin with a cluster of adirondack chairs and a plastic table. It's a perfect place for a picnic in honor of Father's Day.

My thread collection

2011-07-19T14:56:00.000-04:00

Vintage Thread Labels (available in my etsy shop)

My mother's mother, Grandma Magda, was a wonderful seamstress. She made a lot of my clothes when I was growing up. Grandma tried to teach me to sew, and when I was young I really did try to learn, but it just didn't stick. I can still sew on Boy Scout patches, or turn an old pair of stockings into a rag doll, but I never mastered clothes.

Vintage Thread Spools (available in my etsy shop)

My father's mother, Grandma Mary, preferred crochet. She made huge afghans of brown squares topped with brightly colored flowers. They would be super fashionable now, in an Anthropologie sort of style, but in the 1980s when I was a teenager, they were painfully out of date, and I didn't keep any.

Getting slowly to the point, when my grandmothers died and we cleaned out their things, I took their workbaskets. I kept them intact on a shelf for a long time, as if something of them was preserved there. Last year I finally took everything out and mixed it in with my own things. Thread is thread, after all, and there's no sense leaving it shut up in a box. Now Grandma Mary's pincushion holds a mix of needles from three generations, and I sew on my son's patches with thread that was spooled in the 1940s. I love the worn feel of the old wooden spools, and the wonderful typography on the old labels.

Wait 'til you see "our" button collection!

The Bluffs, May 29, 2011 (Beachcombing series No. 34)

2011-07-17T21:26:00.001-04:00

The Bluffs, May 29, 2010 (Beachcombing series No.34)

A typical day of beachcombing: three rock crab shells, a green crab shell, blue mussels, sea urchins, bits of nylon rope, birch bark, sea glass, periwinkle shells, a sprig of rockweed, and a piece of rusty metal. The crab shells were probably shed, since they are pretty clean, with no hint of dead crab in them.

The most interesting finds of the day were the clusters of whelk egg cases. I think these are the eggs of the Common Northern Whelk (Buccinum undatum). The photo below shows a northern whelk laying eggs.

Image credit: Scott Leslie (click on photo for link.)

Don't worry, all the baby whelks seem to have hatched from the cases I found. I tried to open a couple of the egg sacs that still look a bit bubble-like (as you can see, most of them are sort of deflated) but the stuff they are made of is surprisingly strong. It looks like translucent seaweed, and now that it's dry it sounds papery, but it's as tough as tyvek, and feels similar when you try to tear it.

Swans Island, June 3, 2011

2011-07-02T10:12:00.001-04:00

Swans Island, June 3, 2011 (Available here)

At the end of each school year, all the fourth-graders on Mount Desert Island (about 70 kids) ride the ferry to visit the fourth graders on Swan's Island (all 4 of them). There's an adult chaperone for every 3 kids, plus all the teachers, so it's a pretty big group. I missed it the year my son was in fourth grade, but this year I chaperoned my daughter's class. (I won't be posting photos of the kids as that doesn't seem right, but I thought this one might be OK since you can't see any faces.)

It was a pretty morning, sunny with a few clouds and a stiff breeze. Wind may be chilly in early June, but it keeps the mosquitoes and blackflies away, so it is a good thing. We broke up into groups once we got to the school, and went off for activities. One activity was exploring the graveyard:

The kids had a list of questions like "Which is the oldest grave?" "Which is the youngest person?" "Find a really unusual gravestone" and so forth.

The oldest grave was 1800, I think, and the youngest person was one day old.

The most unusual gravestones were modern, so I won't post them as it seems a bit disrespectful, but my favorite had a picture of the Starship Enterprise with the epitaph "May you boldly go to that final frontier."

Early June here is still spring, and the island felt like a wild garden with pink-and-white apple blossoms and dark purple lilacs in full bloom, fields of yellow buttercups and pale-blue bluets, lavender-pink creeping phlox, and tiny bright blue forget-me-nots.

By the time we had lunch on the beach the stiff breeze had turned into a loud wind, and the clouds were massing over the bay. It was dramatic and a bit chilly.

We just put on our windbreakers, let the kids run wild on the school playground, and watched the sun play hide-and-seek behind the clouds until we got safely home, windblown and a little sunburnt.

Reel Pizza, Bar Harbor

2011-07-01T17:29:00.001-04:00

Reel Pizza is a local institution - a movie theater that serves great pizza. Seating is a combination of big battered sofas up at the front with traditional movie seats at the back. There are folding tray tables (like the ones my grandparents had) for the couches, and the movie seats have a narrow ledge built in front of them for a table.

An old bingo board up on the wall flashes customer numbers when your order is ready, and the pizza styles all have names taken from old movies. They get the usual summer blockbusters, of course, but they also get a lot of foreign and "art" movies. Beg pardon, films. The last thing I saw there was the Werner Herzog flick "Cave of Dreams," and the next thing I'm going to see will be "Cars 2" (because I have a houseful of tweens and teens who must be entertained): A pretty broad spectrum of American culture.

Anyway, I just finished hanging a show in the lobby this afternoon, so if you're in the area, stop by and have a look!

2011-06-25T20:03:00.001-04:00

The Burning Tree, an amazing restaurant here on Mount Desert Island was looking for artwork recently. Because their walls are panelled in a very warm wood which looks best with oranges and reds, and also because they grow most of their own produce and specialize in local seafood, I looked through my work for crustaceans. We ended up choosing to print the crab photos at 20"x20" and framed them in black shadowboxes.
I tried to get photos of the installation, but no matter where I stood there were glaring reflections. It was exciting to see my little crabs blown up so big! You can see the patterns and textures of the shells so clearly.

I also hung some 5"x5" prints under the wall sconces. These are in 9" square frames with white mats.

Hope you all get lots of fresh produce and seafood this summer!

Bar Island, May 28, 2011

2011-06-18T09:15:00.001-04:00

Bar Island, May 28, 2011 (available here)

It was my mother-in-law's 70th birthday, and a huge crowd of relatives had gathered for a week of feasting and talking. The day was cold and wet, with a low gray sky that made me think longingly of naps on the sofa. Instead, we all walked across the Bar to hike up Bar Island.

