Archive for the ‘vignette’ Category

AROUND THE HOUSE

Monday, August 29th, 2011

Been toying with the nutty notion of taking my interior documentation slightly more seriously by curbing the usual “phoning it in” style of camera work and post production editing that my blog laziness prefers. In a tiny step towards that end, I picked up a basic vintage Minolta 50mm f1.7 lens for under a hundred bucks and then went all nerdtown around the house, shooting updated vignettes and detail images in an experimental fit of fixed focal lengths, big ‘ol apertures and shallow depth of field.

It’s an unending roller coaster of crazy excitement around here.

After shooting a ridiculous amount of images and putting the f/stops through their paces, I ended up attempting to explain bokeh to my exhausted dogs, who clearly couldn’t give two craps.

Come on. It’s not like those two could really grasp the concept with their teeny brains and total lack of interest.

After years spent in art school shooting film with vintage SLR’s and medium format cameras, I have a fondness for those 1970’s Japanese lenses that got shelved with digital. The allure of going Sony for a camera body was the lens mount compatibility with vintage Minoltas – meaning – I can stick old film lenses on my digital camera.

This vintage 50mm turned out to be both fantastic and stupid affordable. Of course, to feed my weird lens obsession, I keep an eye out for old camera gear bags at estate sales or while thrifting, because have you seen the prices on new lenses? It’s madness.

LIVING & DINING

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

Stuck at home alone with temperatures hitting the 100’s over the long holiday weekend, I went super stir crazy and fussed with the more temperate areas inside the house that had been suffering from months of neglect. The living and dining room were functioning as wayward storage rooms for all the extra homeless bits and pieces of art and lighting and crappity crap that somehow accumulates when laziness wins. The living room has suffered the worst cluttering as my new “shipping zone”, since packing furniture outside is an exercise in bikram yoga and tears.

Things were a mess and still are. Deaccessioning more stuff is still a requirement. Hello Craigslist! Hello smaller stuff in the shop!

I did clean up everything, vignette, adjust and add a few pieces here and there, although, really, nothing major has changed.

This little Tapiovaara chair is a lonely floater from a recent acquisition of a few Finish chairs. I love the shape and construction and it’s simple shaker aesthetic.

Of course it’s also where I make guests sit if they’ve been naughty.

Still need a new wall hanging for above the fireplace. Please please please – world – throw me a brutalist bone.

Fresh and clean and adjusted.

Still need to come up with a solution for the big back wall to replace the old pipe shelving unit. Have a few ideas brewing, just about zero to no motivation. I am considering adding some sort of desk type thing with storage, because sharing one desk between two heavy desk users? Not so fun anymore.

Hey. I need a another small house just to decorate and work on. By the beach…or a lake…or a storm drain. Somewhere cooler. Those are supposed to be cheap – almost free, right?

REMIX

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Slowly the house is getting put back together and rearranged to reflect the much less hoarded out state we had been living in for the past few months. I can’t even show pictures, it was just too horrifying. You will just have to imagine stacked piles of furniture and odd bric-a-brac overwhelmingly overflowing through the entire living and dining room.

It was so bad that we had to create a single hoarder style path to the front door. So, so incredibly bad that delivery people gave us funny looks when the front door wouldn’t open all the way and kept asking if we were in the process of moving.

Now we are blissfully decluttered and I’ve been rearranging all the leftovers into some sort of coherent floor plan as well as getting excited about acquiring a few new pieces.

During the big sale, I deaccessioned a large part of my studio pottery collection. While there is still a ton of ceramics sprinkled here and there, it feels good to be able to go a little more minimal in vignette town. Now to somehow resist the urge to scoop up peoples old high school ceramic projects…

Here’s a peak at a recent Craigslist acquisition. It’s a Danish rosewood credenza which is currently being repurposed as a media unit in the den.

We still need to mount the TV on the wall, but this thing is so much better than the dresser we were using before. This puppy hides away all the cables and ugly boxes and frees up so much visual and physical space that my heart is all aflutter. I can’t wait to have everything fully installed and looking banging…but I just do the furniture thing. I’m leaving it up to Jeremy to figure out the boring electronic stuff.