It’s day two of the Lola Art Crawl! Yesterday was a lot of fun… Met some new people, got to show off my art, and even got a visit from the cutest nephew ever!
Stop by today between 10 and 5 if you can…

We’re back home now. But we had a lovely stay at the Cathedral Hill Bed and Breakfast. Here are a few last photos. And then I’m off to get the house ready for the Art Crawl.

I’m as busy as a bee getting ready for the LoLa Art Crawl!

Enjoyed a lovely morning at Longfellow Garden with other LoLa artists. Many thanks to Anita.

Argyle, from two days to three months. Looking forward to seeing him (and his parents, of course!) next week for the big birthday bash.

I’d like to announce a very special Free Friday offering here at Leora the Sane: my very first photography book!

Giggly is a collection of photographs taken in the Giggly Hills area near our home in South Minneapolis. I created this book as part of SoFoBoMo, an international group event where photographers create solo photography books over the course of one month, from shooting the photographs to layout of the book, to creating the PDF file and posting it for the world to see.

You can download my book at the Giggly page on the SoFoBoMo website. The file is rather large (12.4 mb). So be aware of your bandwidth if you decide to download the file. Giggly is released under my usual Creative Commons, noncommercial-noderivatives license. You are free to share this work, but please attribute it to me and link to my site.

You will soon be able to view Giggly online at Issuu (I’m working on getting it uploaded and into their system). Updated: You can now view Giggly online on Issuu. Issuu will allow you to view the book without having to download it. Good for those with bandwidth restrictions!

This was a great project for me, as it helped me immensely in seeing just what it takes to create a book. Even if, for now, that book exists only electronically. I have created Giggly at a size that will permit me to possibly get it printed through a print-on-demand company that specializes in photography books, just so that I can see it in print. And I’ve also toyed around with the idea of creating a very limited edition of hand-bound artist books. We’ll see where it goes…

I feel like I have the skills now to take my ever-growing collection of photographs and do something more with them, besides look at them on my own screen. That’s something I’ve wanted for quite some time. To have the ability to take my art to its next place, wherever that may be, a book, a collection of prints, or something I may not have even thought of yet.

I hope you have enjoyed these photo excerpts from the book. Click on any of the photos to view them larger. And then please download the book to enjoy the whole work and share it freely. After all, it is Free Friday!

Have a great weekend!

On Saturday, I took some time to smell the flowers… and take their pictures.

We have a couple of different types of lilies in our yard, plus some phlox and creeping purple bell flower (which might be a weed, depending on how you look at it, but it’s flower is kind of cute).

It was a fun chance for me to get out of the house on a gorgeous afternoon and play with the camera. All of these were taken with my 50 mm lens, so this was more great practice with manual focus. And since it was manual focus, it doesn’t so much work with the automatic “macro” settings on the camera. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get anything like a good close-up shot, but was pleasantly surprised with the results. I will probably want to look at macro-specific gear at some point in the future, since I love taking macro shots so much. But at least I know that I can get some good photographs in that area with the gear that I have.

These are just a few of the photographs I brought back inside with me. I’m just starting to sort through them and edit them. More may get posted later, if I find more stars.

Enjoy!

Almost 12 years ago, I took a little trip to France. It was my graduation gift to myself, after completing my degree in French (crazy, huh?). I spent a little over five weeks there, about two weeks in Paris, about a week and a half on the riviera between Marseille and Nice, a week in Brittany, and a few days in transit by train.

Yesterday, Eli and I bought a new print/scanner/multipurpose device. We found that while it is super-snazzy, it doesn’t have the ability to scan negatives. This brought my mind back to that old trip and all the photos I took, almost all on film. My digital photos from that trip are long lost in the craziness of transferring from computer to cimputer to computer over the past 12 years. Somewhere many years ago, they got erased. Its too bad, but they were mostly just photos I took in museums and not those from the landscapes around me. If I really need to know about the art I saw, I can get at most of it online nowadays. I’ll just keep telling myself that…

But those photos I took on film filled quite a few rolls and two nice photo albums. Before I get the printer set up tomorrow, I wanted to see how well the old printer/scanner/thing worked for scanning negatives. Now that we’ve had it for over four years and haven’t used that function once. Silly me.

Turns out that it works fairly decently. Not well enough to make prints from. But that’s just fine, because I still have the negatives if I ever need prints. But for blogging or what-have-you, it’s kind of nice to be able to get some of my old photographs together in the same place with the new. I am pretty proud of some of these old photos. They have a glimmer of vision, and I can see that my artistic voice was just getting started back then. It’s a nice blast from the past.

The shots in this post are all from the Marseille leg of my trip. The first shot, above, is of the Mediterranean as seen through one of the windows of the Chateau d’If, an island prison off the coast that was one of the settings of The Count of Monte Cristo. This shot is one of my favorites when I think of my early photography.

I may post more throughout the summer as I wade through these old negatives. I’ll have to keep the old printer just long enough to get them scanned in.