When last I wrote, Chris and I were in Verona, Italy. Four months later, and here we are back in NJ, where we arrived at the beginning of March.  However, since then we’ve driven north – and then south – and then north again, visiting family, doing research, working on projects … the time goes by before you realize it.

But I have some news: I have finally launched my Photographs, Pistols & Parasols podcast! This is part of the project on early women photographers I’ve been  working on since the end of 2015. Technical challenges were bigger than I’d hoped, but I’ve finally sorted out enough of them to get the podcast off the ground. Yay!

On the podcast, I share the stories of early women artisan photographers, celebrating the accomplishments of women whose professional photography careers began between 1840-1930.

BTW, you might be wondering, what’s a podcast?  Essentially, it’s a free radio show on the Internet. Two episodes are available now; new episodes will be posted on the 1st and the 15th of the month.

There are two ways to listen to the podcast:

Option 1: You can subscribe  (for free) using applications like iTunes or Google Play or others; the advantage to subscribing is that you automatically get alerted when there’s a new episode.  To subscribe to Photographs, Pistols & Parasols, you can find it listed on  iTunes, Google Play Music or wherever you look for podcasts.   If you subscribe and like it, I’d appreciate it if you would leave a rating (and optionally a review) – that will help it get boosted up on the rankings on the podcast sites, which in turn will help me potentially attract sponsors.

Option 2: If all that sounds confusing – i.e., you don’t know what  a podcast is and/or if you’ve never listened to one, and don’t already use an audio app to listen to podcasts — you can listen to it directly from my new website:  p3photographers.net.  You’ll just need to check back there periodically for the new episodes (posted on the 1st and the 15th of every month).   There are two there now.

Whichever way you choose, I hope you enjoy Photographs, Pistols & Parasols!

————-
Links
Subscribe to Photographs, Pistols & Parasols now on iTunes or Google Play Music  or wherever you find your podcasts
More info at p3photographers.net

I have set up a website at

re.chrisculy.net

Each of the 500+ letters between RB and EBB will be posted on the day that corresponds to the original date in 1845 or 1846 that the letter was originally mailed. The first letter is tomorrow, January 10, 2017. More will follow regularly through May 2017, after which the letters come very frequently (almost one a day on average after that).

On the website, on the right-hand side of the page, you’ll see a way to sign up to get the letters in your email inbox as they are posted.

BTW, yes, this is similar to a website I did several years ago for these letters, but note that it is NOT the same website, so you’ll have to sign up again. This time around I think I’ve conquered some technical issues that kept the last batch of letters from arriving on time. Fingers-crossed the “post” works better now.

Also, this new website is now connected to Chris’ website, because he’ll be sharing some of his visualizations and research related to the letters from time-to-time. Plus some other fun stuff, too!

So head over to the website, subscribe if you want to get the letters in email,  and stay-tuned. Truly, EBB and RB are unmatched when it comes to letter writing – enjoy!

Good luck – and hope we all have the luck of the Italian tradition with us for 2017!

To celebrate, here are a couple of images for the season from Chris’s new “ND Series”  of artworks. Enjoy!

1. ND Series 25122016: one of Chris’ digital visualization art works ( I added the blue frame to create a virtual card to share):

ND25122016

2. AND Circles – an animated version of an ND artwork:

That was the day that Chris and I arrived back in the U.S. after years of living in Europe on our current Plan G adventure.

Plan G actually started a few months before that, on March 31, 2015, when we left Germany (where we’ been living for 3.5 years) and turned into “tourists” in the EU. (For more on the complexities of that, as well as why our current travel adventures are called Plan G, I refer you to old blog posts here and here and here and here.)

