Youth Art Contest – 2012 Endangered Species Day

The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2012

The national Endangered Species Day Youth Art contest:

…provides young people with an opportunity to learn about endangered species and express their knowledge and support through artwork.

Endangered Species Day

Started in 2006 by the United States Congress, and renewed each year, Endangered Species Day (ESD) is a national recognition of the importance of animal and plant species worldwide and is an occasion to educate the public on how to protect endangered species.

It will be celebrated on May 18th.

With hindsight, 2012 will be seen as a good year, just as the 1990s, and before that the 1980s, and so on are now seen as good years because each year the situation gets worse.

Polluting, spoiling, and destroying habitat is a game that wins by stealth. Things get worse, but in the short run we don’t see the effects.

If you know someone who is in K-Grade 2, Grades 3-5, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12 and you want to help educate them and for them to go on to educate others about endangered species, tell them about the art contest.

Here is the link to the Stop Extinction site.

Project 365 Day 26 – The Old Bridge At Berwick

Bridge At Berwick Upon Tweed

Benign Or Dramatic

One of the aspects of photography that I like very much is the way that the same scene can be rendered in a soft and gentle or in a dramatic (or other) way.

Here is the same bridge – the same photograph – treated differently. One thing, if you look between the arches of the bridge, you can see the new bridge further along the river.

Bridge At Berwick Upon Tweed

Who Will Scan Your Negatives

After I published my article on scanning negatives, I got an email from Leslie Nuccio from GoPhoto, which is another firm like Scancafe that will scan your negatives.

I like the way Leslie grabbed the initiative, contacted me, and laid out the selling points for his firm’s service:

• Scanned in the U.S.
• No up-front payment
• Only pay for the scans you keep and no limit on deletions

So, you might want to take a further look at GoPhoto

Once I actually have my negatives out of storage and in my hands, I shall look into this service more. It’s not a big deal for me that a service is in the States, however, because I am not there:I am in Scotland.

It may be different for you, however, if you are in the States.

I just took another look at Scancafe, and see that their global headquarters is in the States. That suggests that the worker bees are elsewhere, but that’s just a passing thought.

I don’t really see what difference it makes where they are located provided the negatives etc. are sent and returned securely.

For example, if Scancafe’s workshops are in India, well there is the famous tiffin trade in the major cities that testifies to how the country can organise itself.

Tiffin

Tiffin is the Indian word for lunch. It is a hangover from the days of the British Raj.

Every day, millions of city workers hand over their tiffin boxes (a kind of cylindrical metal box with sections) to the collectors, who speed off to the restaurants to get the orders fulfilled.

And every day the workers get their lunch delivered in their own tiffin boxes. Each one is collected and delivered to the correct person, day after day.

Now think of the several million people in Delhi or Calcutta who get the correct tiffin box day after day, and you will see why I am not worried if my negatives go to India rather than to the U.S.

Project 365 Day 25 – Chawton Contact Sheet

This is a screen grab of the images I had open in Adobe Bridge. I put them there so my wife Tamara could decide which of them she wanted to use in her article about Jane Austen in Chawton. Because it was a screen grab, it reminded me of contact sheets from the days of film.

Of course, you may still shoot film and develop and print the film yourself, in which case this image is a digital version of the contact sheets you make.

I have a lot of contact sheets – not sure how many – in store along with a lot of negatives. I also have my father’s negatives and prints in the same store.

One day I hope to get them all scanned and digitised. There are services that will do that for you and I may take advantage of their services because I know from experience that scanning even a small number of negatives or prints is a long job.

These scanning services have everything down to a production line, with superior equipment – so that is what I should use.

The only thing that is stopping me is that the prints are in store and that I am worried about mailing my negatives. When I get over that and when I get to the store (it is not in this country, but that’s another story), I shall send them to ScanCafe.

To complete the picture, here is a link to Ken Rockwell’s site because I first read about scanning services on Ken’s site.

Word and Idea Association

I find I do that a lot. I will be thinking of something and then the idiom I use relates to the overall subject matter. See how I wrote ‘to complete the picture’ just now?

Do you do that kind of thing?

Book Review: The English Pleasure Garden 1660-1860 by Sarah Jane Downing

Reblogged from Austenonly:

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Last week I reviewed Vauxhall Gardens: A History by David Coke and Alan Borg. That book, while fascinating, gigantic in size and scope, and well worth its price, is rather expensive and I wanted to point you in the way of a more reasonably-priced soft cover book on the same topic,  The English Pleasure Garden by Sarah Jane  Downing, published by Shire. This is not a very large book, only 64 page in all, but it manages to be a comprehensive overview on the subject of those lost pleasure gardens, which …

A look at the English Pleasure Garden in history – and a note that Jane Austen lived opposite Sydney Gardens in Bath and would have seen the masquerades (a euphemism if ever there was one) that went on there. Oh what historical fun.

Talbot Rice

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

- David Hume

There is an exhibition based upon this statement and celebrating the life of David Hume currently showing at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh University.

But who was Talbot Rice?

David Talbot Rice was in British Military Intelligence during World War II. Before and after the war he held the Chair of Fine Art (how quaint these titles are) at the University of Edinburgh.

He established an Honours degree at the university combining art history and hands-on studio art and it was his ambition to have an arts centre in the University and this was opened following his death in 1972.

Note to self to see the exhibition.

Window On Jane Austen’s World

Jane Austen In Chawton

Click this photograph to ‘open the window’ to read my wife’s article about Jane Austen at home in the village of Chawton – where Jane wrote many of her novels.

Project 365 Day 23 Heavyweight

Kilogram Font

The heavyweight here is Kilogram, a free font from KalleGraphics. It is free for commercial as well as personal use.

I made the little graphic to show it off and I am enthusiastic about using it on a poster. Something to think about and work on over the next day or two.

I used the DropShadow effect in Photoshop for the word Kilogram itself, and no styling for the word font.

What do you think of the font?