A parade of vintage vehicles preceded the Memorial Day parade in Brunswick yesterday. I know nothing about cars. I can barely remember the make and model of our car when I take it for an oil change… I think it’s green. Anyroad, I wanted them to be a background element lending atmosphere to the shot rather than being centre stage.
Someone had a birthday… I took all the lovely messages from DrSita’s facebook page and fed them into Wordle and put them over this here diptych of Atticus doing his thing. Here’s the result… Click here for the massive version.
One of the last Maine Photography Meetups for me today down by Evergreen Cemetery in Portland. Read More “Dawn Chorus”
I haven’t uploaded a Through The Viewfinder shot for a while, so here you go… This is from a while back, the first week of ‘spring’ on a phototour Portland, ME. Because of the way Maine’s coastline works incoming ships couldn’t be seen from the harbour so they built this here observatory (not a lighthouse) on the hill so they could see when boats were on their way into the port and sound the horn/ raise the flags to tell the dockers to get on it. Read More “Portland Observatory TTV”
Loved this graffito in Oaxaca (I want to write something but I don’t know what). I want to post it everywhere as it captures a feeling I regularly get.
Today we might finally sit down with a calendar and work out how this summer is going to happen. There’s a lot to sort out, and I keep getting asked for dates for everything. Hopefully we’ll sort it out today so I can give more useful answers.
Read More “Quiero escribir algo pero no sé qué”
What with us moving to New York in the near future, here’s a shot from our garden while we still have one. Matey here is crawling across a solar-powered light that we have in the tree there. A lot easier to photograph than butterflies…
I could understand if it was called Lion’s Mane or something similar, but lion’s teeth always seems like a stretch.
Anyroad… I found out today that by affixing my fisheye lens (x 0.25) onto my manual 28-75mm (f3.5-22) it does a very passable impression of a macro lens. And I know flowers are right up there with sunsets for photographic clichés, but it’s spring innit. Hope you’ll bear with me while I’m going through this phase. I take requests by the way…
Yesterday Brunswick was treated to about 5 seasons in one day. Bright sunshine, gales, snow, hail, rain, cold then heat.
I wanted to get a shot of some of the blossom that has sprung up everywhere of late but with a sense of the elements too. This is a 2 second exposure with a tiny aperture and the polariser in full effect to get the flowers in motion. It took quite a few attempts but this is the best one I managed.
There was an art collective in Oaxaca stencilling (Banksy-style) creations all over the town. We managed to get to the official opening of a gallery exhibit- Disociales. I’m fairly sure this is by the same folks- it was in a little boutique with “no photography allowed” signs. Made to be broken, etc…
In other news, I’ve made a few tweaks to this site, a prize if you can spot them… nothing major but you might like to try out the Random Image Slideshow (beta)
In brief:
Look it: 25 random images from my photoblog slideshow
Mind you:
It doesn’t work in Chrome or Safari (and probably others…), some images will break (cos they’re too big to be resized), some are pixelated (cos they were too small), some aren’t cropped well (cos they’re square or portrait), and the idea is you have a fairly large monitor to see them properly in the first place.
Techyish stuff
Not sure if this is of interest to anyone at all but I thought I’d post it anyway… I’m coming up to the 300th photo on my photoblog (and just hit 13,500 on Flickr…) I’d have more on there but it takes 10 minutes or so for each new post and I’ve been wondering for a while if there’s a way to do it with the tim-thumb.php script rather than using WordPress’ in-built resizing tool and custom fields. Anyway, that’s an issue for another day which, using what I learnt today, should be fairly simple.
So I wanted it to slide from one post to the next rather than load a whole new page. I’ve made inroads today.
It uses:
And that is what passes for excitement during the week in Brunswick, Maine.
Incoming storm clouds provided perfect lightbox conditions for this one. And to the left there was a mezcal factory so this was a full-on sensory overload.
From an unseasonal cloudburst in the town of Oaxaca.