Anyway, here’s a breakdown of our Plan G travel so far:

Phase 1: March 31-2015-June 20, 2015 : Travels in Europe

Phase 2: June 20, 2015-January 7, 2016: Travels in North America, East to West

Phase 3: January 7, 2016-September 21, 2016: Travels in North America, West Coast

Phase 4: September 21, 2016-October 16, 2016: Travels Down Under

Phase 5: October 16, 2016-November 21, 2016: Travels in North America, West to East

Phase 6: November 21, 2016-present: Travels in Europe, again

A while back Chris wrote a lovely little interactive map program for me to use to plot our travels.  He made it back when we were in Phase 2 of the trip, but I never got around to actually populating the map with all our stops, and therefore never shared it.

But I  have now made the Phase 2 map:

Plan G Phase 2 Travels in North America, East to West

That’s a static screenshot of the interactive Phase 2 map. Click on that image, and a new window will open with the interactive map. You can can zoom in and out in the interactive map to see more details, plus you can click on the markers to get more information about the trip.

That Phase 2 map shows all the places we visited from the moment we arrived back in the U.S. (on June 20, 2015) until we got to Vancouver, BC on January 7, 2016. The means it represents more than 9,100 miles of driving around North America in the little Toyota Corolla that we bought (used) in Florida in August of 2015, as well as additional mileage for travel we did by plane, bus, and rental car during that same 6 month period. Seeing everything laid out on the map is kind of fun; while I knew we travelled a lot in a relatively short period of time, I hadn’t realized just how much until I saw it all on the map all at once.

Anyway, I encourage you to let me know if you have any feedback about working with or understanding the map. As a usability professional in another lifetime, I’d like to incorporate changes based on user feedback into the maps for the rest of the phases

Well, the short answer is that the project — and the idea for the podcast — continues on track, even though actually getting the actual podcast up and running got slightly derailed by all the travelling Chris and I have been doing this past year. On the up side, though, much of the travel has been directly related to gathering material for the project, and Chris and I have been uncovering lots of interesting stories to be included on the podcast.

That includes material gathered during 8 weeks we stayed in Arcata, CA this past summer.

I bring this up today because over the weekend, due to our Arcata landlady’s network of contacts (thanks, Bella!), my project and I were featured in an article in the Times-Standard newspaper in Eureka, the next town over from Arcata.  Click here to read the article. Fun!

One advantage of staying put here in Verona for a little while is that it gives me some time to put a new website together, as well as work on the podcast. The name of the podcast, and its tagline, are now

Photographs, Pistols, and Parasols
Early Artisan Women Photographers

That’s all a bit long to translate directly into theaURL for a new website, of course, and also a bit cumbersome for a social media hashtag.  So, those things will instead use a shorter form, p3artisans.

BTW, in case you don’t feel like reading the article, or the old blog post, here’s a quick recap of what I mean by “photographic artisans,” in order to explain what this podcast is going to be all about:

Women began photography careers as early as the 1840s, but the accomplishments of these early women photographers rarely rate a mention in the history books. Even the few woman who are occasionally included — e.g., Gertrude Käsebier, Berenice Abbott, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Dorothea Lange, and several others — are generally not well-known beyond a few specialists in the history of photography. 

Further, there is an implicit bias for photography that is seen as either artistically or socially relevant, and this bias extends to work by this canon of women photographers.  Although these women also had careers as studio and/or commercial photographers, that aspect of their work is rarely discussed.

It is not surprising, then, that the remarkable careers of other early women photographers also get left out of standard history of photography books. These photographic artisans were entrepreneurs who ran thriving photography businesses. They mastered cutting-edge technology to produce photos with ever-changing equipment. They spent their careers recording everyday life, photographing babies, families, weddings, businesses, buildings, events, etc. While a few examples occasionally survive of additional experimental or artistic work by some of these women, it is the everyday photography done by professional women photographers that takes center stage in Coming into Focus: Female Photographic Entrepreneurs 1840-1930.

 Neither the new website nor the podcast is finished … but soon, very soon.

Stay tuned.

Chris and I have been here in Santa Barbara for 2.5 weeks, but I only just started taking scenic photos of town. It’s really a very pretty place, but I had some technical difficulties with my cell phone camera.