There were about 10 people, ranging from intensely athletic to sleepily middle-aged. We managed to stay together almost all the way across the Bar, and then the 13-year olds found itty-bitty crabs under the rocks, and I took pictures and when we looked up everyone else was out of sight.

There's a periwinkle snail crawling on this crab!

So the three of us wandered along the shore more slowly. I saw a marine worm, more crabs, and thousands of baby barnacles. It must have been settling time for new barnacles, because teeny little barnacles covered every surface. Every rock, every piece of driftwood, every shell, even the seaweed. It's hard to get the scale in this photo, but there are ordinary, full-grown barnacles at the bottom. The babies are even covering the grown-ups! I've never noticed this before. I wonder if it looks like this every spring or if this is an especially good crop of barnacles.

The boys found a steep sandy hill and amused themselves by sliding down it and destroying their pants. I took photos of them, and the seagulls, and the rocks, knowing that in the dim grey light most of the photos wouldn't come out but playing with my camera anyway, hoping to learn something.

And of course I had a plastic bag with me because I am physically incapable of not beachcombing. It turned out to be very useful, because I found this:

I'm usually rather finicky about what I pick up - it has to pass the sniff test. Rotten sea-life is incredibly hard to clean, so stinky stuff stays on the beach! On the other hand... a cormorant skeleton? It went into the bag. Fortunately it was pretty clean already. Thank goodness for crabs! I brought it home and sorely tried my husband's patience by boiling it for several days and then bleaching the bones. It didn't smell after the first day, but I guess not everybody is as enthusiastic as I am about bones. I didn't bleach it white because the bones are already fragile and bleaching makes them brittle. Last time I cleaned a spine this way it fell apart in the boiling water, but the cormorant tendons seem to be tougher and it only separated into three pieces.

Eddie's Brook, May 28, 2011

2011-06-15T13:53:00.001-04:00

Eddie's Brook, May 28, 2011 (available in my etsy shop)

Eddie's Brook is an unpretentious little stream that winds through the neighborhoods to the northeast of the Bar Harbor village. It starts somewhere near the top of Great Hill and tumbles down along the side of the Eagle Lake Road, past Kebo golf course, behind Conners-Emerson elementary school, through a long culvert under Eden Street, the main road into town, until it finally resurfaces beside the Seacoast Mission just in time to sprawl into the ocean.

This is the outfall area at low tide. You can see the culvert opening at the base of the stone wall in the center of the photo. The wall is about 10 feet high, and holds up Eden Street. I may come back here on a blazing summer day - the deep shade might be pleasant then. In late May, with a cool mist hovering, it was chilly and not very picturesque. The beachcombing, on the other hand, turned up some interesting bits: two large whelk shells, a surprisingly heavy branch of driftwood, an equally surprisingly light piece of charcoal, a bit of flow-blue porcelain, and a mysterious action figure.

Mother's Day 2011

2011-06-14T16:22:00.002-04:00

The Shore Path, Mother's Day 2011

I have a month's worth of photos piled up to share with you, and we'll start with Mother's Day. The whole family went for a walk on the Shore Path at sunset. The kids climbed Balance Rock, as usual. The tide was out, and the light was very low and pink. I was only able to take a few photos before it got too dark for hand-held photography, but we wandered around on the rocks until it was almost too dark to see.

Remodelista

2011-06-08T17:10:00.000-04:00

There was a nice feature on my Beachcombing photos yesterday on the Remodelista blog. Things have been so busy here, I actually forgot to mention it! The good news is that I've been working a lot, photographing a lot, and doing plenty of beachcombing. The bad news is that I haven't finished editing any photos and there are 5 plates of beachcombing stuff waiting to be photographed. There's even part of a cormorant skeleton! (It took several days to clean off; I'll give details when I post it.) The really good news is that my new web site is just about done - next post, I swear, I'll have it live and give you the link.

Taste of Bar Harbor

2011-05-21T20:17:00.000-04:00

The Taste of Bar Harbor fair today was quite an event, with merchants all over town holding sales, ice-carving demonstrations, restaurant tastings, and of course, a craft fair. I shared a booth with an old friend, Bill Sanborn.

Bill makes elegant turned wood objects and beautiful wood-framed mirrors. Several of his mirrors feature artwork by Jennifer Judd-McGee. It was the first outdoor craft fair for both of us, and was great chance to try out new booth set-ups. I loved Bill's old fence panels, and the patina on them looks even better in real life. My husband built me some new, very lightweight panels - they have a wood frame covered in fabric, similar to a stretched canvas, with narrow grooved wood ledges across the front. The unframed photos slip right into the grooves, and I strung fishing line across the top of the photos "in case of wind." Worked like a charm, too. We didn't have much wind, just damp fog with some light showers. I took these photos to commemorate a couple of brave sunbeams that broke through!

Brown Sea Glass & Beach China

2011-05-13T14:58:00.000-04:00

Brown Sea Glass & Beach China

Sea glass bottle bits, a sea glass mug handle and an assortment of random shards; sea brick in several colors; very old pottery water-pipeline fragments; bits of china plates and stoneware mug handles; an old medicine bottle; part of a china doorknob, and a vitreous china wheel. Oh yeah, and a porcelain electrical insulator. All found on the beach, mostly here on Mount Desert Island.

Sargent Head, April 12, 2011

2011-05-04T17:39:00.000-04:00

Sargent Head, April 12, 2011

These black stones are so smooth your fingers glide right over them. I think they are basalt, which is a very fine-grained igneous rock. Apparently it forms much of the ocean floor, and is also common on the moon.

Coffee by Design, Portland, Maine

2011-05-01T19:51:00.001-04:00

Drove down to Portland (Maine) on Saturday (yesterday) to hang a show at Coffee by Design. Nice shop with great coffee.

We all know I'm just a teensy bit of a perfectionist about symmetry, right? And making things line up? Want to hazard a guess about how long it took me to get these arrangements "perfect" using monofilament to hang them?

Why yes, FOUR HOURS, exactly! I'm insane. The one just above was the first wall I did, and by the time I figured out how to adjust hanging height by 1/8" I was too damn tired to go back and fix it.

Yup. Completely insane.

Looks pretty good, though! And I slept really late today...

