Hanging Pictures



No, I didn't fall off the planet. But, once or twice, it was the fingernails that saved the day. We learned, on relatively short notice, that we were the lucky hosts of the family reunion. Note that I say "relatively short notice" that is short compared to how much needed doing to prepare for the arrival of the group. Since I got a little carried away with art shows last year and produced quite a bit of new work, that meant piles of frames collected and were stuck on the floors. I began to notice that the room once designated (only by me) as "the gallery" (any normal person would have recognized it as the formal dining room) had considerable less floor space than when we first first moved in. It had even crossed my mind that the room would soon shrink to the point of becoming a hallway to nowhere.

How could this happen, you ask? Well, for one thing, when we moved in, this house was only about four years old and the walls still had a lovely coat of mostly uninterrupted paint. This became a thing with The Husband. While I have mentioned more than once what a catch he is, he is human—yes, there is a flaw here and there. He had adopted this notion that he didn't want "a bunch of nails" in the wall. We had hung a few things that I talked him into, along with a few picture shelves, and I had used a bunch of easels as well as the fireplace mantel. Yet, we had a warehouse of frames leaning against walls and an expanse of lovely empty walls. Beautifully painted. Clean. Boring. Empty. Walls.

While we are on The Husband's eccentricities—you hear about mine all the time—the period leading up to house guests has become quite predictable in our home. I have played my part in this little ditty dozens of times in the 30+ years we have been married. If there is any notice at all, I begin making an effort to clean the place up as soon as I get the word that guests are coming. I immediately sense panic, because of course I am always in the middle of some all-encompassing project. On each occasion, I had managed to virtually overwhelm myself with ambitions and deadlines leaving no time for the routine of housework. And, equally inevitable was The Husband's response to my rising panic. "Don't be silly. No one cares what the house looks like. You make too much over it. Stop fretting and relax."

Many years ago, I would fall for that line. Such naivete. Soon however, I learned that it was a trap. A devious, seductive, but stinking trap. Every time I would be rocking along, focusing on my all important, new and wonderful adventure at whatever, oblivious to the impending storm. Then, suddenly one morning, the man I lived with would be replaced by this obsessed person who could talk about nothing except what needed to be picked up, put away, thrown away, washed, dusted, or just generally fixed. I know, you are probably saying why not let him clean and count my blessings. That is because you have never been through this whirlwind.

Soon, he's interrupting me with "What can I do with this junk of yours? Can I throw this out? Do you need this anymore? I'm taking all this junk to the dump, anything you want?" Needless to say, any possibility of concentrating on my project is impossible and I get sucked into the whirlwind.  Well, I am on to him now. When he says, "Don't worry. No one cares, but you", I smile (mostly) and continue cleaning. I am on to his tricks.

This time, the place had gone completely to pot. The end of last year was about art shows and a new web site. January was about being sick. Housecleaning? No way. To top it all off. We had family leaving on a Tuesday morning and another house guest arriving that afternoon. It was going to be interesting. But, this time there was a surprise.

About two weeks before the guests were due here—right on schedule, he walked into my warehouse meant to someday be my gallery, scanned the piles of frames, and announced, "We need to hang this stuff on the walls." Fortunately, I was near a door jamb and didn't hit the floor. I hustled to my studio, nervously grabbed the ever-ready hangers and hammer (and I was never even a Girl Scout!), and said, "Where shall we start?" I was so startled, I couldn't believe it would last.

For days, we spent part of each day hanging prints. In between, I dusted, washed, put away, and cleaned alongside this transformed creature—always anxious about when the old and familiar man might reappear. Fortunately, there was no relapse and, over several days, more nails were tapped into place until the house was transformed. At the end, he stood back and said, "Wow, the place looks great."

I am still pinching myself and periodically have to browse through all the rooms marveling at all my work hanging. It seems that the gallery spread quite a lot beyond the walls of what was built to be a dining room. When the dust settled and the last guest left, last Wednesday, I was bleary-eyed with exhaustion, but smiling. And, I am still smiling.

What Qualifies As New Work?

I don't plan to make this the official new format for the blog—going sans photo, but my limitations create some restrictions and I will settle for this again today.