OK, well, to be honest I accidentally dropped it.  Then the case cracked, and … fast forward to now, when I have a new cell phone and cell phone camera.  It’s a different kind of phone from what I had before, and I have to learn how to take panoramas with the new camera, because it works differently than with the old one. Of course. Sigh.

It’s going to take some getting used to. Without even trying, though,  I got some impressive iCurves.  That’s what I’m calling the phenomenon I see in the panoramic photos I took yesterday of the  long wooden pier in Santa Barbara.

You see, in person, the pier stretches in a straight line from the beach out into the water. But with my new cell phone — which is an iPhone, for those interested in knowing —  the straight pier becomes an iCurve, i.e. a curved version of a straight line seen in a panoramic photo taken with an iPhone.

Maybe I should make that iCurve™. Although maybe someone already has — I mean,  it’s really a pronounced and not-necessarily-optimal effect that is happening automatically in my panoramas, something that didn’t happen as easily with my old phone.

For example, consider the following photo, which looks normal. You can see that the beach is straight across, and the pier is perpendicular to it:

Looking back from the pier toward the beach

But here’s a look taken in the other direction and taken using the panorama mode. The photo shows the other side of the pier, and  a different beach and the hills beyond the water:

An iCurve view from the pier at the beach and hills

And, of course, it shows the pier as curved, but it’s not a real curve — it’s an iCurve™.

Here’s another look at the same beach and hills, taken while standing in a different section of the pier:

iCurve pier and iCurve wire – note the two curves are different

I am intrigued in this one how the two different curves (the pier and the wire) are curved in different ways.

But  if I can figure out how to do an iCurve™ when I want to — and crucially not get one when I don’t want do — I’ll be on to something big…

———-

P.S. Thanks for everybody’s concern about how we’re doing since by now most of you have heard that there’s a big wild-fire near Santa Barbara.  Not to worry, though – it’s not actually in Santa Barbara where we are. It’s many, many miles from where we are in fact,  so we haven’t had any effects of it here in town, fortunately.

OK, perhaps there was a little bit of fine ash dusted on the car the other day. But … that could just as easily just be dust.  I mean, get the idea in your head of the possibility of there being fine ash dust in the air, and suddenly you start thinking that the fine layer of normal dust on our white car could be from white ash, right?

Anyway, the lack of blog posts this past week have had nothing to do with any problems created for us by the fire. I’m just having problems managing my time to get everything done.

Other than that, we’re doing fine.

Chris and I just arrived in Santa Barbara tonight (June 2nd), but Chris has done research ahead of time. So we have some places on our list that will (hopefully) allow us celebrate this “holiday” appropriately. Hope you read this in time so you can do the same!

To inspire you on your quest, here’s a fun doughnut photo from Will that he calls Recursive Donuts. Thanks, Will, for a fun photo – and good luck to everyone on their doughnut expeditions today.

Recursive Donuts (photo provided by Will Leben)

To start last Friday off, Chris and I went out for breakfast. We don’t go out to breakfast that often, so it was the first time we’d tried a place a couple of blocks away from where we’re staying,  that billed itself as a “local institution” for breakfast: Julia’s of Wallingford. . The first item on the menu was an upscale Cinnamon roll:

Cinnamon Yum Yum: Fresh baked cinnamon roll from our bakery: sliced and dipped in our l’orange crème. Grilled and served with orange butter and syrup

Cinnamon Yum Yum, Seattle

Of course,  we did get spoiled in the Basque country last year. We had a dessert there called torrija empapada en yemas de huevo y nata fresca, caramelizada en la sartén, con held causer, roughly translated as “French with cartelized sugar” (with a side of homemade ice cream). What a great concept for a dessert.  Sadly, I have no photo of that wonderful dessert, even though Chris and I ate it at least 3 times on that trip. But we’ve looked through all our photos and can’t find a single photo of something that was truly “Yum Yum.”  Ah well. We’ll just have to go back and have it again, clearly. Just for the blog, of course.

