It has been a quiet week here at the Lost Canyon Project. I’ve been working on the material from Pete’s
Lost Era show, transcribing the story from Pete’s hand written notes, and
cropping and squaring the jpg. images in Photoshop. The images posted today are
some of the finished pieces.
Mostly it’s slow and, after a while, tedious work. I had
wanted a good digital SLR camera for a long time, and the Project gave me a
reason to finally buy a Canon EOS. And that right there should give you all a
clue about how much experience with photography that I didn’t have.
I had done some desk top photography about
ten years ago when I had to sell off a collection of Japanese toys. I learned
enough of what I needed to know to accomplish that one task.
With the Lost Canyon Project I was faced with a similar
situation. There wasn’t time to enroll in a class, and learn about all the
things the camera is capable of doing. I don’t know any professional
photographers to whom I could turn for advice.
So I had to wing it. I set up Pete’s old easel in my den,
bought some black velvet, and a set of lights, and let the computers do the
thinking.
The purpose, after all, was to
create an inventory, not an art piece. Even so, most of the images came out OK.
But they need fine tuning.
I wrote about this in a much earlier post. Shooting a
rectangular picture on a rectangular easel, and fitting it into the rectangular
frame of the camera lens seems to be a pretty straightforward task.
And it is.
But if the camera and easel aren’t lined
up precisely, the image comes out skewed. (above) Sometimes this is unnoticeable until you go to crop the image. And Pete was none too fussy about the material
he painted on.
Many of the pictures are on uneven scraps
of matboard, paper, or even cardboard. The other difficulty that I was much
less successful with was the reflective glare from heavily lacquered pictures. Luckily,
Photoshop has the tools to correct most
of these little deformities. But as I said, it’s niggling, fussy, tedious work
to get them just right.
I’ll close this morning’s post with a bit of a teaser. Pete’s
brother Richard sent me a large packet of material from Pete’s private journal.
I’ve read through most of it, and there are some great background stories on
some of the paintings. I’ll be sharing some of this in later posts. Pete also
wrote about a heart pounding encounter that he had with some very sketchy
characters while he was camped out deep in one of the canyons above Whittier.
