signal fires

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Kim Halloran-Fry

"If there is more important work than teaching, I hope to learn about it before I die." – Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

We had about a half hour early morning session of (not) back to school pictures, so these are rife with imperfections. No re-do's at this school though. <g> I am happy enough to capture us as we are this year – grades K, 2, 5, 7, and 10 plus one mom who is also learning as she goes.

The quote is one of many I have transcribed from My Reading Life which I grabbed blindly off the shelves. I have not read Prince of Tides nor any of his other work, nor even watched the movies. The memoir thus far is gripping even without that background and I found myself unable to see the type for several minutes this morning as he shared the story of his beloved English teacher's death.

His mother instilled in him a tremendous love of literature, introducing him to classics by the armful. The first few chapters are tributes to these two great influences on his life. Definitely lots of food for thought to mothers who are also teachers.

"She read so many books that she was famous among the librarians in every town she entered. She outread a whole generation of officer's wives but still wilted in embarassment when asked about her college degree. She talked of Pasternak and Dostoyeysky."

"My mother hungered for art, for illumination…She lit signal fires in the hills for her son to feel and follow. I tremble with gratitude as I honor her name."

" A library could show you everything if you knew where to look."

"She checked out large art
books from the library and and spread them out for Carol and me and read
out names seething with musicality and strangeness."

"Pat, don't you think the passage of time is what all literature is really about? Poems, plays, novels, everything?"

"I think so Gene."

"Mr. Powell seems to think it is a dance. Do you agree?" (referring to Powell's 12 volume A Dance to the Music of Time)

"I wish I'd thought of it before he did."

"You walked into my class in 1961."

"Our dance began."

It is good to think about our own dance through time with these children. What will they remember? What treasures will they store up in their hearts and minds?

This is what I am thinking about this week.

Without an H

Posted on September 10, 2012 by Kim Halloran-Fry

More street photography today. This time we go to southeast Asia.
http://jonsanwell.wordpress.com/

A walk with my camera

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Kim Halloran-Fry

Not my camera this time. This is the name of one of the few blogs I actually follow right in my inbox. I look forward to the images and stories of his walks around his community in the Philippines taking pictures that move you and make you think.
On an unrelated note we have had a series of technological disasters which I am hoping do not spell the loss of several weeks of work. No picture posts here until this is resolved. But I am happy to share links for a while. And this is a good one.

Random People

vision

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Kim Halloran-Fry

…the photographic journey is about discovering your vision, allowing it to evolve, change, and find expression…. It is not something that you find and come to terms with once and for all; it is something that changes and grows with you….

It is about what you - unique among billions – find beautiful, ugly, right, wrong, or harmonious in this world. And as you experience life your vision changes. The stories you want to tell, the things that resonate with you – they change and so does your vision.

– Within the Frame, David du Chemin

A similar message in Aliki's Marianthe this afternoon: "Some stories are told with words, and others with pictures."

It all has me thinking about purpose, clarity, focus, and articulation.

And I often think better in pictures.

Sons and Brothers

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Kim Halloran-Fry

I have told this story, I'm sure, that I didn't expect to have boys. Maybe one. Someday. After girls. Surely girls would be first. I knew girls. Colin was born before sonograms could accurately predict gender and the military hospital forbid technicians from hazarding a guess. We were told not to even ask. We didn't. I knew anyway. It was a girl. It had to be.

I knew girls.

The male species was another story. There weren't a lot of them in my early life and I had a hard time picturing what it was you were supposed to do with them. I had cared for a few little boys as a babysitter, but I wasn't involved with footballs and bugs and wrestling. Loooooong (and loud) discussions about sports statistics and cars were completely foreign to me. Me, with my collection of Victoriana, my fondness for classical music and coordinating table linens. Maybe I wasn't sure where I would fit in there.

That anxiety fell away as the first blue blanket filled my arms. And then another. And another. Six all said, in two groups of three's. A mighty band of brothers who have run circles around me for a lot of years. They are loud. They are messy. Left five minutes in the same room, they are inevitably tumbling over the edge of the sofa or playing keepaway. They eat. A lot. I know this because I find apple cores and pop cans behind beds and on the bathroom windowsill.

They also send me music for my ipod when they hear something they think I might like. They suggest books or movies because the heroine "is just like you, Mom." They fix my phone app's and tell me how to figure out my computer. In a given day I have discussed how to know you are love, how we to decide how to vote, how to find the area of a triangle, and how to tie a shoe – all with equal gusto and sincerity – with one or another of them.

So I don't have to wonder anymore about how I fit into their world. They showed me.

