Color week here at HQ. Notes from the front...

 

not a skyscaper.

I just can't resist those round, bulbous parking garage mirrors...

Here is something to understand if your domestic partner's career was as an award-winning art director in the advertising industry; when having the house painted you will go through hell selecting final colors and also ensuring that the final mixed paint is EXACTLY the way she wants it. 

We had our favorite painting company come in last Fall and re-paint our living room. They did a great job but behind the scenes I lived for months with giant swatches of "test" paint on various walls. At times our dining room table was covered with paint swatches and the difference between colors was minuscule to me. But not to B. Now we're having a bigger job done and she's spent days with small cans of test paints applying big swatches to each part that will eventually get painted and trying to look at them and compare the colors at dawn, dusk, on cloudy days and in full sun. When the weather took a turn for cloudy and gloomy we were outside with an expensive LED fixture making our own sunlight at 5400K for evaluation. 

I'm generally of the mindset that color for walls, exterior trim, doors and stuff is largely subjective and I can probably quickly adjust to just about any color we might paint something ---- as long as it's not black, bright orange or deep purple. Art directors tend to be much pickier about colors. MUCH pickier. 

I've spent many late nights doing press checks with B., running big sheets of premium papers on Heidelberg presses and looking at the resulting test sheets with a printer's loupe. A lot of time in viewing booths with highly corrected lighting, which is part of their reason for existence. B. is a tough color critic but not as tough as an art director named, Betty, with whom I worked photographing a number of book cover projects for a text book publisher. Back in the film days certain green colors on book covers were difficult for color transparency films to replicate. You could get "pleasing" color but accurate color was a whole other circle of hell. 

On one job which required 4x5 color transparencies we went through eight different film emulsion tests until we found a Kodak film that was very, very close to our targets. I think it was called EPP but memory (thankfully) fades. I went on a press check with Betty once and watched as one of the pressmen burst into tears of frustration. We eventually got the colors Betty wanted but it was a tough slog and took forever. The resulting brochure was a work of art. Amazingly good. Worth 100% of the effort involved?Maybe not for me but for Betty having the work end up exactly as she envisioned it was critical and that was her standard. 

So, the house painters arrived today and the first thing we did was go over paint formulas and brands. And we double-checked all four colors on the work order. 

We have multiple interiors that need re-painting. "Simply White" (an actual color choice) for the ceiling is like easy days for the painters (and for me) but "Dried Parsley" in an eggshell finish for the long (50 foot) hallway is one of those colors that has to be spot on because one side of the hallway is being painted to match the other side. We're on pins and needles to see if it all works out. 

Everything on the exterior is getting a power wash, scrapping and various other levels of prep. Then the exterior is getting its custom paint colors. All under the ever watchful eye of a seasoned and picky art director. There are interior fixes and treatments as well... 

Various wags bitch about the cost of a Leica M11 or a Leica SL3 but their costs pale in the face of an involved, one week long painting extravaganza. As a grizzled old photographer I'd happily choose a Leica instead and let the wood on the house eventually decay and collapse. But I have a dedicated art director to keep me --- and the house --- on the straight and narrow. It's been five years since the last all out painting episode. That's about the time I started growing in white hair. Correlation? Causality? Coincidence?

Enough about house painting. I guess as long as the paint is an ultra low VOC variety I'll be happy... thank goodness for my own, separate office. Now, where's the coffee?

Work notes: The rumors of my retirement seem to have been premature. A week in San Antonio, a couple of days with attorneys who needed portraits last week, a call from one of my favorite theater groups asking for both a set-up, pre-lit shoot and also a live performance shoot, and then more attorneys booked in near the end of May. Enough to keep the wolves from the doors and the painters well paid. And the Leicas well exercised. All good as long as none of this renewed commercial photography vigor interferes with swimming. 

As part of my rehab from too many images of skyscrapers I'm taking it easy and just doing 

interesting (to me) chunks of historic houses and bushes. Maybe some benches...

this is a Mannequin Bush. a rare species of never dying, short trees that spout flowers.

I guess all trees have flowers of some sort. 

Slowing down enough to appreciate a nice bench in the middle of nowhere. 

Oh! You asked about swimming? Nothing much to tell. You either get it or you don't. Just remember to always be streamlining.