About to head out the door to the conference, but first: A few snapshots from yesterday, a day of travel with Peggy: heading down the New Mexico highway to the airport; passing time while waiting to board our plane by showing Peggy how to calibrate her laptop monitor; scenes from King’s Fish House, where the fish is so fresh they have to update the menu twice a day (and where these desert dwellers ate some really good fish!)
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Alas, a gardener I’m not, proving with my latest attempts this summer that I can’t even grow weeds. (In a well-meaning attempt to support me in nurturing my inner gardener, Mothering editor-in-chief Peggy O’Mara donated some sunflower and morning glory seeds to my cause earlier this year. I planted them in late May and just last week began to notice a little blooming action.)
Successful or not, I still like to take photos of the products of my efforts—and sometimes can shoot them in such a way (see photo at right) that you can’t tell that when the overzealous twining morning glories wrapped themselves round and round the too-dry stalks of the sunflowers, the bright purple and blue flowers just plain brought the big gold ones DOWN.
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Disclaimer: In these photos, the dark spots that are not holes are bugs. The bits of yellow that are not sunflower bloom are leaf damage. What you also don’t see here is that several of the sunflowers are just propped up against the fence after being leveled—stems snapped—by the morning glories.
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P.S. As if to mock my feeble horticultural skills, this house around the corner from us sports a sunflower crop run amok, several of them reaching over 10 feet high.
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Tags: ants, bugs, failure, garden, morning glories, summer, sunflowers, weeds
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And it’s only Tuesday.
In other words, kinda crazy around here.
In addition to our regularly scheduled production work on the May–June issue of the magazine, we’ve been in various stages of birthing Mothering Radio, an audio version of the mag, a mobile version of the web site, Mothering-topic-related phone apps, several new reprints of time-honored favorite articles, and more.
But it’s all good. Exciting times to be working here. Just gotta strap ourselves in for the ride . . .
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Photo by Steve Steigman. You might be too young to remember Maxell’s “Chair Man” ad campaign, but this image was everywhere in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (The story behind the ad, created by the old Scali, McCabe, Sloves agency, is here.) Apparently, the “blow away guy” was brought back in 2005, this time to the world of online games. That story (along with some of the photographer’s tricks for achieving that “blown-away look” look), here.
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Tags: "blow away guy", maxell, mothering radio, steve steigman
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One of the things I learned a few years ago at Camp Quad (a conference our press holds annually for all their clients) a few years ago: our ability to detect color begins to deteriorate after we reach 40.
Which is not at all helpful to know when we’re in the last hours of magazine production and are trying to color-correct photos. So, at times like this, I pull out this screen shot.
Last summer, someone sent me an online color test where you line up a bunch of color swatches by hue. My production sidekick extraordinaire, Mel,* took the test and did well. I kept meaning to take it but kept waiting for a better time—when I wasn’t rushed or the light was better or my eyes weren’t tired . . . Truth is, I was petrified. What if I took it and flubbed it? How could I, the art director, expect anyone (especially Mel!) to respect my opinion if I couldn’t even pass a silly online color test?
Finally, at Mel’s urging (“It’s fun—and it’ll be good for your confidence.”), I set aside some time and took the Online Color Challenge. Mel was right. It was fun—and it did wonders for my color confidence. Hence, the screen shot.
Try it yourself here.
*Staff Photographer/Ad Production Manager/Web Designer Melyssa Holik, who is 20 years younger than me
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I love how my friend Jim’Bo (photo at right) manages to say this with such earnest indignation that any thoughts one may have had of his being incommunicado—or just plain late—are completely derailed.
Apologies for dropping out of sight. I’ve been absorbed by all things REDESIGN (more on that soon!), coupled with production of our January-February 2009 issue.
Yes, we’re back in the fray. . .
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