Moving soon!

Good grief, I’ve sure gotten behind on keeping this up to date! So much to do, so little time. Also, up to now, it’s been a lot of Same old, same old…

After living on the Southern Oregon Coast for almost exactly 6 years, we’ve purchased a place near Chiloquin Oregon in the south central part of the state. It’s 3 blocks from Agency Lake, part of the huge Klamath Lake and will be a great new place to explore and photograph. Being about 30 miles from Crater Lake, it will be a lot of fun checking out that area. Also, since neither my wife or I have really seen much of the southern edge of the state, with fantastic geology and high desert scenery, I expect a lot of new and exciting photos to come from this!

While camping nearby, a few miles north of the place we bought, we found this incredible 6′ thick ponderosa pine tree, a subject we’re sure to visit again.

Saving Family Memories, Before it’s Too Late!

I’ve been doing some articles for the local newspaper on family photos, how to gather the memories, preserve the images and also digitize them. I see so many fine photos at estate sales, antique shops, etc., that no one in the family has a clue as to who they are, so they just get sold or thrown out. So the first article covers getting the information. I’m going to add these as tutorials, along with some illustrations dealing with scanning and possibly some basic digital restoration work. See the articles on the right under tutorials, in the Saving Family Memories and Photos. The illustrations of the scanner use are in article #3.

Giant Skunk Cabbage Leaf

We seem to have the largest skunk cabbage plants I’ve seen anywhere, just a 1/2 mile from our home. Although the leaves will get somewhat larger for another month or so, I brought one home this morning to photograph. I’ll do it again in a month, looking through the swamp for the largest I can find. This one is from the edge, where I didn’t have to wade out in the muck. That’s my wife holding it and this is NOT a Photoshopped image.

The Sun Has Finally Arrived

After one of the wetest winter/spring seasons on record, we finally have gotten some sunny days here on the Southern Oregon Coast! Combined with very low tides and no wind, this made for some great beach days, hunting agates and playing in tidepools. With a -2.3 tide, many areas were exposed that you only see a couple times a year, so this was a special treat.

Cabinet Card Catalog now on my Website

I now have a catalog of the cabinet cards available on my website!  Go to the Historic Images page and you’ll find the link to my catalog on the right side.  There are quite a few historic photos of the Pacific Northwest, lighthouses, towns, etc. that aren’t on the other parts of my site.  Enjoy!

A New Product, Vintage Looking Cabinet Cards

I’ve been so busy that the blog has really slipped behind. I’ve been developing a new way of marketing my collection of historic photographs. I’ve come up with a practical way to make reproduction cards that look and feel quite like the real thing. So far, they are proving quite salable!

Cabinet Cards were a very popular way to collect photos of far away, exotic places in the 1880′s through 1920′s. Many sizes were marketed, one very popular size being the “Boudoir” card, which appeared in the late 1880′s, after which Earth Sea Imagery Boudoir Cards are patterned.

Our Cabinet Cards are styled to have the look and feel of rare and valuable vintage cards, using modern archival materials. They even include period-style studio advertising on the backs. Some are duplicates of originals, others are created from selected vintage photographs.

I’m having a lot of fun with this, finally, a way to do something with my huge collection that’s been building since about 1965!

Rains bring…Shrooms!

We’ve had some great fall weather here on the coast, but we’ve also had some heavy rains. This time of year, that means the mushrooms are popping up everywhere. It takes a special breed of “nut” to go out and photograph these bizarre and wonderful forms. It means setting up a tripod, very low to the ground, kneeling in a range of awkward positions on soggy ground, and usually making multiple images to get enough depth-of-field, while inches from the subject.

Amanita Muscaria is one of my favorite subjects, wonderful form and color, makes them irresistable! This group included 2 that have just broken the surface, still with their protective coating and one in the background with full brilliant color! This required 10 images to get it all in focus, using Photoshop’s stacking ability to combine the images. The 16 bit tiff image with all 10 layers was rather large at 1.25Gb, the new computer handled it easily.

A very strange alien invaded our greenhouse this year! The local experts think it is a mutated boletus type mushroom, but we are still researching. This is just a 4 image stack.

It had some great forms and textures, with desert southwest colors that reminded me of Canyonlands.