Right in the middle. : )

You don't raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes.

~Walter M. Schirra, Sr.

Weekend Photography tips: cropping and printing

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Kim Halloran-Fry

My kids sometimes argue that they are never going to need to use their math. I beg to differ. Printing and framing your photographs is a good example of real like application and this article helps to explain why.

Digital images from a cropped sensor camera (which is what the consumer dslr and point and shoot cameras are) produce prints with a 3:2 ratio. (full frame or pro cameras have a 4:3 as a rule) That means they print a standard 4x6in photo. However, that also means the next size "up" is not a 5×7 nor even an 8×10. It is an 8×12. (16×24 and so on) That is a bummer because photo frames are not typically those dimensions. Most online photo labs will give you a crop tool to use as you select sizes. It is still helpful to have a fair idea in your mind of what different ratios look like so you can plan enough margin into your shots to all for the inevitable cropping of parts of your image for framing.

I had the advice "fill the frame" drilled into my head early on in film days. It isn't such good policy for digital. Zoom in close enough to isolate your subject, yes, but leave enough room around the edges to crop comfortably for enlargements while retaining all the essential elements of your image.

(I am mid-relocation so if my math was off I beg pardon <g> It is all in the linked article.)

Weekend Photography tips: all those old pictures

Posted on June 23, 2012 by Kim Halloran-Fry

A big project around here lately has been scanning all the shoeboxes of old pictures. There were a lot of them. I am ashamed to say we are just now doing this. SO many disasters could have befallen them over the years. I shudder to think. 15 houses, 10 babies, 5 states, a couple countries, and a fair number of miscellaneous crises in the intervening years kept me preoccupied. Being the poster child for biting off more than I could chew didn't help either. Which brings us to date and saddled with all these vulnerable pictures.

My solution was to pay the 12 yr old to sit here and scan pictures while watching netflix. Brilliant. <g> He was happy as a lark and more than qualified to move pictures from box, to scanner bed, to another box. A couple movies and several hundred pictures later we are nearly done. If you find the prospect daunting I suggest tapping your young people. No willing workers? There are national scanning services and many local printers or photography shops will do the job as well.

I am sharing some links with tips for scanning your old photos here and here Basically you want to be sure your scanner is set to 'photo' vs document and at 300dpi.

When you are done scanning consider saving copies of the files to an external hard drive. Cpu's fail. Hard drives fail. One copy is unwise.

And don't forget the whole point of having these pictures is that they are part of your story. Tell it. The most important book you will ever write is the one you write for your family. What happened? When? Where? and more importantly – how did you feel about that? This is what I am working on now.

It's ok to document random memories out of 'order'. If they come to mind when you see an old picture, write it down. If you don't have photoshop, start a photobook at Shutterfly and drag an old photo over to your project here and there as the mood strikes. They keep your stuff saved a long time. (another back up)

Weekend Photography tips: iphoto

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Kim Halloran-Fry

Most images benefit from some post processing. This is especially true of those taken in auto mode. Editing can help to get you closer to what you envisioned than your camera did. It pays to take a little bit of time to get to know the photo editing software you may have already built into your computer. Then you can edit at the same time and place you catalog your pictures.

There are some really good tips for iphoto editing here and here. They cover much of the same ground but usually reading the same things over again with slightly different presentation helps you to really get it. This one explains how to use the red eye and retouch tools. You can find lots of youtube videos if showing works better than telling.

I am including a picture I edited with those tips from several years ago that was shot in auto in the house. First thing I did was to adjust the exposure considerably. Auto shots are notoriously underexposed, especially in the shadows. Check the sliders at the top of the adjustment box. That center slider for levels is your friend <g> Move that to the left and watch things brighten up. Then I increased contrast and sharpness as well – two other things usually a problem in auto.

I corrected the white balance as best I could with the dropper. You may need to try the dropper a few different places to get it right. If you clicked on the white comforter towards the top/left in the image it would over-correct and make the rest of the image yellow for instance.

Anyway, it's a snapshot, but a little brighter and well, snappier. : )

Personally I really dislike the iphoto effects options. The black and white conversion is awful. The sepia is heavy handed. The color fade leaves things looking chilly and anemic. There are so many better effects editors out there these days, I avoid this one.

Irish eyes

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Kim Halloran-Fry

Had a wonderful session with our Irish dance instructor last weekend. Sharing some glimpses of her gorgeous family and the birthday bash that followed at a local Irish pub, complete with performances by the studio kids and any willing Irishmen who ever learned to jig. And there were several! There's no party like an Irish party. : )