Grilled Octopus with chickpea puree

Ramp ravioli with fava beans and sun-dried tomatoes

Squid-ink linguini with seafood in a marinara sauce

The grilled octopus dish was a little odd, which is why I have presented it oddly in the photo. At least it adds some interest. Ramp is a vegetable related to a green onion, and I guess it’s trendy? Anyway, the ravioli wasn’t bad, but it was an overly small serving for an overly high price, IMHO. The linguini with seafood – meh. Ah well. We should know better, but we are always optimistic that an Italian restaurant will be good.  Even if we’re not always in Italy – and last May 20th that’s where we were.  So it’s not fair to compare that meal to this year’s offering. It’s inevitable, though, since May 20th is our wedding anniversary, and a certain amount of reminiscing goes with the territory on those occasions. But apparently the food last year was so good that I didn’t take any photos, though — so at least this year we have something to remember the meals by in this blog post, because I’m not sure that they otherwise would be very memorable.

Actually, I hadn’t realized until now that I’d not even written anything about last year’s Eurovision 2015 competition. We were travelling a bunch around that time, I guess. But Chris and I actually watched the semi-finals on our laptops last year, as we were in a room without a TV. We didn’t see the complete final “live” (on the laptop), though, as we opted that evening to dine out and have a spectacular Italian seafood meal at our favorite restaurant, rather than sit at home and watch the Eurovision 2015 finals.

I know, I know, priorities. What can I say.

Anyway, this year’s contest is now less than 2 months away, and I guess most of the countries have picked their entries by now, including Germany. For each of the past few years, Germany has been holding a TV contest to pick their entry. However, as readers of my old blog might recall, that system hit an unexpected snag when the winner – who was incredibly popular with the audience the night of the contest – declined to perform at Eurovision and withdrew from the contest just after he won. It was all quite strange. The loser then became the new winner – i.e. the singer who was NOT popular with the German song contest audience got sent to Eurovision. Unfortunately, she went on to crash and burn rather spectacularly at Eurovision, when she and her song were “awarded” the dreaded NULL points. I.e., she scored zero points. Eurovision 2015 wound up being a big disaster for Germany all the way round.

So for the 2016 contest, the Germany organizers perhaps very sensibly decided to ditch the contest idea and just have a committee pick their 2016 entry without holding a contest.

Now, other countries do this, including England. But it hasn’t worked out well for England —  recent Eurovision results for England’s entries have been less than stellar. The use of a secret committee to pick the entry had actually become a bit of a sore point in England, to the point where this year England switched to holding a contest.

Which is, as I’ve said, what Germany used to do. But after last year’s debacle, a committee got together and selected a singer (and a song) to send to Eurovision 2016. They announced their selection — and then all hell broke loose.  The singer  turned out to be rather notoriously racist, sexist, xenophoic, homophobic …   well, you get the idea. Not exactly a great choice to send to a contest that celebrates the idea of uniting the world through song.

So, the committee withdrew their selection, and then announced they’d have a contest after all. The winner turned out to be a 17-year old girl who had previously won the German version of a TV-show contest called The Voice, and she’s going to sing a song in English called Ghost.

Personally, the song isn’t my cup-of-tea, but I put it on and listened to it in the background as I typed up this post. Then – as they say in all the click-bait headlines on the Internet — something weird happened. I actually thought I’d clicked on the wrong thing and was listening to a song from a couple of years ago called Only Teardrops. Ghost sounds that similar to me. If you watch the videos you might not heard the similarities at first. But they are darn similar if you just listen to them without getting distracted by the the odd staging used for each song.

Anyway, Only Teardrops won it all back in 2013. So does Germany have more than a Ghost of a chance of winning this year?

