Perfect Florida Day

I just had the perfect Florida day. I spent the morning at Hontoon Island State Park. It’s a small park with some hiking trails. I didn’t get a lot of pictures but the walk was nice. I figure I did about 5 miles. I enjoyed the solitude. The drought here has left its mark. While walking through the nature trail I got a sense of Florida how it must have been to the early settlers. Rather forbidding seeming. I found my way to the shoreline and got a photograph of a Great Blue Heron. Not a lot of wildlife out, three squirrels, the Great Blue, and an Ibis. But still a nice walk.

After my visit to Hontoon Island I came home and spent an hour floating in the pool in the sunlight and then headed toward Merritt Island to see the space shuttle off. Since I’ve been in Florida I haven’t missed a launch but this was my first sight of the space shuttle taking off from closer than my own backyard. Long ago when I was in high school I talked my way into president of the science club by promising a trip to see a launch of what was then Apollo. Unfortunately personal and family problems prevented me from making good on that promise or even assuming my post as president. I feel badly about that. But I finally made good on the promise to myself.

I arrived about 3 hours early, plenty of time to get a great spot and I alternated reading with talking to people until it was time. It wasn’t quite as loud as I expected or as close but a great experience nonetheless. I need to do it again and next time I need to get one of those special tickets I hear about that get you closer. I promised myself I would look at the launch rather than photograph it but I couldn’t resist a couple of shots.

After seeing the launch I headed up to Daytona Beach and had dinner with my husband. I capped off the evening with a quick dip in the pool and slept soundly.

I love living in Florida.

Mayfaire, etc.

Let’s see, how can I describe Mayfair – How about 15 bottles of water during the show and only needed two bathroom breaks… Yes, it was hot, and windy, and buggy, but a good show nonetheless. A nice end to the Florida season. Here in Florida, the season is ending. There won’t be another show until the end of September.

So I’m taking this time to revamp and rest. A new printer, a new print bin, and a new booth design for the fall. I may even take Monday for a photo trip. In the meantime, Florida is hot and dry. Rain was promised for today but I haven’t seen any yet.

In the meantime here’s a new featured photograph from my Everglades trip earlier this year. This is from Shark Valley and I call it Blue Heron Perch. I hope to be sharing more with you in the coming days.

Speaking of parks and wildlife I was upset to read an article this past week on how our wildlife refuges have become so under funded that criminal activity is starting to take hold and many of our refuges are completely unstaffed. How shameful that we are letting this happen. How sad that our grandchildren may not have these places to enjoy.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17634561/

http://www.funoutdoors.com/node/view/1432

Overdue update

It has been pointed out to me that I have been rather lax in letting you all know what’s going on with shows lately. So here goes…

Leesburg has always been a good solid show for me and did not disappoint this year. The weather was picture perfect, the crowd was good, and the promoters were well organized. Like a lot of shows lately though, I wish they would give awards based on category not overall. Photography always seems to fare poorly when they do that although Sheila Crawford won a first place (and highly deserved it). I was able to park very close to my booth which is always nice. It’s a nice laid back show to do which after the two visits to Naples and St. Stephens I sorely needed.

That was followed by Ponce Inlet, another nice laid back show. It’s usually one of my best shows. It was down a little this year but my new panorama pair sold almost immediately. No complaints here.

Port Orange is put on by the same people who put on Ponce Inlet so I had somewhat high hopes. It’s up against the Maitland spring show and by the artists who showed I would say that more people than me are frustrated with Maitland spring. It was a very well done show. I especially liked that at the awards ceremony they actually displayed photos of the work that won the award. That’s a really nice touch that I’ve never seen before. Breakfast was also the best artist meal since Ocala. Unfortunately sales really weren’t there. I made one sales to a very nice couple from out of town. At the very end of the day on Sunday, representatives from Port Orange came through and bought again the panorama pair for one of the public buildings in Port Orange. Only complaint here is that the show has a section for buy-sell type merchants. It’s nice that it is in a separate section but they really should put the artists near the parking lot where people come in and the buy-sell on the other side. People who made it around to the artists booths had already been through the buy-sell, and generally much cheaper, booths and I think there was a little sticker shock when they got to the real artists.

Apopka was bad. I’m not sure why. It was a beautiful weekend. Artists who had done the show before kept saying it had always been a decent show. Maybe it was the economy or maybe the early Easter this year but patrons just weren’t there. Another show with entertainment that pulls all the customers away from the artists and into the seats watching the show. I managed to break even with a late sale on Sunday but I think I’ll sit this one out next year. There were a lot of good artists. I’m not sure what happened with Melbourne jurying this year but a lot of really exceptional artists did not get into Melbourne and did Apopka as a backup show. Judging was awful. The first judge introduced herself, did a quick look around, missing an entire side of the booth and left. She seemed bored and flippant. The second judge was nice and thorough but had the completely wrong definition of a giclee, thus inspiring my last blog. I can almost forgive show promoters for not having a clue about what is and is not a giclee but a judge should know.

