SeeingEyeBlog

Two more photos from my trip to Italy. I did a lot of expressionistic stuff with long shutter speeds. I like the dreaminess of the results.

Dog Walking Girl

Brunelleschi's Stairway

Two photos that I took of a barrel-vaulted storeroom at a vineyard near Orvieto, Italy.

These subterranean tunnels were cut into the soft ‘tufo’ rock a thousand years ago by monks to age their wine. It looks like some of the bottles are from the 1105 AD vintage.

I’m fascinated with the pre-industrial world, when the world was still a huge place without a lot of infrastructure, and man was forced to live simply. One of the interesting things about WWI is that, while the world was by no means pre-industrial, much of the world was only starting to get a taste of mechanization, and those areas were still doing things the hard way.

But, when you think of imagery from the pre-industrial world, you think of black & white. Autochrome was a color photography process invented in 1903 by the Lumiere brothers who also pioneered cinematography. The autochromes have a true life feel, but with a very dreamlike or nostalgaic character of color. It’s nice to be able to see a full-color image (true color, not colorized) of the world before its wholesale homogenization. Here are a few examples:

A couple recent scans from some of my 4″x5″ slides.

A creek in northern Oregon.


A floral arrangement with some studio lighting.