Last week, I made fun of my "90% new work" rule and after some comments on that rule I thought I should clarify and ask the opinion of others as to what qualifies as new work.

Common sense and self-preservation told me to simply show mostly pieces that exist in present inventory of framed prints and enjoy the experience of our venture. Over time, I have amassed a decent collection and I could easily have had enough pieces for such a small show as this. Need I reference previous examples of ignoring common sense in my plans of action?

Therefore, after a brief period of struggling to talk sense to myself, I surrendered and admitted that I was going to spend a small chunk of money on new framing kits as well as dig into the work of prepping new pieces. My definition of new work, this time around, meant work that may have been displayed on my blog, but pieces that had never been given the final tweaks. Web ready, yes. But, not print-ready. From past experience, I knew better than to assume that a piece that had played well on the web was ready to be printed and framed for presentation. Sure enough, there were cases where I got some unpleasant surprises and spent quite a bit of time coaxing out the file that was up to the rigors of print.

By the time I finished the job, I had six framed pieces that were new to my framed-prints collection. I had planned on hanging eight pieces which would fill my small portion of our limited display area. Right off you can see that I didn't meet my 90% goal. I got close, but three pieces that I had my heart set on eluded me. (Perhaps I should be grateful. After all, we have another show in December.)

More to come on another day. Meanwhile, does your definition of new (for a show) come closer to the SoFoBoMo rules—meaning photographs taken in the period immediately before a show? Does it exclude work previously shared in any form? Maybe I am out there in some alternative universe making stuff up as I go along. Wouldn't be the first time.

Living with My Photography

(Click on the thumbnail for the bigger, better version)

Recently, I mentioned the joys of hanging prints in our house and the more I thought about it, the more I realized how important it is to me to have some images on view.

Because our previous house was small, there weren’t many places to hang a 16x20 framed piece and I had never hung a 20x24 frame there. It was those old days of severely limited display space that was uppermost in my mind when I made those comments a while back, and I am getting a big kick out of seeing prints that previously were only hung at shows, or never before even printed, much less hung.

On the other hand, even back then, with more limited options for display, I was surrounded by prints. In the last couple of years that we lived in that house, I had come up with a makeshift way to keep me focused on what I was doing and why. I collected test prints, some of which were proofs either for clients, or pieces that were to be shown somewhere, and some that I had printed out of curiosity, after experimenting with a processing technique. Most of the proofs were 4x6 or 5x7, but, in a few cases, I printed 8x10.

The next step involved what I first came to know as “museum stick”. This reusable adhesive (one brand is Handi-Tak) had long been a staple item in our home. (In earthquake country, you want to have something around that holds valuable items secure when the earth starts rockin’ and rollin’.) One of the beauties of this sticky stuff is that it won’t damage finishes. (It’s always a good idea to test any product like this on the back or underside of a surface before proceeding. But I will say that I never found anything damaged by it, and we used a great deal of it.) Thanks to this handy adhesive and a stack of prints, I put prints in little nooks and crannies where I either couldn’t have, or wouldn’t have, thought of hanging a framed print.

Mostly, I stuck those prints on the insides of cabinet doors. The beauty of that casual treatment was no unsightly clutter on the outside and no need to matte the prints, much less frame them. Flexibility was a major bonus. I could change my display on any old whim. If I opened the medicine cabinet seeking relief from a tummy-ache, or some way to deal with a small cut that couldn’t be handled with a wad of tissue, I was greeted by a photo of our purple geraniums. A trip to the linen cabinet might include photos of beautiful horses galloping about, or standing just so with ears forward and eyes flashing. Reaching for a glass in a kitchen cupboard yielded a reminder of a favorite scene from a road trip.

It was an informal, simple, flexible, inexpensive (to say the least) way to display photos—dozens of photos, and I hadn’t realized how much I was missing that until we began hanging the larger framed pieces here. Now, I just have to find that museum stick-um that’s in one of those boxes somewhere. On second thought, maybe I’ll add it to a shopping list.

NOTE: Handi-Tak is available at Michael's Craft Stores and, today, I found QuakeHold! at Amazon.

What a Difference a Print Makes

(Please click on the thumbnail to view a larger version)

I have just had the value of making prints brought home to me in a vivid fashion.