The Trouble with Red

2011-04-27T16:22:00.001-04:00

Rainbow People

Kind of reminds me of the Brady Bunch, or Hollywood Squares. Probably because I was happily chewing and drooling on these guys when those shows were on. (Because I was a toddler!) Ahem. Coming back to the present day, these vintage Fisher Price people presented an interesting photography challenge. Red!

Yes, if you have ever taken a picture you have probably noticed that red does not play well with others. It flattens perspective, outshines other colors, and generally behaves like the worst sort of diva. Here's what this looked like out of the camera:

You can see how the two red plastic people just glow. They are made of a particularly fluorescent red plastic, which is not just brightly colored, it's reflective and I just couldn't get it right. The first thing I tried was adjusting the saturation:

They didn't glow any more, but they look flattened and tampered with. Unnatural. So I went to the photo critique groups in Flickr and asked for advice. About 5 people responded and said "adjust the luminance." Hmm. There's no "adjust luminance" in Photoshop Elements. You can, however, make an adjustment layer for hue and saturation and select luminance there. So I tried that:

Still glowing. Posted it in Flickr again and asked where to adjust luminance. The answer was "in Lightroom before you import it into Photoshop." Oh. Hmm. Well.

I don't have Lightroom. Photoshop is enough of a challenge for now. So I thought about it for a while. If it has to be done before you import it, maybe it's something you could do to the RAW file? So I explored the RAW window and found a Luminance slider under Noise Control. Well, what the heck. I slid it. Adjusted the exposure, too, while I was there. OK, now let's open that puppy.

Hey, that's getting a lot better, isn't it? Oh boy, now let's tweak the saturation in Photoshop and make the background true white:

Tada! I'll bet someone who really knows their post-processing would laugh themselves silly over this, but it's like a miracle to me. Luminance, huh. I gotta learn some more about luminance.

Crab Personalities

2011-04-21T23:02:00.004-04:00

When you get really close, there's no way you could mistake one crab for another. I really want to try this series again with a macro lens, especially the first one, with all that amazing coralline growth.

My First Craft Fair

2011-04-18T20:44:00.001-04:00

Whew, my first craft fair is over! The Big Thaw was this past Saturday in Portland, Maine, at the Mayo Street Art Center. The venue is a former church and provided an attractive and er, cozy setting. I had planned to show the larger photos on a few easels, but the spaces were a little smaller than I'd expected. (3' x 6') We weren't allowed to use the walls so my ingenious husband came up with a wall substitute. We used blue board (left over from an insulation project last fall) and covered it with white paper. I have extra-long pushpins left over from graduate school, so I stuck them into the blue board and rested the photos on them.

We had to slide the board over so my neighbors could get in and out of their booth (I did say the space was cozy, didn't I?) It bothered me that the board wasn't centered but there's a limit to the symmetry real life allows you. On the whole, I think it didn't turn out badly for a first attempt. Financially, I pretty much broke even, which again, is not bad for a first try. If I hadn't had to spend the night in a hotel I'd have made a bit of a profit. Overall verdict: craft fairs are a hell of a lot of work for a fairly small return. On the other hand....

they are a lot of fun! This is one of my neighbors, Christina from Madderroot. She and Janyce have gorgeous hand-printed dishtowels and napkins. Um, yes, I did some shopping, why do you ask? I bought one of these:

And this is another neighbor:

Jen from Quench Metalworks. She definitely had the most awesome set up at the fair - I didn't get a very good shot of it, but she has moss in frames and in bowls and her jewelry is draped against it. Fab! My mother came to the fair and bought a necklace something like this one from Jen:

Gorgeous things everywhere you looked.

I didn't have time to take many pictures, but here are a few more shots of the fair in progress.

And here is Audrey of Little Eye, who organised the whole darn thing:

We drove back to Bar Harbor as soon as the fair ended, arrived home about 9pm on Saturday, and I slept most of Sunday!

2011-04-12T08:41:00.000-04:00

I did an interview with Audrey over on the Big Thaw blog. Come on over here if you're curious. (But brace yourself, I must have been pretty excited because there are an awful lot of exclamation points!)

I Really Want to Straighten the Square

2011-04-12T08:24:00.000-04:00

This is one of Patrick Smith's brilliant Mental Disorder series. You can probably see why this one resonates with me. There's a lively and (mostly) civil debate in the comments on his blog about the nature of some of these disorders, and whether the minimal approach oversimplifies complex issues. I personally feel that the images are sympathetic and witty, and have provided a great deal of value just by providing a starting point for that debate. And isn't that one of the purposes of (modern) art?

The Jealous Curator

2011-04-08T11:58:00.000-04:00

I love the Jealous Curator's blog. Her tagline "I know it's good when I'm left thinking DAMN I wish I thought of that" resonates with an awful lot of people, including me. I often look at other artists' work and think exactly those words. Being gobsmacked by someone else's stuff can make you feel awfully insecure about your own work. Danielle's grace is that she's turned the whole phrase on its head, from an expression of jealousy to one of whole-hearted admiration. Plus she finds the MOST amazing work! I always look forward to her posts.

And I really wish I had written this little tribute months ago, because now I AM ON HER BLOG, and feeling incredibly cocky and humble at the same time. Have you ever felt that? This peculiar mix of "Damn, I'm good" and "Who, me, are you sure?" At any rate I am thrilled and honored to be there, and it really is a great blog so you should click on over and see some of the fantastic art she's gathered from around the world. And then you should go here and see her own wonderful work.

Thank you, Jealous Curator!

Blue and White Beach China

2011-04-05T18:01:00.001-04:00

Blue & White Beach China, April 2011. Prints available in my etsy shop.

In the 14 years I've lived on this island, I've picked up a lot of china on the beach. These are some of my favorite pieces of blue-and-white. Some are fairly modern, some are really old (well, old for the US.) If you look closely you might recognize the Blue Willow pattern on a couple, although I think they are from different makers.

There's part of an old clay pipe, too.

