First Attempts

The most important conclusion of day 1 on this project was that I pretty much have the greatest summer job in the world. Other observations were that I need to stock up on bug spray, find some shoes that have enough traction to prevent me from slipping on wet rocks and breaking myself or my camera, and buy an external harddrive because if I took 400 pictures in about 2 hours on a cloudy day who knows what damage I'll do when the sun finally comes out. I'm midway into Day 2 and using the March-like 50 degree, grey, breezy day to reacquaint myself with photoshop, set up a little studio space for myself on the 3rd floor of McLellan, and do some research.

Yesterday I started off the day by picking up my camera from getting cleaned and I am thrilled to be rid of the splotches of dusts I've been editing out of my abroad pictures for the last few months (hurrah!). I also stocked up on some more watercolor supplies and discovered that Art Mart (Maine College of Art's supply store in Portland) is awesome and also has a cafe inside. I decided to start shooting despite the cloudy skies, so I headed out to the Coastal Studies center on Orr's Island. I want to explore a lot of different places along the Maine coast but since this center is the basis for the fellowship I figured it's a pretty good place to start. There are several different trails so I walked a loop that included the Pine Needle Path, Brewer Cove trail, and Long Cove Loop (see map below) and stopped to photograph at various points along the way.

For this first week I'm trying to collect a lot of different shots of the coast so that I have a lot to work with when I begin to convert the photos into cyanotypes. At that point I'll narrow my focus and begin to see what works best with that medium. I've been playing around on photoshop to see what some of my shots will look like as cyanotypes> Here are some examples. Most shots are from Brewer Cove and Harpswell sound. They'll look pretty different when they are actual cyanotypes, not just digital ones, but this is helping me to visualize the effect.