While I never completely lost interest in prints, I had become quite distracted by the web experience and had formed the habit of rushing from one photo outing to the next and skipping the printing step. There are, after all, only so many walls to fill; and paper, as well as ink, are expensive. In my situation—months of preparing to move, moving, and not being certain now whether we will be able to stay in this house—putting holes in walls to display prints and creating more things that may have to be packed and moved again didn’t seem like a smart plan.

Besides, there is plenty to be learned from viewing images only on a monitor. What I see on my screen is a harsh enough reminder that I continue to struggle mightily with all the technical elements of photography. Lately, I have been most frustrated over my weaknesses in composition. Furthermore, while I am getting far more consistent in the exposure department with fewer and fewer outright losers, I haven’t begun to master exposures that fully capture what I felt when I saw the image in my mind. Even though I am improving in my ability to control depth of field, I continue to come up short of my goals. I experiment more frequently now with point of view, but I haven’t come close to pushing boundaries.

On a regular basis, I ask myself how is it that I can feel so passionate about what I am doing, yet that passion is not fully translated into the images I make? How long will I face this the great chasm between my intent and the execution. When Paul Butzi wrote recently that he considers himself "a Photographer of Very Little Ability", I was floored. “Holy cow,” I thought. "If Paul Butzi has ‘very little ability’, where the heck does that put me!?”

To complicate matters, I added a bright, shiny, new monitor. Next, I added the Eye One Display 2 to my list of technological challenges. Having calibrated my previous monitors using the by-eye method, and being of almost zero ability when it comes to learning new software, I was destined for trouble from the beginning. Sure the software offers an “Easy Method”, but that would have been admitting defeat, wouldn’t it? Yes, I know that the intelligent thing to have done would have been to live with my limitations and opt for the easy path. No, not my style.

I dug into the “Advanced Method”, whimpered for help from The Husband and Paul Lester when I was completely stuck and plugged away at it. The Husband was there for me and helped even though he knows nothing about color management; Paul generously shared the benefit of his experience and both of them made a difference. To put my limitations with software into perspective, let’s just say that I could swear that divine intervention powered me through the experience of learning Photoshop. Since, I often compensate for lack of talent and smarts with determination—that’s old-fashioned stubbornness, if we are being blunt—my health and sanity were spared with a few key breakthroughs and I now enjoy using Adobe’s mind-bending program. So far, no such intervention with Eye One Display. I’m still not satisfied with my calibration. A couple of days ago, I was so discouraged that I began thinking I had probably never had anything vaguely resembling decent calibration and that meant that I couldn’t possibly ever have produced any decent photographs. Everything I had ever done was garbage and a person with so little intelligence should never, ever tackle color management. (A dental appointment and the beginnings of a cold didn’t help my frame of mind.) I was ready to raise the white flag.

But, that’s where prints come into the story. Before beginning one last ditch effort calibrating the new gorgeous, but virtually useless monitor, I searched for the calibration prints I had ordered from Smugmug—they had proven invaluable in my previous by-eye calibration. Early in the search, I ran across a few envelopes of prints made over the last couple of years. Some of those prints had hung on the walls and when I ran out of walls, some had been stuck on the insides of cabinet doors in our old house. The prints all around me inspired me, challenged me, and helped to keep me on track. Looking at my failures was just as important as viewing the successes. (The stinker were inside cabinets that no one else looked in—my ugly little secrets.) Next, I opened some of the framed prints that had hung on the walls in our old house, but have languished in boxes waiting for a certainty that these walls will be ours. Too many of the prints reminded me of how much I still have to learn, but there were a few that succeeded in capturing moments of consequence to me and some reminded me that others had been happy to purchase copies of those prints. Furthermore, the prints showed that, although it might once again have taken divine intervention, I had managed to get some of my impressions on paper.

Since that day of discovery, I have shot with enthusiasm and a confidence that eventually, I will get close to calibrating this monitor and once again making prints that please me. If only momentarily. I was reenergized. By the way, it hasn’t escaped my notice that I require reenergizing about two or three times per month. It’s a herky-jerky journey, but I can only move at my own pace.