I’m here now in Lakeland for Mayfaire. Last show of the season for me. I’m looking forward to the break and hoping to sell enough this weekend for a little cushion for the summer. I just bought a new printer and next week my studio gets entirely redesigned to make room for it.

What is a Giclee?

The word giclée seems to be one of the most misused and misunderstood words in the art world today. It doesn’t help that the word itself has been through an evolution of meanings itself and still has a wide range of meanings. Ask an artist, a show promoter, or a person on the street and you will get as many definitions as people you ask.

Some random examples from the web – My comments are after the quote in parentheses.

From http://www.giclee-information.org/
“Giclée is a term coined to describe inkjet printing at its highest level.”
(Well there’s a real precise definition, highest level of what?)

From http://www.greatgiclee.com/art_printing.html
“The cost of a giclée printer as well the price of pigments and papers, is the reason why fine art reproductions using this method are expensive to produce. Also, because of the resolutions these printers have, it takes a lot of time to make the giclée. The new machines took the leap of beating the art printing color rendition limitations of 4 colors and added 2, 3 and sometimes even 8 to the mix. The results are stunning and no description does justice other than seeing a giclée print! “
(This appears to me to be just marketing hype. Depending on the settings I use I can print a panorama in 15 minutes; 1440 dpi, high speed printing, or an hour; 2880 dpi with high speed turned off. I always use the higher quality setting but very few people can tell the difference without a magnifying glass. So is one a giclée and the other is not – the paper is the same, the printer is the same, the ink is the same?)

From Wikipedia
“The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.”
(There’s that subjective term, high quality again. Who and what determines this? Is it the type of printer, ink, paper?)

But also from Wikipedia –
“to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art.”
(And we wonder why people are confused?)

From http://www.giclee-canvas-art-in-trinidad.com/Giclee.html
“Regrettably, no official or legal standards have been laid down for this duplicating and printing process.”
(Woo hoo, somebody gets it)

And

“However, if a "Giclée print” is taken to mean “any printed, scanned image” then such a print can be called a Giclée print.”
(And if a “dog” is taken to mean any four legged animal then a cat can be called a dog. Of course by this definition a digital photograph is not a giclée because it is not scanned, confused yet?)

From http://www.harryadamson.com/giclee.html
From the French verb "to spray", the word Giclée (zhee-clay) is used to describe a digital fine art printmaking process. Giclée prints are created using a high-resolution inkjet printer. Images or paintings are carefully scanned and reproduced using stable pigment-based inks.

From http://giclee.netfirms.com - a page titled quite appropriately lies, dam lies, and giclée prints
“Just as they will tell you, giclée printing is ink-jet printing, the same process used by the ink-jet printer hooked up to your computer right now. The cheapest computer printers commonly used today.”

And a comment on why an ink jet print is called a giclée

“For the same reason that they would rather sell you lingerie in a boutique than underwear in a store.”

From http://www.artreproservices.com/Advantages_of_Giclee_Prints.html -

“If it will take ink, and go through the printer, we can print on it.”


So a giclée is either
a) any inkjet print or
b) a “high quality” ink jet print with no definition of exactly what is high quality and what is not.
c) An inkjet print using pigment inks only

The original meaning for giclée however was an inkjet print on a specific printer with specific ink actually meant to fade, for use as a proof for a photograph. This is probably where the idea came from that many people have, that a giclée is a cheap, non-durable, print.

It is interesting to note that a google search on “giclée history” is well into 6 pages of results before photography is even mentioned and after that it is still rarely mentioned. But photographers are the ones suffering. The definition that has become prevalent in the art show world, at least among people putting on and judging art shows, is that a giclée is somehow of lower quality, and /or that a giclée is a print on canvas only. By the definition that a giclée is any inkjet print, a giclée can be a cheap way of printing. It can also be a very expensive, long lasting way of printing. The process, the printer, the ink, the paper; all are components in the level of quality of an ink-jet print. What is more prevalent in the art show world today is the idea that prints on canvas are the only giclées and that is false by any accepted definition. As I already talked about, a print on canvas can be high quality or low quality and while it is almost always an ink jet print, it is not the only type of ink jet print. And why shouldn’t a high quality photograph on canvas be judged among its peers as art instead of being judged with one strike against it.

I believe that the term giclée should be retired and standards for photographic prints should be defined in terms of the archival quality of ink, paper, and printer; not loosely defined terms like giclée.

Trains, Planes, and Automobiles

My plans are made to go see my daughter and the grandbabies, and also to meet her new significant other. I’ve chosen the method of travel that seems the most sane in this world – train. I can go round trip on the train for what it would cost me in gas to go a little more than one way and I get pretty good gas milage. The only way I’m flying these days is if the trip is too far to do any other way.

