July News

Six of us (John, Chuck, Kathy, Earl, Lynne, Mike) met for lunch on July 22 at Applebee's at 53rd & Central (by Menard's and the Fridley welcome sign). I photographed the Fridley welcome sign before lunch.

Earl showed some practice paintings of clouds and a book of clouds photos he is using for reference. He is planning to upload some pictures when he figures out how to do it. Kathy showed us the current status of her grandaughter painting and the book Drawing With Charcoal, Chalk, and Sanguine Crayon she is planning to use for her fall drawing class. Mike told us about his photo book The Quiet Hours published by the University of Minnesota Press. Lynne has been concentrating on digital photography this summer and has put some of her photos on Flickr under the name "cityclickernet."

CityPages has a nice review of Mike Melman's book and you can search inside the book at Amazon. I checked the book out of the Minneapolis Central Library. It is listed in the catalog at 12 Minneapolis libraries but not at the Anoka County libraries.

I also checked out another photography book Photographing Your Artwork: a Step-by-Step Guide to Taking High Quality Slides at an Affordable Price. That book tells the proper way to photograph artwork using a 35mm manual SLR camera, tripod, lights, an exposure meter, a gray card, exposure bracketing, and squaring up the artwork in the viewfinder (Amazon has an excerpt you can read online). I shot my picture with a handheld point-and-shoot digital camera using autofocus and autoexposure--definitely not the recommended method. I tried to square it up on my camera's LCD screen but wasn't very successful--I ended up skewing it in Photoshop to square it up and also adjusting the color a bit.