Friday, March 13, 2009

Know Your Mushrooms, part the second

M and I stopped by the Cinematheque this afternoon, to make sure everything was set up for tonight's screening of 136 of my macro pictures of mushrooms (which will be shown before the documentary Know Your Mushrooms, of course).

We even got to sit in the dark with a theatre's worth of wrappers and floor popcorn and see the photos on the screen, all in the name of a tech survey.

It was sort of lovely and sort of like pulling teeth to collect the images from their various folders on my external hard drive and put them all in one place. Oh - that one! Yes! I kept muttering to myself.

Part of it was that I'd forgotten some of the photos, given that they dated as far back as 2003.

Part of it was that after a long long cold winter, I miss the forest like nobody's business. But after ten years walking its highways and byways, I'm confident it's still there, even if I've neglected it (again). Unless CMU students burned it down (again). And this summer, I WILL spend as much time as possible there.

Part of it was just the difficulty of assembling the images. My computer was elsewhere the first part of the week and then, once I got my grimy hands on it, I had to wade through folder after folder to find the images I distantly remembered.

M reminded me we lost a hard drive a few years ago, which accounts for some of the frustrating can't-find-it-ARGH feeling.

I also reminded myself, after a good long look at my first posts in this space, that I did a lot of plant studies and landscapes in addition to the mushrooms early on. Which were just as satisfying as shooting mushrooms but not applicable for a GATHERING of mushrooms.

Did you know that 136 images, displayed for 4 seconds each in a slide show, is about twenty minutes of visual stimulus? Or, put another way, did you know that 136 images equals five years of shooting?

Weird!

(Fun!)

p.s. I won't be there tonight but will be in attendance on Saturday from 8:15 onwards, with the proverbial bells on. Wanna sit with me? Wanna hold my hand?

2 comments:

Brenda Schmidt said...

That's wonderful, A! Congratulations again.

Shawna Lemay said...

Sounds amazing! Congrats! If somewhat belatedly...