Wobbly Easter Eggs

2011-04-04T14:28:00.001-04:00

Wobbly Easter Eggs, April 2011. for sale here

Wow, was this one unexpectedly hard to shoot! The hard shiny plastic with those intense colors gave unnaturally saturated shots. Like this:

I won't make it larger because the intensity gives me a headache. It took a lot of tweaking in Photoshop to let it read as vivid but not blinding. Just for fun, I took the desaturation a little further, looking for a slightly faded feel to the photo:

I sort of liked that, so I de-saturated it just a little more:

Did I take it too far?

The last shot is really of eggs from my neighbor's chickens. I put out a call on Facebook looking for bird eggs, since I wanted to do a companion photo to the plastic eggs. This one is kind of cool, not sure yet whether I like it. The smooth eggs on the smooth background are a little bland for my taste. (Maybe I should add salt? Sorry, can't resist a bad joke.) I'd still like to find a variety of sizes and colors and maybe some speckled ones. Anybody have an egg collection I could borrow? Hey, I wonder if they sell quail eggs at the mainland grocery store...

Still working on my booth for the Big Thaw craft fair. Holy cow, this is a lot of work! I have new respect for people who do this regularly. I finally picked up my table from the Boy Scouts' Christmas tree sale lot, where it has been languishing for three months, and am going to mark off a 5x8 booth with masking tape on the living room floor and test the set-up. Won't my family love that!

Square

2011-03-28T15:40:00.000-04:00

I'm not usually what you'd call an "early adapter." I might even be a "reactionary anti-adapter." I stuck with vinyl records until cassettes were the norm, and I stuck with cassettes until, well, until the late 1990s. If I hadn't married a musician, I'd probably never have owned a CD. Or a stereo more elaborate than a boom box. I didn't own a computer until I graduated from college (on the other hand that was totally normal, very few people had them in college.) I actively dislike cellphones although I acknowledge that they can occasionally be useful. I rolled my eyes at many generations of iPods and mp3 players and Kindles. Then the iPad came out, and suddenly I'm a techie. I bought mine within a month of seeing a store sample. I love it - not blindly, but passionately. It has its flaws, of course, but people who think it is just an oversized iPod or an entertainment device are missing the point. Half of what the iPad can do hasn't been invented yet. You've probably heard the bands that use iPad instruments:

Yes, it's a gimmick, but it makes you think "Hmm, what else could I make this tool do?" Because they are completely enclosed with no moving parts (so they can't be destroyed by dust) archaeologists are using them on digs and all kinds of scientists are using them in the field.

Because the screen is big enough to see without squinting and because it can be operated by touch, people with a wide range of disabilities and illnesses are using iPads to communicate and express themselves... and new possibilities open up every day. It's like handing out legs and watching people invent dancing.
Square seems incredibly mundane, after a build-up like that! It's not in same league as inventing dancing, for sure, but it is going to be one of those small but brilliant ideas that subtly changes the way people work. "Everybody" has a cell phone or iPod or iPad now, right? Well, Square makes an elegant little block that plugs into your device. You swipe the credit card (see the photo above) and then the customer signs with a finger (see the photo below.)

And voila, you can accept credit cards anywhere there is a wifi network or cell phone signal. Why do I care? Well, remember this post about my first craft fair? Well, it's coming right up, and Square means I can take credit cards without an elaborate and expensive set up. The reader itself is free (!) and there is a charge of 2.75% per transaction. Suddenly the (extremely) small artist/businessperson has the same advantage that larger stores do - instant and secure credit card approval. It's so cute, too: I can't wait to use my new toy! (And no, I'm not getting paid to advertise it. I just love the idea.)
Just under 3 weeks left to get ready for the show .... I'm working on my booth display now. I'll post photos when I do the mock-up.

Harborview Park, March 15, 2011

2011-03-25T12:24:00.003-04:00

Harborview Park, March 15, 2011 (Beachcombing series No.29) available to purchase here.

(I wrote this right after I got back from beachcombing, but once again it has taken ages to compose and take the photograph, so the weather details are slightly out of date.)

It was 18°F when I woke up this morning, 23°F when I hit the beach around 8am, and by the time I limped home with frozen toes, it was a balmy 34°. The ice dripping down the concrete seawall from a storm drain looked like gargoyles:

But oh what a treasure trove I found today! You don't really understand how much crap is in the ocean until you comb the same beach regularly. I was just here a few days ago, and yet look at all the new stuff. The special of the day was apparently old blue-and-white china. And my second marble ever (the first was plain white and unphotographable), and PINK sea glass! A little closer to broken glass than I'd like, but unquestionably pink. What a haul! I'm rubbing my hands together with glee as I survey the pile.

On the other hand, I think I have enough sea glass re-collected that I'd better get down to the business of setting up a new series of sea glass photos. I'm procrastinating for some reason.

Probably because I have yet to take a really great sea glass photo and I'm afraid that even with my fancy new camera it will elude me. Humph. Fear of failure is such a lame excuse. Right-ho, first thing in the morning!

One last ice photo:

Postcards!

2011-03-21T15:05:00.000-04:00

I finally made postcards out of a few of the Beachcombing images, and am so tickled I can't wait to get them up on etsy. Each one has the title and my name on the back, like so:

Get them here!

Treasure Beach, March 12, 2011

2011-03-19T20:11:00.000-04:00

The sun finally came out and the thermometer climbed over thirty degrees, but my kids flatly refused to leave the house. I left them behind and went beachcombing on my own, feeling only the tiniest smidgen of mother-guilt. Sometimes I miss the chubby little cheeks they had as toddlers, but oh it is nice that they are old enough to stay by themselves for an hour!

I've decided that I need to re-take the beach glass photos that started this whole photography thing. The originals are interesting compositions but technical disasters.

They're fuzzy, the shadows are harsh, there are two or three light sources with different colors ... anyway, I decided the only thing to do is start over. Unfortunately, I sold off most of that glass. (After all, the whole thing started because I was taking pictures to sell the glass for my etsy shop.) SO, I have to gather more glass. Did pretty well today, too!

I've decided not to do the white and clear glass, at least not as part of this series. (White glass on a white background has driven me way past crazy, so I'm shelving it for now.)

Fork, Knife, Spoon (Treasure Beach, February 20, 2011)

2011-03-18T17:01:00.002-04:00

Fork, Knife, Spoon (Treasure beach, February 20, 2011)

The sun came out for a while and the tide was high but ebbing, so I headed down to my favorite collecting beach. By the time I got there it was overcast again and the wind started to pick up. I was pretty well bundled, so just ignored the weather. When it started to snow, I moved under the pier.

