Hot Cooter

Yesterday.....Shooting French Sparkling of all things.  In a fashion setting.   Tongue in cheek, everyone referred to it as Hot Cooter. The Bubbles and each other I'm thinking. They were quite a lively bunch.  Bubbly..in fact.

A close crop in so as not to publish something off limits.

Palo Santo Morning

+ Three

Wow!  I just looked back into the past and saw I delivered this table three years almost to the day.
This link will take you to the beginning of the table build.
To bring you up to speed.  Built a sixteen foot picnic table out of dimensional reclaimed lumber for J Lohr's Paso Robles visitor center.  I thought I would construct it using just traditional joinery.

Paso Robles has some pretty harsh summers with temperature regularly going above 100 degrees.  After three years I came down for some maintenance on the table. 

I'm doing a walkaround seeing what's held up, what's failed.  A truck pulls into the parking lot and the man gets out and starts walking toward me.
"If I knew Kris Kristofferson was coming today......."
I threw my head back and laughed
"You must get that a lot."
So I told him how just last week at a show in SF and in between the opening group and the headliner, I was tapped on my shoulder and turned around to a guy holding out his phone to me and asking if I was the man on his phone....it was a picture of Kris Kristofferson.

Anyway the truck man is the landscaper for the grounds.  Dante, as his name turns out, is a talker so that's what we did.

The table held up sort of good.  All the wood facing up cupped up and turned really black.  The cupped wood pulled through the dovetail joints holding them down.  A lesson I wrote down in the notebook in my head.  Seeing the failure there of course would lead me to do differently if I could do it over.  All the joints and wood underneath held up perfectly.

Wirebrushed it a bit just to remove dirt but not the beautiful blackness, applied some more glue in the wedges and poured a bunch of new finish on it.

 How I found it yesterday.

The wood cups up.

The joint failures.

The joints under...tight.

And the wood still wet with the new finish.

Dante, the landscaper along with Cindy. He's coming back to talk me to about California Sage.

"Don't cook with this, it will destroy your chicken."

O  K    because it's close to being a full moon.

Doored then Floored

I do not like being late to anything.  Like Taylor says, "If I'm on time, I'm late."  Yesterday I don't know how it happened but I thought I was going to be late for a Doctor's appointment so I'm on a full tilt boogie on my bike going up Geary St.  Full on huffing and sweating and l'm approaching a stopped intersection so I'm starting to brake when a car door flies open.  I hit it and impact throws me backward and I land on my back.
Pop up like a piece of toast out of a toaster, the man is apologizing profusely.  I didn't seem to be that badly injured so I jump back on the bike with newly twisted handlebars and make to the appointment with 4 minutes to spare!


After the appointment I call up Henry..  I'm coming over.  Henry's space is completely on the other side of town so it's another long bike ride out there.

We start in on the tequila.
And I'm doing some mansplainin' to Henry here

By the time I got back home, maybe I wasn't quite floored but I sure was getting there.

New Old Friends

Yesterday morning I'm driving onto a winery I haven't been on in years but it's one I've been on a thousand times before.  Used to shoot for this place for years and years, then the Director of Marketing moved on, the winery was bought from the large Japanese liquor conglomerate that owned it and as is the case, the photographer moves on as well.

But as the world turns, I was re-discovered! and so I'm there unpacking into old but new surroundings (heavily redecorated by the new owner) and hugging old friends from other wineries that work here now and shaking hands with new ones.

The deadhead on the wall is new.  Sort of wished it was another foot higher on the wall because I could've used that foot.

And now they're doing food so that was a new thing for this old place.

Just some quick plating shots before food goes on the set.

It turns out to be Ingrid's birthday yesterday so as the day went on, so did the sampling of the products of winery...Sparkling and a very nice Cab for lunch,  some Rosé during the 3-4:30 hours and some sumpin sumpin after work as well.
Damn, you just gotta love working for the alcohol industry.

photos courtesy of Nicole Rosenstiel and Ingrid Greiser.  

A Tape Shooter Addendum

Should have placed this with the post below.

Details of the tape shooter.  This was an add on to the rolling cart a few years after completing it.  I'm not quite sure why it never felt right visually.  Maybe I chose to keep the wood just a might too thick because it has always felt a bit clunky.

The shaft was constructed like so.  First sawed the block into an 8 sided form, then cut grooves to hold the splines. I put a chamfer on each spline to reduce friction while pulling the tape.  Lastly I cut a male dovetail in the end.

And those two male dovetails slide ever so nicely in the female receivers.  The cutter is a piece of bandsaw blade.

A Rolling Holder of Things

I built this while still an assistant working for Alan in 1987, right before opening my own place.  You need a place to hold all the random but necessary things for still life photography.  And it needs to roll around so you can have by the set.

The random but necessary things have changed since digital came into being.  Just judging from how many times I pull a drawer open to get something out, the digital doesn't need as many tools as did the film.

All vertical grain Douglas Fir.  The drawers slide on wooden glides.  I think a drawer feels so much nicer to open when it's wood on wood rather than the ball bearing engineered metal slide.  The wood on wood requires attention to the opening and closing.  Like life should be.  Attention to the moment.
Hundreds of thousands of opening and closing I'm guessing over the years and not one tiny moment of any of the joints.  The fronts are held on with through mortise and tenon the back of the drawer is a fingerjoint.

Let's go through it and how it's changed from film to digital.

The lower left side drawers held the 4x5 and 8x10 cameras, lenses, bellows, etc.   What was used a hundred times a day then is never ever used today.  The cameras are still folded up, the bellows are still there, the lenses sit in their slots but these drawers sit closed.  Dead.  Put a fork in em.

The two smaller top left drawers used to hold sheets of 8x10 Polaroid.  Dead.  Put a fork in em.  These two drawers now hold foreign money left over from trips, my passport and random wood working tools.  The opening above the drawers used to hold a 8x10 Polaroid processor.  Now it's a place for the little cameras.  The top of it opens and is supported by the tape shooter to the left of it.

The middle low stack of drawers was the place for the color gels, sheets of diffusion  and small white, silver and gold fill cards.  All of this stuff is still used but not nearly like before. I hardly ever use the color gels anymore.  Small fill cards just somehow don't work the same and it's easier to open up the shadow in post.

One drawer held a foldable chart of the available gels and which drawer you'd find it in.

The lower right side had blocks, small pieces of duvateen and the large medium format camera things.
The blocks still get used but two of the drawers never get opened anymore.

Ahhhh.  The top stack..  The things that still are used the most.  All those ten thousand little objects.  Qtips, bamboo skewers, rubber bands, solvents, glues, razor blades, tweezers, C47's, longer sticks, staple gun, string, fake ice, fake smoke, blue tac, mortician wax, the list just goes on and on.  Still used, still vital today.

The top back left opens as well.  It was a place to hold 4x5 and 8x10 film in their holders.  Now it's a place for momentos and memory type objects.  Rarely open it.
There are two slides that you pull out so the top has a support.

On each corner of the top is a trigram.  Heaven, the creative.

And Taylor, since you asked to have this after I'm gone....there's one hidden compartment that houses one long object.  When you find it, you'll laugh at what's inside.

Love Dad