Category: Christmas

The Great Code

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Canadian literary critic Northrope Frye was famous for his work The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, about the pervasiveness of biblical themes, metaphors and symbolism in Western literature, and as I worked with this image I was struck by the fact that while the model and I were not consciously trying to do so, to my mind at least we created an image that reminds of of the story of the Annunciation, with the combination of the head scarf, the lighting, and the model’s upward gaze. It’s ironic that at a time when I am at best agnostic (with atheist tendencies), I am still affected by the universality of the story.

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Time-Warp Tuesday: Ghost of Christmas Past

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Christmas memories, and how times have changed, so for Time-Warp Tuesday this week I have a Kodachrome slide; I made this image, a close-up of an ornament on the family Christmas tree sometime between 1980-82.

Tree Ornament, 1982?

This slide looks pretty much like it did when I first took the image; the colours and sharpness have remained true. So much else about Christmas has changed though: relatives have passed on, and at the same time a new generation has arisen to be part of my Christmas memories.

My late mother was very proud of her Christmas tree ornaments, and her tree decorating. If such a thing as Yuletide Feng Shui existed, she was the master. Now the collection is spread out amongst various family members, so we will never see a single tree like that again. All we have are images like this one, capturing the memory of Christmas treasures.

 

Portrait of the Artist: Randell Rosenfield

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Another in my Portrait of the Artist series today:  Randell Rosenfield is a founding member of the Toronto-based early music enable Sine Nomine. My wife is a also a member of this group, and in addition to recording their Christmas concert last Saturday night, I was also able to take pictures of Sine Nomine as they warmed up and got in final rehearsal for the concert. In this image Randell is playing a vielle, a forerunner of the violin.

The Vielle

 

From a technical point of view, it was a challenging shoot. I was using a Nikon FM film camera with a 50mm f1.4 lens. I was shooting sans flash, so even using Kodak Tri-X film pushed to E.I. 1600, I had to shoot at 1/30 of a second, wide open. Because of the slow shutter speed, I had to time my shoots to coincide with the short pause at the end of each upbow or down bow, in an attempt to avoid blur. I am quite happy with the results; there is a luminosity in black and white film that is just not there in digital black and white.

And of course, when taking images of a group that performs medieval music, using a digital camera would have felt wrong. 🙂