I made the cover of Portland Magazine!

I'm so excited because my image, Reflection, made the cover of Portland Magazine this month (August 2008!) I also have a landscape-oriented lighthouse image gracing the heading of their big article, Maine Classics of the 21st Century!

A Visit to the Boothbay Harbor Region, Saturday

Painted Ladies, I think. . .

Mom and I went to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Harbor, Maine on Saturday, July 12, 2008. First, we had a trip to a wonderful pottery school called Watershed, in Edgecomb, where we attended a benefit lunch called salad days, where you could buy an amazing handmade plate by an artist and then have a delicious, homecooked and put together buffet lunch of salads and side dishes.

The two butterflies above were the only butterflies I saw all day at the gardens, which was strange, considering I was surrounded by flowers all day!

There was an English Cottage-style garden, which was really cheery. . .
There was also a beautiful water garden, where I saw these amazingly deep-pink water lilies. I could hear frogs croaking and leaping around, but I never saw one because there were these two little girls who were trying to catch them!
I also loved the fairy house woods, where I found this lovely little rock sculpture sitting on a boulder with the nicely blurred background of the evergreens.
And just as I was lining up the shot to take this beautiful clump of lavender, this bumblebee ambled in and landed on one of the flowers.

A lot of fun and it was a beautiful day besides--just the right temperature. Cheers, Cindy

Fireworks and a weekend on Sebago Lake. . .

We had a great time on 4th of July, watching the fireworks with my cousin and her family. I set up my tripod and used my Pentax 50-200 mm zoom at 200 mm. I set up the focus before it got entirely dark and set the camera on manual focus so I wouldn't lose it. Then when the fireworks started, I tried a few different exposure times, but settled on the best being 8 seconds at f/11, ISO 100. I have wanted to try photographing fireworks for a while, but rain always interceded before this year!

The next day, we went to my cousin's family's camp on Sebago lake and I got a few nice pictures, my favorite being this one, which was taken about 30 minutes after sunset.

This is Maya and her cousin, embracing the beautiful sunset:
And here, at last, is the sunset itself, zoomed up on at 200 mm, looking out across St. Eiboh's Cove to the opposite shore:
I hope everyone else had a lovely fourth of July weekend!

My work on Terrell Lester's new gallery website!!

Well, I am so excited to announce that I have an entire page on Terrell Lester's new gallery website! I will be having a show of 16 of my images runnning from July 25th to August 7th of this year. You can visit the new site by clicking on this link: http://thelestergalleryllc.com/artists.html
and then either clicking on Exhibits or Artists, scrolling down to my name (Cynthia Farr-Weinfeld) and clicking on it, which will bring you right to my page, along with an opportunity to read my "fascinating" biography! Thanks for looking and hope you're all having a happy summer! --Cindy

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Fogged in, Bernard, Maine, Mt. Desert Island. . . .

Jon and I went camping in Acadia National Park from the 20th to the 23rd of June. As you'll see from most of my pictures, the weather didn't exactly cooperate, but I photographically made the best of it, although many of the 450+ shots I took were out of focus due to the incredibly heavy fog we experienced. But it was really comfortable for hiking and walking around, which was nice, and for sleeping.

The Black Boat, Bernard, Maine, Mt. Desert Island. . .

We camped at Smuggler's Den Campground (http://www.smugglersdencampground.com/main.html) in Southwest Harbor, on the right side of the island, if you're looking at the map. It's nice if you're looking to be away from the hustle and bustle of Bar Harbor, which can be kind of honky tonk, albeit fun!

Main Street, Bar Harbor, with streaming car headlights and people milling around stores. . .

The first day, we set up our tent and then headed out to Bass Harbor, to see the beautiful Bass Harbor Headlight. This is one of the most-often photographed lighthouses in America, but you generally see sunrise views of it because of its East-facing nature. Of course, there was no sun in evidence, so I focused more on the beauty of the pink granite rocks, leaving the lighthouse shrouded in fog in the background:

We spent the Summer Solstice Sunset on Cadillac Mountain:
And one of the rare times we had sun, we went to Jordan Pond. In the distance, across the pond, is a view of the twin mountains called "the bubbles."