Stay tuned…

———–

Song links:

• Ghost, Germany’s 2016 entry
• Only Teardrops, Denmark’s winning 2013 entry
• Cake to Bake, Latvia’s Eurovision 2014, and my all-time favorite of the recent shows
  — OK, this one  has nothing to do with anything else in this post, but I wanted to leave you with a cute song to end on,  so those other ones don’t get stuck in your head.
  You’re welcome.

But in the meantime, I have managed to put together a couple of things for my Photographs, Pistols, and Parasols project.  Specifically, I’m working on creating a podcast, and I really would like to get some feedback on the idea.

Photographs, Pistols, and Parasols

BTW, for those who haven’t ever listened to any, podcasts are audio recordings, often done by one person, but also offered by radio stations. You can subscribe to podcasts through iTunes and some other services. Usually a podcast doesn’t have any associated photo or video that goes along with it – the audio should stand on its own.  So, I’m experimenting with an idea:  have a podcast episode that tells a story about a photographer and one or two of her photos, and then refer people back my website for them to see the photo(s).

Here’s a general text-only page about the podcast as a concept: http://www.clfoto.net/p3podcast/

Below is a sample episode you can play on this page (to mimic the idea of getting the podcast from someplace other than on my website, e.g. eventually it would be on iTunes or someplace like that):

And here’s the associated webpage for that episode to see the photo (note that the address in the audio will not currently get you to this page, as I haven’t made it completely public;  you’ll have to click below to get to the episode page):

http://www.clfoto.net/p3podcast/episode-003-lasting-impress.html

Ignore the fact that’s it’s labelled Episode 003 – due to technical issues it’s currently the only sample that’s available.

As I said, I’d appreciate feedback on the idea and the sample episode (you can either leave comments here or email me privately). I’d hoped to have more samples by now to share, but those darn technical issues have gotten in the way. But hopefully you’ll get the basic idea of the podcast from this one sample, at least enough to give me a little feedback on the idea of listening to a story about a photo (and a photographer) and then going somewhere else to see the photo and get more information.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of food that we had in Vancouver that we do think of fondly, of course: Simba’s African grill, all the Japanese Isakayas, the Bulgarian place, the Chinese noodles, the Moroccan place, the fresh fish, etc. , etc.  The list goes on for all the food things we really enjoyed in Vancouver.

But then there is something that I bought in the grocery store that seemed typically Canadian. So it seemed reasonable to try. At least for blogging purposes.

I mean, maple is good, bacon is good, and potato chips are good. What could be bad, then, about Maple Bacon Potato Chips?

Maple Bacon Potato Chips Bag

Maple Bacon Potato Chips

They weren’t the worst chips in the world, but they were a bit odd.   And I think it’s telling to say that Chris — who loves potato chips of most any kind — decided they weren’t worth finishing.

Contrary to what people say, bacon does not make everything better, apparently.

It was the only misstep in our fabulous nearly 8-week-long food odyssey in Vancouver. Ah well – 99% of what we had there I’d rank as anywhere from pretty good to great, which makes the Maple Bacon chips remarkable in the fact that they really weren’t very good at all – but at least worthy of note for a Food on Friday.

Just a quick house-keeping note to follow-up on my post from the other day: My computer is still not really all back together – let’s just say it’s not been a good week for me and technology. In addition to the hard-drive complete failure, it turns out a major thing that I thought was being backed up wasn’t. So, I’m still trying to sort out how to put back as many of the pieces as possible, but it’s going to take a bit longer. Until I get more of it organized and installed, I won’t have a date for when regular posts will start. Hopefully soon. Stay tuned for any breaking developments on that front.

OK, well, hopefully not breaking developments, exactly … but you know what I mean…

And yes, for those of you about to ask, the one that’s malfunctioned is my brand-new one, the one I purchased in November.  Sigh. Ironically, I got the new one because my old one was threatening to do what this one just did.