This beach picks up all kinds of debris from the harbor. A lot of it is obviously from restaurants, like a gazillion lobster-claw-bands, plastic spoons, and broken bits of diner-style china. It's one of the only beaches where I reliably find good sea glass (as opposed to broken glass!). I guess the commercial waterfront has just been dumping debris for a hundred years or so. It is a fantastic place to hunt.

Looked at another way, it is an awful mess and all the recently-dumped trash is quite depressing. You'd think people would have improved over the years, with all the recycling and environmental education we've gotten since I was a kid. (Can you finish this slogan: "Give a hoot, ____ _______" ? If you can, then I know how old you are!)

After an hour and a half the sun came out again, but my camera battery had died and I was thoroughly frozen (because I have not yet got wind pants or mended my boots and my gloves got damp) so I've got no good location photos for you.

Oh, and can you spot the sources of this photo's title?

Clark Cove, March 10, 2011

2011-03-12T15:59:00.000-05:00

I had to go to the farm store in the center of the island to pick up rabbit food, so I figured I might as well stop by Clark Cove and see how it was passing the winter.

Turns out the cove is still under the usual thick cover of sea ice, and since the tide was coming in and the sky was a gloomy and ominous gray I didn't linger. It is always hard to get a good photo of snow, and the huge expanse of ice pretty much defeated me.

Still, you can get some idea of the place.

I picked up a couple of bits of things, but my heart wasn't in it. What I did get were some great close-ups of ice, which is turning out to be this winter's obsession for me.

Patterns I can barely make out with my eyes turn out to be intricate and lacy or bold and abstract through the lens.

I get so close I've bumped into the ice with my lens a couple of times.

The three above were taken along the edges of the massive blocks of sea ice in the first photos, so they are hovering at least two feet over the beach stones. The next few photos were taken of this lovely little puddle near the end of the access road:

so they are more traditional ice lying on top of the water. The sea ice is fascinating because it is so open, so lacy.

The puddle, on the other hand, reminds me of paintings by Robert Motherwell or Elliott Puckett, with these broad, calligraphic gestures.

I could do drawings like this. Wouldn't that be amazing, to do an ink drawing based on this:

(All of these ice photos are taken with the Lumix as I'm still trying to get my nerve up to take the Nikon outdoors. I'd better get moving or winter will be over!)

Seal Harbor, February 14, 2010

2011-03-11T14:51:00.000-05:00

Seal Harbor, February 14, 2011

The day I found the hundreds of sand dollars I also found some other interesting things, but I was so excited about the sand dollars I forgot to post this image!

Review of "The Bowler" Camera Bag from Acme Made

2011-03-07T21:40:00.006-05:00

I love this bag. Love it, do you hear me? It's cute, affordable, has adequate padding, and seems to be well built. I can't quite accept that it is too small. (I have this problem with shoes, too.) I have a Nikon D7000 with a 28-300mm lens, and the only way to get them in is to take them apart and sort of squish them in side by side. With a shorter lens on the camera, I can lay it in on its side, but there's no room for other gear, like batteries.

Dear Acme, please make a bigger version! Love, Jenn

P.S. With a shoulder strap.

Originally submitted at Adorama

My First Craft Fair

2011-03-06T19:58:00.000-05:00

Isn't that a gorgeous poster? I got word a couple of days ago that I've been accepted for The Big Thaw craft fair next month in Portland (Maine). I'm about equally divided between excitement and total panic. No idea what to expect. How many photos should I bring? Framed? If not, how do I package them, especially since I'm trying to cut down on plastic? Can I hang them on the wall? Will they have a wall or do I have to bring my own? Dear lord, what have I gotten myself into? If you've done craft fairs I could sure use some advice. And if you live anywhere near Portland you have to come hold my hand!
On the other hand, it promises to be a great chance to meet all kinds of interesting people and see amazing artwork and fantastic crafts. When you finish holding my hand, you can check out all the cool stuff!

Kickstarter

2011-03-05T20:24:00.000-05:00

I love Kickstarter! If you missed my first post about it, it is a website that serves as "a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers..." The latest project that caught my imagination is LetterMpress, "A virtual letterpress for your iPad." Check this out:

I've also helped fund a book called Punk Mathematics, Shannon Rankin (an American artist planning an installation in Berlin), The Oldest Living Things in the World (a woman documenting living things that are over 2000 years old, and Paintings for Satellites (an artist doing large scale paintings on New York rooftops). All those fundraisers are over, but they send periodic updates on their progress. I'm not exactly rolling in cash, but I can usually spare $10 for a really cool idea, and most of the people I've chosen to fund have far exceeded the amount they were trying to raise. No one's failed yet. The Punk Math guy was looking for $2000 to fund him while he wrote, and he got $28,000. Apparently there are a lot of us who like word problems that involve exploding trains.

A Good Day for Echinoderms...

2011-02-21T11:30:00.000-05:00

Sand Dollars, Seal Harbor Beach, February 14, 2011

...at least from the beachcomber's point of view. The echinoderms might not agree.

It was a cloudy grey but relatively warm day in February, probably in the 40s. There was just enough wind to make me glad I had a hat on. I was a little tired of the beaches I've been combing lately (a lot of others are hard to reach this time of year) so I headed over to Seal Harbor after lunch, thinking I would wander for a little while, then go home and get down to work.

There were huge drifts of seaweed on the tide lines, full of crab shells, broken sea urchins, and unbelievable amounts of trash. I started to poke around and was delighted to find a sand dollar. I rarely see them whole.

Then I found another, half-buried in the sand. And another, caught behind a rock. As my eyes adjusted to what I was seeing, I realized that the beach was littered with sand dollars, many still covered in their dark pinkish "fur." (It's really very tiny close-set spines.)

