Time-wasting images for today

I should be studying...I swear that I will crack open the SPHR study guide as soon as I click Post for this entry...but blogging seems important too (a procrastination tool...but still, important).

Today since it was so sunny I did a big photography project I had been putting off (not to study might be a sin, but getting this other difficult thing done might ameliorate my badness somewhat). Uncle Harvey took hundreds of photos of our 1978 trip to New Orleans when I interviewed for a scholarship at Tulane University, and I had been wanting to get some of these images online with a story I wrote years ago about the trip.

It got really hot outside as I painstakingly did several shots of each old photo, trying to keep them straight, trying to avoid midday sun glare, and trying to keep the breeze from blowing away the precious photos. There isn't a comfortable position for this nit-picky kind of outdoor photography - either I lay a towel on the sidewalk, sit on my knees and lean over the photo (have to use a weird angle to minimize glare), or I can put the photo on a short outdoor table and do an awkward leaning-stand over it. Either way my back and neck hurts...but it's so important to do, for the sake of art. (I've tried to re-photograph old photos in our cool, comfortable house, but electric light, at least in the hands of a very amateurish photographer like myself, captures much less detail.)

Today's photos wouldn't lie flat in the hot air of our backyard, so I experimented with weighing down the sides with kitchen knives. The metal knives got uncomfortably hot from the sun, and since their edges weren't straight they made it harder for me to frame the photos correctly, but at least they worked well as weights.

On some of the images I captured more knife than others, which doesn't matter since I have the magic tool of Kodak software cropping...but I thought it would be funny to show one of the knife-framed images, as a preview of the actual photo show (which may take me weeks to finish, since I need to revamp the original story and weave in the photos appropriately).

And what would any blog posting be without photos of Chucks...here are two close-out styles I found on Amazon last night...they are now in UPS transit to join the rest of my collection.