On Location

Fairlee, Vermont

We had several things to do on a quick overnight excursion to Vermont and New Hampshire, including a stop at The Fairlee Drive-in Theater Saturday morning. I'd somehow not yet managed to include it in the giant DI project. For a behind the scenes look, Tina took a series of snaps as I worked. This is setting up the 7x17-inch Korona Panoramic View Camera (that's its official name, from a metal nameplate on the front panel).

That's the target.

Lining everything up. Setting the camera in "exactly the right place" is always key, but with the theaters tiny differences in camera position have a big effect on the pattern and intersections/mergers of all the speaker poles in the field, leading to the screen.

Measure the shadow values with a 1° spot meter. This is a second, somewhat closer camera position, using the 8x10" Deardorff.

The sun is out with a light veil of thin cloud. 1/2 second @ f/64.

Digital capture of details around the theater, waiting for the light to be right for the 8x10 shot.

Making the 8x10 exposures.

PHONE

Hudson, New York

Sofa

Putney, Vermont

NO TRESPASSING

Hudson, New York

Hudson Weeds

Hudson, New York

WELCOME TO MANSFIELD

Mansfield, Ohio

I've spent all day working on layout-size psd files of the drive-in theaters to begin assembling trial drafts of a full book treatment. Along the way, I found this scan of an off-topic 7x17" negative of Mansfield, Ohio's fairly famous welcome sign on grain elevators on my Midwestern drive-in search in September of 2011. Sometime I'd like to make a nice big print from it to dig out all those wonderful details in the towers and railroad cars.

NO TRESPASSING

Hudson, New York

Role Playing

Hudson, New York

Sidewalk Plants/Learning New Programs

Hudson, New York

There's been a lot going on behind the scenes here recently. About ten days ago I signed up for a full membership in the Adobe Creative Suite. For several years now, while I had Photoshop up to date, I didn't have a proper page design program, or web page program, a full copy of Acrobat rather than just Reader, etc. There's been a lot of talk about Adobe's high-handed behavior "forcing" people to adopt a new model for licensing software, but especially at the introductory price of $20 a month, having access to all of Adobe's top of the line software through CC is an amazing bargain.

So I've been learning what's new and different in Photoshop CC (more on that another time) while relearning InDesign by diving into full-bore design work on the Drive-in Theater monograph. Also, I'm learning Muse, which I've never used before but is essentially InDesign for web sites, with a familiar interface and command structure. I've completely redone the front pages of my web site, linked over there in the sidebar. The pages are much cleaner and simpler, with navigation menus that should make it easier to maneuver. For the content of the many web gallery pages though, I didn't want to make them over. Not just because I'm lazy. Some of the galleries are over ten years old. I designed them in PageMill using flatbed scans of platinum prints with hand-made thumbnail pages linked to individual images. Then there are galleries made with GoLive from the original Adobe CS1. Over the years I changed the designs as I made new galleries, with recent additions being Flash galleries generated from Bridge Output Module. I wanted to keep all of this intact, but that isn't what Muse is really meant for. It's meant to be a sleek tool to create an entire website, quickly, from scratch, then either automatically upload it to a site hosted at Adobe (you get five of them with your CC membership) or manually to your own domain. It took a little while to figure out, but before long I was able to remake the front pages and still have the new Online Galleries page link to the whole archive of individual picture galleries.

Have a look! Leave me a comment if you encounter problems like broken links—there are almost bound to be a few.

Hudson, New York

White Chairs, Blue Horse, Birds

Hudson, New York