For the second time this image has caught someone’s heart. The first image was a landscape version printed by Elm City Photo and sold at the Boothbay Region Arts Foundation Art in the Square Show in September 2010. This portrait version of the image has been printed by myself on my former Epson Stylus Pro 3880 Ultrachrome K-3 Ink printer. Future images will be printed on my new Epson SureColor P800 Ultrachrome Ink printer.
I took the initial image during a Scott Kelby World Wide Walk on July 24, 2010. Mike Leonard of the Portland Camera Club had organized the walk. This image was taken with a Canon EOS 40D DSLR with a EF 28-135 f3.5 to 5.6 IS USM lens.
I’ll be returning for a week long visit to Monhegan Island in June to shoot more magic images of the island.
One of my artistic periods was during the early 1980’s while I was living in Dutchess County, New York. I lived in the towns of Poughkeepsie, Wappingers Falls, and Hopewell Junction. I worked in a retail camera store with a color finishing machine to play with to create my own wet process color prints. I belonged to a public darkroom in Poughkeepsie. I was part of camera club. It was an unsettled time in my life when work and residences changed frequently and ended in May 1985 with an abrupt move to Maine.
I was living in the most awful apartment I would ever live in when I arranged this still life “Oil Lamp in Window.” This was the only window and source of natural light in a very dark basement apartment. I had noticed how the light became magical as it shown through the window and arranged the still life to take advantage of the romantic light.
It was before Halloween in October 1983. I had made a spider web, and made a spider to decorate the window above the shelf. On the shelf an orange ceramic pumpkin sat which I had painted in a greenware ceramics class. I used my 1984 Canon F-1 to take a roll of some forgotten kind of color negative film to capture my Halloween decorations. I usually hand held my camera but for these I put it on a tripod. I took several images of my pumpkin, spider and spider web but only one shot of this Oil Lamp!
I don’t remember the exact chronology of how many or the when of my print making from my days when I used Elm City Photo for my enlargements. I have two remaining prints from that that time. I know that it was exhibited in the 1986 Waterville Arts Festival and that it won first place in the Waterville Camera Club contest in 1989. In September 2002 I asked for a digital copy to be made from the original negative. It is only a 1.2 MB digital copy.
In 2010 I bought an Epson Stylus Pro Ultrachrome 3880 Printer to use to make my own digital prints from my work. This image was created in March 2019 using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to enhance its quality and to remove scratches and grain still evident in the digital copy from 2002.
My husband and I drove up to Addison, Maine in July 2005 to see his mother’s childhood family summer residence. It’s a two and half hour drive from our home in Waterville but not if you take the scenic roads and use Route 1. We had booked ourselves an overnight stay at the Pleasant Bay BnB in Addison to spend the night.They were also a llama farm and sold their llamas to guard property from intruders!The BnB is a lovely house and the owners were delightful hosts.
The family property we looked at had been sold decades ago. Don’s Uncle Vern had kept ownership of the tip of the peninsula and what remained was an edge of mostly sandbar no bigger than a postage stamp and much too small to build on. It was covered in brambles typical of abandoned ocean front property.
Don encouraged me to use his 5 megapixel Sony “point and shoot” camera for our trip. Somewhere on our return trip home we stopped at an ice cream stand with a picnic table at its back to enjoy our ice cream. I noticed these two boats painted in complimentary blue and red sitting on the shores of a tidal inlet. Where? I don’t remember. Somewhere where there is tidal water along Route One between Ellsworth and Addison. I do remember standing on the picnic table to get the composition I wanted!
“Summer Boats” represents my entry into digital photography. I was still using my Canon F-1 SLR as my primary camera.It wouldn’t be until 2006 that I was comfortable enough with the digital cameras (and computers to manage the images) that I began to use a digital camera to create artistic images. But, it wouldn’t be until January 2008 that I purchased my own SONY point and shoot camera but then upgraded to a Canon EOS 40D DSLR by August.