I started out loving flying. I saw the ocean from the air before I ever saw it on the ground. In fact, the first time I did see the ocean on the ground I wondered where the white fluffy things that sat on the water (clouds) were. I remember nothing but enjoyment when we flew back from Korea, 33 hours in the air, my poor parents. I do remember feeling a little miffed because everyone told me we were going to stop in Hawaii and the only thing I saw in Hawaii was the inside of a windowless room where all us children were herded while our parents went through customs. I loved flying when I took a bus to Boston and then discovered I could fly back for just a little more money. Sixteen hours on a bus plus 2 hours in the New York terminal vs. an hour and a half in the air. It was heaven. It was pure decadence. When my first husband and I moved to New Hampshire we flew back home regularly. I’d bring my camera and fight for the window seat, taking lots of non-descript cloud photos through scratched plane windows.

Perhaps it was the time the plane hit turbulence, the seat belt sign stayed on for the entire trip, and I needed to visit the restroom in the worst way. Maybe it was all those small planes that I flew in when I worked the northeast installing and teaching software. I especially remember the one into Pittsburg where the seats looked like school cafeteria seats bolted to the floor and we bounced and rolled like never before. Maybe it was Air Florida hitting the 14th street bridge. Somewhere along the way flying got a little scary.

I went through a period of being afraid to fly and that slowly mutated into just not liking it but doing it anyway. I came to acceptance that when it is your time to go, it’s your time to go and quit being afraid of crashing.

Now there is a whole new fear, getting stuck on a plane for hours while it waits to take off. I’m not so afraid of getting stuck in a terminal. I’m pretty resourceful and I always have my camera with me so the idea of getting stuck somewhere interesting sounds kind of fun. But getting stuck on a plane for hours on end, stuffed into a tiny seat, with the bathrooms slowly becoming unusable, sounds slightly terrifying. And it is so much more inconvenient these days. I can’t check my camera and laptop because they might get stolen but they’re bulky and dangerously close to the carry on limits. I end up only carrying one camera and stuffing it into the laptop carrier with my purse and now I’ve got so much delicate electronics rubbing against each other that I’m afraid to put it in the overhead bin. Not to mention trying to take off my shoes, keep an eye on the laptop, the other eye on the camera, and get through the metal detector.

The train – it sounds so civilized…

Patience (or not)

“I never know in advance what I will photograph, ... I go out into the world and hope I will come across something that imperatively interests me. I am addicted to the found object. I have no doubt that I will continue to make photographs till my last breath.”

Ansel Adams


A lot of patrons remark that I must have a lot of patience. Actually I don’t or at least I don’t think I do. I search out the wild places because of a spiritual hunger that needs the peace and tranquility they offer. Any photograph I get is an extra gift. I don’t generally lie in wait for a specific shot. I walk and look and wait for beauty to reveal herself. When I am out taking photographs I will raise the camera to my eye a hundred times without pressing the shutter. If I like what I see however, I enter a different mode. I will take 30 shots in the space of 10 minutes or less trying to get that perfect representation of what I see before me. Unlike what some say, the camera can and does lie. It darkens the darks and washes out the lights. Sometimes the camera, most frustratingly, tells the truth. Our eyes compensate, turn the pole straight even though it is leaning when it becomes two dimensional. Our eyes miss the piece of trash in the foreground, until it shows itself in the photograph. It’s not just the art of seeing that makes a good photograph. It is the art of seeing and anticipating the way the camera sees.

Sometimes I just stop though, and breathe in the air, feel the solitude.

Photography Invitational and More on Canvas

I am looking very forward to the Photography Invitational at the Mount Dora Center for the Arts. They will be displaying four of my photographs. They even put “Morning in the Glades” on the postcard advertising the event. I was there today dropping off work and got to see some of the other work that will also be displayed. Some very nice quality work and well worth the trip to see it. Please stop by if you can. I will be at the opening which is on April 11 from 6 – 8 PM. This is the same time and in the same area as the Mount Dora Art Walk. If you cannot make the opening the exhibit will be up until May 9.

On another note - Another attack on photographs printed on canvas and it’s coming from photographers themselves. It’s come to my attention that some photographers are having their canvas gallery wrap prints made in China very cheaply. I will be the first to admit that I don’t do my own gallery wraps. Trust me, you don’t want me to, it’s not a quality product if I do it. I can eyeball a print inside a mat to see that it is straight but I can’t get my gallery wraps straight or neat. I’ve also tried several suppliers to do gallery wraps for me until I found my current one. They just weren’t right either. Too tight and the canvas cracks, too loose and it looks sloppy. The coating put on the canvas is important as well. Canvas gallery wraps do not have the benefit of UV resistant glass to protect them from the elements. The wrong or improperly applied coating will cause the photograph to fade prematurely. The bottom line is that quality is very important on a canvas gallery wrap.

If you buy from me I can guarantee that my canvas gallery wraps, and all my work, is done to the highest quality possible and done in the US. If you buy from somebody else and the price seems quite low, please check and make sure you are getting a quality product. If you’re looking for a canvas gallery wrap made in China – Wal-Mart sells them.

Check out the new picture of me. A friend and I photographed a wedding this past weekend and he took this very nice photograph.