I left those, hoping they might still be alive. It's kind of hard to tell with a sand dollar. I stared at the mouth of one I thought might be alive, but it didn't do anything and the little spines didn't move. It was probably dead, but I put it back anyway. For one thing, it's good karma. For another, dead sea creatures stink stink stink, and you can't clean a sand dollar easily. I prefer mine not just dead but thoroughly scrubbed by the salt water and sand. There were hundreds of sea urchins, too, but mostly broken or unclean, so I only picked up a few. (I still have a whole pile of non-sand-dollar finds from this trip to photograph!)

Sea urchins and sand dollars are both from the family Echinodermata. The sea urchins we have up here are Green Urchins (Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis) and the Sand Dollars are Echinarachnius parma. I've never seen so many sand dollars, dead or alive. Every time I stooped down to reach one, another would catch my eye as I stood up.

When it started to rain two hours later, I went home.

The Bar, February 11, 2011

2011-02-17T09:57:00.001-05:00

Green & Brown, The Bar, February 11, 2011

When I got back from beachcombing last Friday I sat down and wrote this right away (but it took me until now to edit all the photos and post it!):

I've had a (small) hot pizza and a (big) mug of really hot chocolate, and I'm still not completely thawed. Brr, it was cold out on the Bar today! I was out for at least an hour, found all kinds of lovely things, including my very first marble, and finally decided to go home when I realized I couldn't feel my right toes, the back of my right hand, or my thighs. From the waist up I was pretty well bundled, but I guess long johns and khakis weren't enough for my legs. It's not even all that cold; the thermometer at my house says 23F. It's the wind that does it. And the itty bitty leak that developed in my boots. Maybe I'll get a hot water bottle for my feet, curl up with a nice warm computer, and do some online shopping for snowpants and winter boots. I know a lot of people who swear by Mucks. What do you wear for winter beachcombing? Or are you sane?

The Bar, February 11, 2011

That's the Bar up there - all the greyish stuff between the snow and Bar Island. It's completely under water at high tide.

I took a lot of photos of ice. It was a brilliantly sunny afternoon, and while the light was too harsh for good landscape photography it did wonderful things to the cracks in the ice. (This is all with the Panasonic Lumix, as I'm not brave enough yet to carry Ginormica down the icy slopes to the beach.)

Isn't that amazing? The ice is just flowing over the barnacle-encrusted rock. It looks like Fortuny pleats.

This one looks like a trilobite. Those are frozen ripples!

OK, just one more...

Brrr - time for something hot to drink!

Hulls Cove, February 9, 2011

2011-02-16T10:40:00.001-05:00

The nice soft powdery snow I fell into on my last visit here has hardened and iced over, so I bypassed the direct scramble down the rocky bluff and took a more roundabout path to the beach. Even at the lower end of the bluff climbing down was a bit dicey. The snow is hard enough you can't tap at it to see how deep it is, but it isn't hard enough to take your full weight. Climbing down the rocks means keeping your weight on the uphill leg as long as possible while slowly adding pressure to the downhill leg, trying to find the rock below. Phew, I get tired just thinking about it.

I beachcomb here a lot, because the main road goes right by and I can just stop by between errands. It's a convenience beach! Not quite a drive-through.

Looking in the other direction you see the Chart House Restaurant pier and the wide delta where the stream comes out:

Poppytalk Handmade Market

2011-02-14T21:20:00.000-05:00

I'm going to be a vendor at the Poppytalk Handmade Marketplace. It's a juried online art and craft market that changes theme and vendors monthly. This month is the Affordable Art and Home market, running from today, February 14th, through March 4th. There will be all kinds of amazing artists, with an emphasis on smaller (and therefore more affordable) art works, prints, photographs and interesting home items. Click on the badge above and come on over!

Plastic, Hulls Cove, January 29, 2011

2011-02-11T22:15:00.003-05:00

Plastic, Hulls Cove, January 29, 2011

Bits of plastic and other trash from the Hulls Cove Beach. Sorry, sea glass lovers, the red and orange are plastic bits.

Ever since I read about the huge garbage patches trapped in the gyres of the worlds' oceans (back in this post), I've been picking up more of the plastic I see on the beach. I used to ignore it, looking hard for sea glass, shells, driftwood - you know, the usual things. Then I felt morally obligated to gather it, so some poor seabird doesn't starve to death because its belly is full of plastic bits. Now, I find some of the trash I pick up is just beautiful. See that red piece encrusted with sun-bleached coralline? Lovely.

(Prints available here.)

Andrew Zuckerman talk

2011-02-10T13:44:00.001-05:00

2010/11 Andrew Zuckerman from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.
This is a video of a fantastic talk by Andrew Zuckerman. He's the author and photographer of Creature, Bird, Music, and Wisdom, all very visual books with a distinctive style. He talks about his process and the development of his style over the last four or five years. I'm most fascinated by his idea of "multiple entry points," ways for different people to engage with the work. Some people like to read a book, some prefer video, some like to go to exhibitions, some want to use their iPad. So for him, the work is about collecting data and then refining ways to show it to people. He says, "The work's not about me ... I'm the person that's driving the work to the audience. ... It's about finding the best car to do that with."

Some other Zuckerman quotes that resonated with me:
"I work really hard. I have two young kids, and I work. I don't have much of a life outside of that. Happily so."
"Everyone has these rocks in their shoes, projects that don't really get off the ground."
and one from Chuck Close, in Wisdom: "Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work."

It's a 34 minute talk, followed by Q&A. Brew a cup of tea, and take an intelligence break.

Zuckerman's books:

Hulls Cove, January 29, 2011

2011-02-07T15:37:00.001-05:00

Beachcombing in the snow is an adventure. Climbing down the rocky bluff to the Hulls Cove beach, I misjudged the depth of snow over a stone and tumbled awkwardly down the hill. Not quite head-over-heels, more of a shoulder-over-shoulder roll. A year ago, even with the snow cushioning the rocks, it would have been excruciatingly painful. Today I scooted down to terra firma on my bottom, looked around sheepishly to see if anyone on the road had seen me, then laughed and dusted myself off. I bumped my knee a little, but the sheer joy of being able to take a little tumble in stride again more than made up for looking like an idiot.

And I'm sure I did look like an idiot to someone, because Hulls Cove is right on the main road, and even at this time of year it gets plenty of traffic. This photo is of a more sheltered area where Duck Brook comes down and carves itself a channel. You can see the main road there in the background, where the bridge crosses the brook.

