Explosions in the Sky

What a weekend! It began on July 2, which was Isobel's 12th birthday. After years of having everyone be out of town on her birthday, we decided to postpone her party for a week. But in place of the party, we brought everyone over to our friend Sandi's house. Her neighbor puts on the biggest fireworks display in the county, and we more or less had front row seats. I spent the hour running up to the fireworks taking pictures of the clouds and the sunset. Haven't gotten around to doing anything with those images yet. But I did have fun taking images of the fireworks themselves. This time around I used my telephoto lens, so things are a bit crisper than last year.

July 3rd took me out of town to Oswego, where Isobel and I attended the bon voyage picnic for her trip to Australia. I'll post some of those pics closer to her departure time.

July 4th found us at Trout Lake, as Ginger's family's camp. Between the two picnics I've really gotten in touch with my inner George Hamilton. Or should I say my bottle of aloe is now my bff. The Norwood fireworks display was a bit anticlimactic, especially since all the kids were way overtired by that point.

July 5 has found me in either a heat-induced stupor or torpor. Whatever word best fits lying prone on the breezy front porch all evening. I did manage to muster up the energy to process some of the fireworks images. I've been thinking for a couple of weeks now about contributing to an art project being run by some of my colleagues. They purchased an old cigarette vending machine and have turned it into an art vending machine, featured during the summer Artwalks in Saranac Lake. Nifty idea, but the art pieces have to be small enough to fit inside a cigarette box. My original thought was to use my Superman leaps image, as I already have a screen. It would have been easy enough to print out a run of twelve for the machine. But the dimensions would not have worked without rotating the image into portrait orientation, and I just didn't like the composition.

So instead, I'm processing 12 images of the fireworks into small art pieces I'm calling Skylights. Here's a preview of all 12 together in a collage:



Each segment is 2X3. I haven't figured out yet how I'm going to print them--I'm going to try some giclee prints and some color laser on black paper first. All for now.