The above’s a short video of the charming little animated ‘green white man’ on all the pedestrian crossings in Oaxaca. I like how he encourages you to run, not walk, the closer it gets to the stop again. I also wonder if there’s a backwards setting in there somewhere…
As you know, no news on this blog means there’s lots of news occurring, but no time to write about it. In brief, we made several gourmet home-made pizzas last night with a couple of lovely folks from Bowdoin. Today’s Wolfe’s Neck with dearest Atticus, picking up Blackcurrant & Apple juice, Twiglets and as many Creme Eggs as I can stomach, from the UK Essentials shop in Freeport. Tomorrow, if the weather holds, tis a Flickr meet in Brunswick of all places… so maybe some more Mainecentric photos will follow soon. And that is the mere tip of the iceberg in terms of current events round our way.
Guadalajara’s rising multimedia star, Elias Garcia-Ortiz has once again rendered one of my photos in beautiful watercolour. Above is Mitla’s Spanish church built with and on top of the remains of the conquered Zapotec structures.
It’s not the first time my photos have got an EGO2005 makeover 😀 More here
Part of the guided tour on Day 2 took us to a little cooperative centre close to Santa Ana del Valle, Oaxaca to see how Zapotec rugs/mats/carpets are made using methods that haven’t changed over the centuries. I still remember doing something similar when I was about 7 in Kingston school. I made an acorn placemat. Actually that should be Acorn, because I was into BBC computers at the time… There used to be a weaver in our village too using not dissimilar methods.
The Oaxacan valley’s climate isn’t ideally suited to rearing sheep so the wool is brought in from Los Altos, the first step is carding it to get all the wool fibres going in the right direction.
After a few minutes of carding the resulting rolag is spun into wool using a hand-turned spinning machine. It rotates a spindle which twists the wool and winds it onto the bobbin.
Next up is the dying process. Cheaper rugs use synthetic dyes, but here they’re still using a range of natural dyes using local ingredients. There’s a whole range of colours. Cochineal is used for the reds (the word comes from the Spanish ‘cochinilla’, woodlouse or more literally ‘little piggy’). Cochineal is harvested from the ‘leaves’ of a local cactus. The female insect is first removed from its husk (I’m making up terminology here…) then ground up with a metate (volcanic pestle and mortar type thing) and activated with lime juice to produce a deep crimson.
Blues come from cobalt from the coast. It’s bought in crystal form and is again activated with lime juice. Here’s the guide mixing it on his hand:
Yellow is from Cempasuchil (Marigolds)
and several varieties of moss are used for green colours:
Once the dye’s mixed up to the colour they want, the wool steeps in it for 24 hours or so. Though they didn’t mention it, some kind of mordant is probably used to fix the colours at the end of the process.
When they have enough wools with the colours needed for the rug, it’s time for the loom.
I still can’t work out how they get the complex patterns into the rugs and I was off taking pictures when they talked about the finer points of the process. It involves pedalling to swap the weft and warp and passing a shuttle between shifts is about all I know. Wikipedia on weaving will fill you in better than I ever could so I’ll just give you a few photos of the bits and pieces used in this part of the process instead:
The resulting rugs are gorgeous with rich natural colours and using traditional geometric designs that can also be found decorating the Zapotec ruins down the road at Mitla. They’ll set you back a few hundred dollars but considering the huge amount of work that goes into each of them are a veritable bargain.
Next up… the difference between Mezcal and Tequila and how to make it 🙂
I MISS MEXICO… (you’d be surprised how many people Google ‘Miss Mexico’ and end up here… can’t imagine why)
One of the few things I regret, other than not still living south of the border, is that I didn’t take a tripod with me on our trip to Oaxaca. That said thanks to me 1:1.4 50mm lens I managed a good few hand-held night time shots like this one in the courtyard of Santo Domingo’s church which, though they don’t hold up to close scrutiny, give a good feel for the atmosphere.
Here’s the sole photo I took in its absence. Flickr doesn’t display panoramas very well, nor does my photoblog. So sorry if you’ve seen this one before, but here ’tis:
If everything goes according to plan the next photos you see in this blog should be of mole, chapulines, mayan ruins and mezcal.
I could never get the hang of Twitter, but 24 hours later I’m liking Google Buzz. This is taken through the window of one of those shops that makes you wonder how they manage to stay in business. East Portland, Maine…