You can also see that it was gray and overcast, so the lighting is awful. None of my photos came out very well. (I was using a Panasonic Lumix, not the massive new Nikon. Thank goodness, because if Ginormica had landed on me when I rolled down the hill, one of us would have been badly injured!)

Do you have any tales of beachcombing adventure? Share them in the comments, please!

Snowglobe Love

2011-02-03T21:47:00.000-05:00

I don't know if anyone pays attention to the stuff in the sidebars, but if you've read my Profile, you know I love snowglobes. Well, plowing through my blog reading list tonight I came across the glorious Museum of Modern Snowglobes on Whorange. Be still, my plastic-dome-loving heart!

The website has this account of the museum's origins: "It began innocently enough: a snowglobe from Philadelphia, sent to a friend in Boston in 1997 inside a tiny, handcrafted wooden box. A few more particularly kitschy examples were acquired, and soon there were a dozen snowglobes on a windowsill. Now it was a collection, and once friends and family decide you collect something, you can't fight it.Who among us hasn't gotten a strange gift from a grandparent with a note like, 'I remembered you collect unicorns!' (twenty years ago)." Now there are 171 snowglobes in the collection (all neatly catalogued in the acquisitions database.)

The museum is located in Somerville, Massachusetts, and is open by appointment. Next time I visit the Boston-area relatives, I will make a pilgrimage!

So Whaddya Think? (About the Nikon D7000)

2011-01-30T14:38:00.007-05:00

Red & Green, Hulls Cove, January 1, 2011

Here is the first photo from the new Nikon D7000. Wow! I'm in love. This is after plodding through about half the manual and deciding to ignore it and just use the automatic settings so I didn't get fed up before I properly got started.
For comparison, here's a shot of the same set up from my Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 (a very good point-and-shoot):

And one from the old Olympus Stylus 800 I used for everything up 'til now:

All three images were cropped and tidied up (I just fixed the white balance and brightened them) in Photoshop Elements. All three were hand-held (no tripod) and had exactly the same lighting. The difference in color and clarity is amazing!
To really show off the difference, here's a detail from each:

That's the Nikon, with 16 megapixels.

The Lumix, with 12 megapixels.

And the Olympus, with 8 megapixels.

Oh yes, I love my ridiculously large, insanely complicated and mind-bogglingly expensive new camera. I think I will name her Ginormica.

My New Baby

2011-01-29T19:28:00.001-05:00

Here she is, my brand-spanking new Nikon D7000, by far the fanciest camera I have ever owned. I've spent the last three months obsessively researching cameras, and settled on this one.

I think the lens alone weighs more than my last cat.

For those of you who care about such things, it is a 28-300mm Nikkor lens. I am still learning what exactly that means. Well, I know what it actually means, what I don't know yet is how that translates to real world usage. The 300mm is the furthest extent of the telephoto. I suspect that if I wanted to become the paparazzi of Bar Harbor, Maine, I could use this monster to take photos through my neighbors' windows. From inside my house across the street! But I don't want to. So how did I end up with it? Well, see, it was massively on sale, and it is a really great all-purpose lens...

I am plodding my way through the manual, which I am enjoying almost as much as high-school algebra class. I am also beginning to wonder what I was thinking!

Doubts are creeping in: This is an awful lot of camera.... Maybe I should have gotten a smaller lens...How could I spend so much...I really really want to take a nap...

Maybe I should just put the book down and start taking pictures.

Yes. Tomorrow, I will post a photograph. Taken with this camera, dammit. It will be good. And all will be well.

The Blues, Hulls Cove, January 1, 2011

2011-01-28T12:30:00.003-05:00

On New Year's Day I climbed down the snow-covered rocks to spend a lovely half hour on the beach. The day was unusually warm, maybe in the high 40s and the sun even came out for a bit! I haven't been on a beach since Thanksgiving as I've had some health trouble. The first thing I noticed was blue mussels everywhere. As I wandered I slowly became aware of a soft steady 'thump...thump...thump.' My constant companions, the seagulls, were leisurely dropping mussels on to the rocks for their lunch. Ah.

I recently finished Curtis Ebbesmeyer's book, Flotsametrics, which I highly recommend and will probably mention more than once here. Essentially an autobiographical account of how the author helped map the greater currents that circle the oceans, driving trash to certain places and bewildering beachcombers. Entertaining, anecdotal, extremely informative, with impeccable science. Loved it! And he gets his secondary message across clearly. Plastic can be deadly to marine life, and it lasts for decades in the water. As a result, I looked harder for plastic bits than I usually do, just to get them off the beach. Turns out that it is better to send it to the landfill after all. Not ideal, mind you, just safer for wildlife.

And from an artistic point of view, I found several plastic bits that were downright lovely. That star, for one, and those gorgeous mysterious blue pieces. Also shown are a razor clam shell, a spruce cone, 2 blue mussel shells, a weathered bit of silver metal that feels like thick aluminum, the remains of a blue plastic toy propeller, half a weathered peach pit (I frequently find them on this beach), a seed pod I half-recognize, part of an acorn, and some driftwood.

Poppytalk's Winter Colour Week

2011-01-21T14:55:00.009-05:00

This is Winter Colour Week over at the Poppytalk blog. It's kind of a game we play on Flickr, organized and judged by Poppytalk. It isn't really a contest and there aren't any prizes - the point is to share photos and have fun. Each day features a different color, and you upload photos using that color to the Flickr group. Poppytalk picks the ones she likes best and spotlights them in her blog. Yesterday's theme was "green," and my photo of dirty linoleum was chosen! I am so flattered. You can see the other (much lovelier) photos at Poppytalk here

Today's theme is "silver and gold" and there's still time to add photos to the Flickr group if you want to play.

