"Under the Cloth"

**Ian Lascell** · 24-Dec-2010, 19:34

Happy birthday Bruce and Kevin.

**pdmoylan** · 25-Dec-2010, 01:03

Met McPhee in Princeton on a number of occasions through a mutual friend. He was very taciturn, almost unemotional as I find his writing, extremely dedicated to his craft; but always seemed on the verge but never quite eliciting a smile. He married a portrait photographer, the divorce I think skewing his view towards the objective I believe. He loved the outdoors then, and the labor intensive research and resulting epiphanies of identifying science and its process in even dated crafts such as making birch bark canoes in NE or tracking down wild orchids in NJ. Now if you have never tried to photograph the latter using LF with the variables of wind and changing light, without flash at beyond one to one, you have not lived the agony and the ecstacy of this medium.

**eddie** · 25-Dec-2010, 14:52

happy b day bruce!

i thought old f@ckers like you no longer had birthdays!?!?!? har har har!

**Bruce Barlow** · 26-Dec-2010, 05:46

eddie, not sure why I bother.

The McPhee book is delightful. Just learned more than I ever thought I would about chalk, and the billion (with a "b") bottles of champagne that are in chalk caves in France.

Blizzard on the way. 12-16" of snow forecast. I'm ready: amidol, VersaPrint, PyroCat, and lots of paper. Gotta get out and make some negatives before the weather closes in.

Taking an idea from here a while back, I splurged $4.04 on a set of red Christmas lights, which I strung around the higher parts of the darkroom. Festive! Bright! Shadowless illumination! Safe! Hunker in the bunker! Bring it on, Mother Nature, you b*tch!