Praeterita

  I took this photo ten years, in February 2011. There are so many things about it that are so different from now that I feel I'm looking at something from someone else's life: The location is the living room of an old farmhouse that my wife and I owned back then, in a very small town in northwestern Illinois not far from the Mississippi River. The old fireplace, the old wood pocket doors, are all original, but I repainted the walls and put up a faux tin ceiling. The watercolour over the fireplace is something I did back in London in the 1990s. The ceramic vase was from a ceramic artist who had a small workshop and store on the little high street in this town. Finally, I took the photo on a Samsung flip-phone, so it was probably 160 Kb, as opposed to the multi-megabyte photos we all take with our smartphones now. I imagine this is true for all of us: the older we get, we can look back at more than one time in our lives with the amazement of people discovering the ancient Egypti

  Every artist knows that you need to have good, high quality photos of your work if you hope to attract any attention online. This applies to: Your website. Blog. Social media. Physical mail such as postcards. We all know this, yet it's hard to get good advice. I am no expert, so I'm merely passing along what I've learned from scouring the internet and talking to professional photographers. So, consider this post a quick source for where to find some useful information, via the following links: https://expertphotography.com/photographing-artwork-tips/ https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/photographing-artwork In the photo at the top of this post, you can see how I followed the advice. I bought two Neewer softboxes from Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017D7W57S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ) which cost $90. They were well worth the price: very bright daylight-style bulbs, can go up to 7 feet high, and they have an opaque covering over the fr