But yes, I did buy the Apple Care coverage, thanks for asking, so the repairs should (in theory) be covered once we get back to the U.S. and an Apple Store there. So tomorrow, after we get to Seattle (as previously scheduled we are leaving Vancouver in the morning ),  I’ll be headed to a bar.  The Genius Bar at the Apple Store, that is, to see what they can do for me.

Until that’s sorted out, there will be a hiatus on the blog.

BTW,  my project on women photographers is also on hold until then. FWIW, I’d settled on a name for the project: Photographs, Pistols, and Parasols.  Thanks for everyone who gave me feedback on the original proposed names!

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be back on here soon. Stay tuned.

1. Chris had been waiting to hear about two grant proposals that were pending in Europe, with decisions due on both in January.  Unfortunately, the news wasn’t positive for either one, so now the job hunting begins in earnest.

BTW, if you’re curious about what Chris does for a living, his website has been newly updated with more information about some of  his cool interactive visualizations of language data. You can check it out here: http://www.chrisculy.net. (BTW, if you do check it out and see a typo or click on a link that doesn’t seem to work, please let me know.)

2. So what does the job hunting entail? At the moment, this means lots of looking on the internet and sending out emails. All of that, of course, can be done from anywhere,  which means we’re able to stay put here in Vancouver for a little while longer.  We’ll be here until the end of the month.

3. On March 1st, though, the Plan G tour heads  south, at least as far as Seattle.  Seattle will then become our base for job hunting for at least a couple of months.

4. For my part,  I’m trying to work on my book project on early American women photographers (circa 1850-1925).  My first task is to set up a website with some information sheets (which I’m calling SnapSheets™) with photos and stories about all  the interesting women photographers I’ve discovered in my research the last few months. These are women who ran photography studios as early as 1850,  and did quite a lot with photography, but hardly anyone talks about them, and they never seem to make it into the history books.

Here are a couple of ideas/working titles for a website about these women – see what you think:

1. Title: Photos, Pistols and Parasols
Tagline: Celebrating early women photographers 1850-1925

2. Title: Enterprising Ladies, Adjusting the Negative
Tagline: Celebrating early women photographers with élan
(Note: the acronym of title #2 is ELAN)

I’m interested in getting feedback on those two names, so let me know what you think (either in a comment here or in an email).

Anyway, the basic update is that Chris and I are here in Vancouver for a couple more weeks. While we’re here,  we will continue to enjoy sampling the wide-variety of food on offer,  as well as the opportunity to catch up with more old friends and acquaintances.

And the view. We will definitely continue to enjoy the view.    Here’s what it looked like the other morning from our window, as a fog that had socked us in completely overnight finally rolled out as the sun came up:

Foggy Harbour, Photo #1

Foggy in the Harbour, Photo #2

Click on the following photo a couple of times to get it to the largest size, and then see if you can spot all the birds in the fog. In the addition to the 2 in the front, there is a string of birds in the cloud to the right above the trees.

Flying through the Fog, Vancouver

Nice, eh?

Yup, I’m definitely going to enjoy this view a little while longer.

Time flies, eh?  I find it hard to believe it’s already been 7 months. In that period, we have visited family and old friends up and down the East and West Coasts, as well across the U.S. in general. We’re currently here in Vancouver, BC, visiting old friends and acquaintances, and enjoying exploring our old stomping grounds in the West End section of the city.

The questions that I get a lot these days is “What’s next?” and/or “When does this current somewhat aimless travel end? ”

Well, I’ll be honest with you: we don’t really know. We have reserved this place for a month, through the first week of February. We may stay here awhile longer before moving on to as-yet places unknown, since the exchange rate with the U.S. dollar is in our favor, making life here less expensive than in the U.S. While we’re here, we’ll work on our projects (research for me, art and other interests for Chris, and photography for both of us) and enjoy the chance to relax before we worry about what lies ahead.

That’s a kind of a plan, right?   Well, at least for now, it will have to do …

View towards the horizon, English Bay, Vancouver