Snow Shadows and other beautiful things

A house of love for bluebirds!

Valentine's Day is a little past, but I've been saving this image. It's John's Valentine's Day gift to me. . . a Bluebird Box. So romantic. I can hardly contain myself. He has a gift for gifts, at least sometimes. I got him a box of The Chocolat Bar's caramels. Delicious, but not nearly as romantic.

This winter has had long stretches of exceptional cold. If it wasn't grossly inconveniencing Jasper, I'd be ok with it. It's given me a chance to get back to my violin, and to specifically take my bows in for re-hairing. What a revelation that turned out to be. The gentleman who is doing the job lent me a bow while he works on mine, and I could NOT believe how much better my tone is with it. I knew that the last guy to re-hair my bows was a fledgling luthier, but I had no idea how much difference good bow hair could make.

 

But I digress. As the title suggests, I've found myself enamored of snow shadows. John and I walk with Jasper every evening, and when the moon is bright, the shadows on the snow are so beautiful that they still my heart. Make me gasp. I haven't gotten it together to try to capture them with my little video machine, but I did take this video of the snow shadows in the sun. This was taken when Jasper and I were walking on the Inland Hospital trail. I see these every time I look out my windows here, too. We are so lucky.

 Snow Shadows Video

Boots, please. It's cold out here.

And of course, here is Jasper, duded up for the snow and cold. He has actually refused to walk when it's in single digits without his boots. This is remarkable, given his fondness for walking, so I take it seriously.

And while I have you here, I thought I'd show you how I photograph my work. John built a glazing booth for me in my studio. It has a good quality kitchen vent and light, as well as a tray for draining any mess. There is plenty of mess when I glaze. But because it has translucent walls, I can also use it as a photo booth, with a few adjustments.

The Glazing booth

 I use a Gradient backdrop that I clip on to the back wall, and can then place my piece on the backdrop. I use an old Coolpix camera, which has a great closeup adjustment, and a tripod to minimize movement. It works quite well. I love putting together these tools and pieces of equipment, using my brain, my indulgent tech and inflicting minimal fiscal pain for my efforts.

Sorry for the blurry image of the photo booth, but you get the idea.

 

Voila. Now a photo booth

Because the light has a lot of yellow in it, I use Photoshop to correct that. I can also erase any errant dust that sneaks into my image. But the image itself is in it's original state. While I developed this technique for close ups of jewelry for my website, it's adapted nicely to larger works in ceramics.