Improving Photo Quality

2011-01-10T15:34:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed I'm a bit of a perfectionist. The fuzziness in my photos has been driving me crazy, and I've finally accepted that my beloved little Olympus Stylus has done all it can. Now I am learning all about the current line-up of DSLRs. (Digital Single Lens Reflex.) I haven't used a "real" camera since junior high school, and I never had the patience for it then. I've had little Instamatics and point-and-shoots most of my life, and have to re-learn the whole process of picture-taking now. But a friend of mine came over this weekend with his Pentax K200D, and we played around with it in the studio. Holy cow! Here, let me show you the difference. Here is the absolute best quality photo of those dental tools that I could coax out of my Olympus:

And here is a photo with the Pentax (no tripod, even):

No contest, I'd say. I had been thinking I would get the not-quite-newest generation of camera to save some money, maybe even buy it used from a reputable company. Some people I talk to think that is sensible. But other people I talk to say no, absolutely get the newest one, you can get 16 megapixels now! Which is also tempting. I could blow those puppies up huge! Oversized crab shells and beach stones. Sea glass posters. Wouldn't that be cool?

Here are the contenders (as of today, right now) and I'll give you just the minimum of data:
Nikon D7000 (about $1200 stark naked, meaning no lenses.) 16.2 megapixels, ISO 100-6400.
Canon EOS 60D (about $1400 with one or two lenses depending on where you shop and what you know about lenses. I have a lot to learn there!) 18 megapixels, ISO 100-6400.
Nikon D90 (about $950 with one lens.) 12.3 megapixels, ISO 200-3200.

Canon EOS 50D (about $800 naked.) 15.1 megapixels, ISO 100-3200.

You can see this is a major investment just for the camera body. So I'm talking to everybody, testing other peoples' cameras at parties (yes, just last night!), looking up photographers I admire to see what they actually use, and reading page after page of chat boards and reviews online. I finally had to give myself a deadline or this could go on forever. By the end of next week I must order a camera! Really, I could probably get just about anything made in the last two years and see massive improvement. But I don't want improvement, I want perfection! Meanwhile, I'm still gathering data, so, hey, what do you use, and how do you like it?

Oops

2011-01-04T19:09:00.002-05:00

Two weeks of silence, and then three posts in one day! Between the holidays and still being sick it has been too easy to let things slide.

Blogger introduced some new formats that have a wider page, which seemed like a great idea. Bigger photos, for one thing. Unfortunately I can't get the header straight, it just doesn't look right, and I can't change it back. Pardon my awkwardness while I renovate my house...
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Oh no! I looks like I've lost all your wonderful comments since last April!! Let this be a lesson to all. If it ain't broke...but no, then we'd never get better at anything. Still, this is the kind of meltdown that makes me wary of change. Unintended consequences vs. the hope of improvement. Tough choice!

It also looks like quite a few photo links are broken. I'll try to get those fixed as soon as possible. If you run into a post with missing images, could you leave a comment so I know? Thanks for helping!

The Insatiably Curious Beachcomber's Reference Library

2011-01-04T16:26:00.004-05:00

Are you curious about the things you find on the beach? Do you want to know what that shell is and why it has a small hole bored through it? Have you noticed that barnacles and mussels often live in layers that make tidal rocks look like layer cakes and wondered why the divisions are so sharp? And what kind of rocks are they, anyway? Do you want to know how old that perfectly weathered piece of sea glass is and why so many pieces look slightly purple? Me too! So I've added a new page to this blog, called The ~~Insatiably Curious Beachcomber's Reference~~ Library*, where I will keep a running list of useful resources. You can see it as a tab up there by the header. Here are a few of the entries:

The Naturalist's Guide to the Atlantic Seashore: Beach Ecology from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Hatteras, Scott Wesley Shumway, 2008.

If I had to pick one book to recommend, this would be it. Great pictures, comprehensive explanations of various tidal ecosystems. This is the one that answered the barnacles-and-mussels question.

Pure Sea Glass, Richard LaMotte, 2004.

The bible of sea glass. Really. Everything from comparative photos of different bottle tops with the dates they were in use to an explanation of how manganese turns clear glass purple when exposed to UV light. If you don't care about crustaceans and seaweed and you are just in it for the sea glass, forget the book above, this is the one you want.

The Art of Shelling, Chuck & Debbie Robinson, 2008.

A very useful little book. I actually read about a beach (sort-of) near me in this book, tracked it down, and had a lovely afternoon. More focused on the southern part of the country (remember I am in Maine, so southern is New Hampshire and beyond.) Good advice on collecting and cleaning shells. Hmm, I should re-read this one, it has been a while!

The Sea Glass Artists website

This is a great place to ask questions about things you find. You can post photos in the forums and knowledgeable beachcombers from all over the world will tell you what they think it is. There are also fantastic photos of the amazing things (not just glass) that people have found. Cameos, marbles, a French railroad watch, antique binoculars, and mystery objects galore. And of course, glass. Lots and lots of sea glass. Who knew there was so much out there?!

Flotsametrics, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, 2009

How trash moves through the oceans of the world and ends up on your beach. An appealing mixture of hard science and colloquial story-telling. The rare book that is both entertaining and informative. Highly recommended!

USGS Bedrock Maps

I usually associate the USGS with the incredibly useful topographic maps they issue, completely forgetting that it is, after all the US Geological Survey. Forgetting, that is, until I get curious about what I am walking on, and then I go poke around on their website looking for local geology maps. The scale is pretty big, but I haven't gotten obsessive enough about geology (yet) to track down something more detailed.

I will continue to add to this list as I run across interesting books. I would love to know what you use for references, so please list your favorites in the comments!
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*I thought it was a funny title but it is way too long!

I am so sad!

2011-01-04T14:38:00.001-05:00

Because I have lost my camera. It is a little Olympus Stylus, just the thing to slip in your pocket while running around India, but also very hard to find once missing. Last seen just before New Year's. Please call if you find it!

Ironically, I have been shopping hard for a new camera. My beloved Olympus just can't take the kind of photos I want. I have one composition that has been sitting in the lightbox for three weeks while I tried one setting after another, and could not get the darn camera to focus properly at any aperture, shutter speed, or distance. See?

Close, but no cigar, as they say. I think the translucent plastic is throwing off the autofocus. (One prime criterion for the next camera - manual focus!) So maybe my camera got jealous and ran away to teach me a lesson. Come back, please! I need you ... for now.

P.S. The little red things are plastic tips for a dental tool. The bottom ones are not needles, they are blunt tubes. My father-in-law was a dentist and retired a few years ago. He gave me a bunch of random things like this when he cleaned out the office, because he knows me well!