Windeyes in Waiting

I remember learning about the parts of Pennsylvania bank barns, with their massive gray limestone walls with glassless slits, called “windeyes,” built into their sides for ventilation.

One of the pleasures of looking up words is discovering how fitting they can be. According to Dictionary.com, our word window has this history: Origin: 1175–1225; ME windoge, windowe < ON vindauga, equiv. to vindr wind + auga eye.

These windows on an old frame barn near our house gaze north from under aging and peeling brows, facing the cold north winds and awaiting the shedding of their panes, to turn them into true windeyes.

Reimagining Tuscany

One of my favorite childhood books ended with a character reading a book in which that same character was reading a book in which….

I didn’t know the term “recursion,” but the concept was a great toy for imaginative play, inspiring me to go the bathroom to noodle around with a hand mirror reflecting the wall mirror’s reflection of the hand mirror,’s reflection of the wall mirror, and so on.

This image is a digital play on the same theme, using an iSight Webcam, iChat, and my Nikon.

Milkweed Leaves

The gray, overcast, and gusty weather seemed to present a challenge in composing an image in an “outdoor studio,” so I decided to give it a shot. This image looking down on a young milkweed plant was taken in the tall grasses outside our house.

I used my Nikon 60mm AF Micro Nikkor lens to get in close, mounted the Nikon D70 on a Benbo Trekker tripod that articulates to allow positioning at all angles, an infrared remote shutter control to avoid adding any shaking to the camera. Then because the wind was gusting, I propped a large piece of countertop laminate behind my legs to block the wind. I also have hidden behind the leaf in the bottom of the image a large clip from a Wimberly plamp, a kind of positionable clamp for holding things still. One end clamps to the tripod and the other to the object being photographed.

This particular exposure was captured at 1/5 second (hence the tripod, plamp, and remote control), with aperture of f/32.0 to give a greater depth of field, and an ISO of 200, which compromises between speed and noise (grain in the film days).