TTV - Part 2

Here are some more TTV shots of prints. Let me know what you think.

Gone to Pot

The pumpkin has finally gotten a new, bigger pot...which already seems too small. Lily has nightmares of it taking over the apartment while we sleep. Chris just looks at it, smirks and shakes his head. At least we seem to have successfully bee-proofed the terrace although I know just saying that has cursed me to wake up one morning to a swarm of bees nesting in my pillow.






As you can see, the leaves alone are now about the size of my hand. Lily may not be too far off with her fears.










The buds are starting to get much bigger so I'm sure that I'll soon be sitting on the terrace floor with a few dozen q-tips trying to pollinate the thing before the flowers fade and fall off. From what I've read the flowers only bloom for a few days so I can't procrastinate or I'll end up sans pumpkins come Halloween. So, that's all that's new with the pumpkin. Here's a few more photos of its awesomeness.

The Book Collector

This is just a cute photo of Chris that I took in B&H Photo when I was trying out a new lens. The lens is an awesome 50mm lens that goes down to f1.4 so I can take photos at night or in really low light situations using a pretty quick shutter speed. I really like it and it's been my lens of choice for my street photography since Chris bought it for me.

Coney Island

These are some photos from Coney Island that I took in March of this year. One of the photos from this shoot is already up on my my online shop. These ones are still works in progress though. Also, this was some of the most miserable 10 minutes of photographing I've done. Chris and I went out to Coney Island thinking that Spring was in the air. So it sucked when we got to the beach dressed for warm weather and it was freezing. A storm was blowing in and there was this crazy frigid wind coming with it. So when you're looking at these photos keep in mind that I was shivering and miserable during each one of them. That being said, I think they came out pretty cool. I hope to get back to Coney Island again soon.

TTV

I've been experimenting with ttv (through the viewfinder) photos. I bought a Duaflex II camera for a couple of bucks on eBay. It doesn't have the grid lines in the viewfinder like the Rolleiflex I have and it's also nowhere near as valuable so I can tape it without stress and if it ever falls while I'm trying to set up one of these shots I can get through without crying. I think that the photos are coming out really cool. So a TTV photo just means that you use one camera to take a picture of the big, square viewfinder of a box camera. It usually adds a more vintage look to the photo and distorts the focus around the edges. I enhanced that distortion by using a macro lens on my digital to take the pictures.

The first photo is of a leaf on my pumpkin plant. The other photographs are a little less traditional. They're actually ttv photographs of prints of my old photographs. I set up the duaflex on a table on it's back with the lens facing up and then placed prints directly on top of the viewing lens and back lit the print paper with a small lamp. Let me know what you think. I'm planning to add these photos to my shop on etsy.com in the next couple of days.

A Bee Invasion

The pumpkin is growing like mad. This photo is from about a week ago and it's already grown probably another 6 inches taller than this. I also have the uneasy feeling that it's luring bees onto our terrace. Since planting it we've had two bees end up on the terrace within a few weeks of each other. We're not sure how they're getting in but up until the pumpkin we'd never had anything find it's way onto the terrace. I discovered the first bee and it scared the hell out of me to be watering my plants and to suddenly hear a loud buzzing next to me. Luckily, the bee seemed terrified and chose to run away from me and into the closed window or hide in my ivy plant. Chris managed to shoo it out by opening a window and corralling it with a large piece of cardboard. The second bee may, in fact, have been a wasp. Neither Chris nor Richard could decide what it was. I'm still hoping that I can make this whole pumpkin thing work. It's beginning to form little flowers so soon I'll be watching youtube videos on pollination and hoping to breed myself some awesome little pumpkins.

Cherry Blossoms

The weather today is pretty awful so I thought I'd reminisce about my afternoon at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens a couple of weeks ago. The cherry blossoms were all in peak bloom and the place looked rocking. As for today, the temperatures dropped to about 40 and i nearly lossed my umbrella a few times in the wind gusts. At least tomorrow looks better. In the meantime here are a few shots of the cherry blossom trees.

An Indoor Pumpkin

I've started growing a pumpkin plant in a small pot on my terrace. From everything that I've read (all of which I decided to read after the plant had already sprouted) this is not a good idea but I'm sticking with it. I was looking at the tiny seed selection at Walgreens thinking that maybe I'd buy some Lily of the Valley seeds since I'm maybe having that for my bouquet come the wedding in October. Of course, Walgreens doesn't have seeds as daring as Lily of the Valley so I was about to give up and head home when I saw the pumpkin seeds. Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday and there's something about carving pumpkins that's become like Communion to a Catholic for me so I caved and bought a pack. Seeing as how it was around April and good Pumpkin planting time, according to the seed packet, I grabbed a pot, dropped in a seed, and waited to see what happened. So less than a week later and I had this beautiful little sprout that you can see.

In some fit of maternal instinct he's been named. You can call him Linus. I'm hoping that things will time out alright and Chris and I will be able to plant him in the garden we may or may not have when we find a new apartment in August, assuming that the roots haven't burst out of the side of the pot before I get that chance. When I was searching online for information about the possibility of growing, and not killing, a pumpkin plant indoors I found a total of one website addressing it. The site had nearly no text, just a series of photos showing a small sprout growing into a slightly larger plant with a few leaves that then fell over and died.

So, hopefully, anyone else out there who gets impulsive near the seed section but lives in a city, like me, where a piece of earth almost never comes with the rent, can find out from me if you can squeeze a big dream into a small pot. Although, I've got to say that I'm not looking forward to pollinating it. I can either set a hive of bees loose in my apartment or carefully determine the sex of each flower and use a q-tip to pollinate them all by hand. Bees cause me to freeze up and make terrified little girl shrieks so Q-tips it is. Wish me luck.