No, I’m not roaming inter-war Berlin like Christopher Isherwood, passive, recording; I am not a figurative camera. But I now wield a camera, an alarmingly small digital camera that does so many things it’s hard to figure out how to just, as they say, point and shoot, and then download the pictures to my computer so I can show them to you. It’s taken me several days, but I have managed two photos on subjects of interest. A bright red amaryllis blooming on my worktable (one of five waxed amaryllis bulbs I got in a post-Valentine’s Day sale at Holland Bulbs of Holland MI). And five tiny (just over an inch long) brass castings of motos-couples getting it on in an assortment of positions (tiny, but with fingers and simple facial expressions) — entertaining artwork, shown here watched over by a fabulous portrait sketch by John Singer Sargent (which has its own sexy story). (But definitely sexy, so I suppose that #2 is off limits for kids and the sexually modest.)
Here are the shots, and then very brief commentary.
The red amaryllis. The first of three buds on a flower stalk that shot up as soon as I unpacked the bulbs:
(#1) Oh, there’s Olimpio Fusco, on my worktable too; he gets around; with two other waxed amaryllises
One of the others has slowly sent up some leaves, but not yet a flower stalk. The other immediately produced four leaves that shot to almost a foot and a half, then bent over from their own weight and essentially snapped, so had to be cut down; I’m still hoping for a flower stalk. Meanwhile, I have a third that is sending up leaves even more slowly than the one in the photo, plus two that haven’t produced any leaves or shoots at all.
It’s an adventure.
The sexy castings. The background is a series of discussions, on Facebook and in e-mail, with Max Vasilatos Rasmussen about these tiny castings she’d come across on-line; she does castings herself, and she reads a lot of stuff. Some photos of big assortments, or mélanges, of these castings that included various animals and other stuff, led to a series of misperceptions (because the photos were of poor quality and the individual images were minuscule), so Max went to her source (Ali Express) and discovered that the company’s photographs had been pixelated for modesty, so were utterly useless for our purposes. Today I offer you a somewhat better version of the set:
(#2) Someday I’ll master the zoom feature on the camera and might possibly get better images of individual couples
Maybe we should think of Olimpio as a watchful sexual spirit, facilitating pleasure. Take him with you for good luck. Maybe he could get more amaryllises to bloom.
(The camera is a Canon 4K digital camera. More specifically, it is a Canon:
4K Digital Camera for Photography Auto-Focus 4K Camera with 180° 3.0 inch Flip Screen 16X Anti-Shake Vlogging Camera for YouTube Video Compact Cameras with SD Card, 2 Batteries and Battery Charger
— as the Canon ads put it. On sale at the moment; with tax it costs just under $100.)
April 6, 2024 at 7:21 pm |
Notice how the red in the flower oversaturates, common in digital photography with red, and to a lesser extent whites and yellows. You can use a photo editor like Photoshop Elements to reduce the saturation.
April 7, 2024 at 4:25 am |
The red of the actual flower, in the light of my living room, is considerably *more* saturated — a real knockout red — than in the photo. But since it took so long to be able to get two photos I could post (and e-mail etc.), I let things rest at this point.
April 6, 2024 at 8:34 pm |
I’ve recently been chided on Facebook for violating community standards with a post they helpfully deleted and won’t show me, but I suspect it might have involved these figures. As I discovered and you mention, they are now pixellated in the catalog where they’re sold.
Those same vendors have no problem with, for instance, a pendant I now keep in inventory: a monkey with a ginormous penis, smoking a cigar.
April 7, 2024 at 4:38 am |
☹️ 😞 😞