And after that, since it was still sunny, we headed to the Asticou Inn's famous Thuja Azalea Garden, which is a traditional Japanese Garden. This is a little zen nook I liked, but it was too bright a day for good photos of anything but dappled shade:
I got a couple of interesting shots in Bar Harbor--this is the historic resort, the Bar Harbor Motor Inn, which sits right on the Shore Path, a lovely place to take a walk and see the huge mansions from Bar Harbor's glory days in the late 1800s and early 1900s:
And we raced out early (4:00 am) one of the last mornings we were there to capture "sunrise" in Bar Harbor, because a magazine, Maine Food & Lifestyle, had expressed interest in a couple of shots of Bar Harbor from me. This is about the best of what I got, as you can see!
So I was really only very happy with one photo (the blue lobster bots at the beginning of the post) but we had a wonderful vacation together and got to revisit our old haunts, as we lived there together back in 1991 when we were getting to know each other as a young couple. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. I certainly enjoyed taking them!

Remembering someone who left too soon

Rufus and Maya at sunset, July 2007, Kawanhee Inn on Webb Lake, Weld, ME. . .

This morning, I'm remembering someone who left us too soon. . . My mother's boyfriend/partner of 13 years, Rufus Hellendale, died this past week in a tragic and senseless accident that we're all still reeling over. Apparently, he was pruning a tree on a 16 foot ladder that was quite rickety in the woods near his cabin when he fell and broke his neck, dying.

He was so much to so many people, it's unbelievable to think that he's gone at age 53. He was a rebel, a wild, untamed spirit, in so many ways, and while he died doing something he loved, which was working on his many acres of land in Cape Rosier, Maine, I wish we could've gotten a phone call on Friday saying that Mom had found him in the woods, alive but badly injured, or that in a passing way she could've told me that he had had to leap off his ladder when it broke, spraining his ankle or even breaking it.

Not the way it really went down. . .


Rufus was the love of my mother's life, and they should've been able to grow old together. He loved gardening, and working with his hands, building things out of the cedar trees from his own beautiful property. He loved fine foods, traveling and learning about new cultures, getting exercise in so many ways. But most of all, he loved the outdoors, nature. He died doing one of the things he loved most, which is a small consolation, I suppose, but I know we'd all rather just have him here, perhaps limping around for a while on an injured ankle, alive and well.



He could be infuriating sometimes, to me, but I adored him. We sometimes had a bit of friction, such as the time I told Jon I didn't want him to have Rufus teach him to paraglide because I felt it was an unsafe sport--boy, he was pretty ticked off at me! (and vice versa!) But we got through it, and many other things, and in the last three to four years, we'd been getting along famously, aside from minor, petty things. (He was always rearranging stuff in my house when he came to visit, and I STILL can't find my favorite attachment to the Zyliss cheese grater that he was the last one to use two years ago! lol!)

Rufus windsurfing (another passion) on Webb Lake when we stayed at Kawanhee Inn last July 2007. . .

Rufus and I had so many incredible conversations. . . We talked about everything from photography (my passion) to slow food, global warming, politics, being a parent, gardening, my mother, travel and life in general. I wish I'd recorded every conversation because I always came away from them feeling uplifted. Rufus had a fascinating perspective on life. . .

I had an amazing dream about him on Friday night after Mom called me about his death:

Rufus was showing Mom, Maya, Jon and I around this beautiful little cedar house he'd built in his inimitable style--live edge boards, peeled cedar poles as supports, everything looking like it grew that way as opposed to being physically crafted.

We were following him up this beautiful spiral staircase in the center of the house and rich, golden sunlight was pouring through every window, as though it came from every direction. he seemed radiantly happy and at peace as he showed us knick knacks and things that had been meaningful throughout his life: books from his childhood, cups and trinkets.

The last thing he showed us was this bar of handmade lavender soap that was wrapped in lavender colored paper and had another piece of paper wrapped around it with the logo of the company that had made it with a nice drawing of lavender and some text on it. He let us all smell it, and unfortunately, I woke up before we could get to the top with him.

I told Mom the next day and it was very meaningful to her, but it became even more meaningful to us on Sunday afternoon. We had visited his cabin and laid lupines on the spot where he fell, and visited the lady slippers that grew all over his woods as he'd always wanted us to do. Maya took a swim in his lovely pond, and we all drank a cup of delicious water from his well.

When we left, we stopped at the Bucks Harbor Market to get a few groceries we needed, and when we got up to the front counter, I looked down and saw THE SAME SOAP Rufus had shown us in my dream, stacked up with a few other scents of soap from the same company.

I showed Mom, and she was really surprised and shocked, because last year, she and Rufus had gone to the woman who owns that soap company and spent a pleasant afternoon of soapmaking lessons with her. One of rufus's favorite scents was lavender. . .

There's no doubt in my mind that both incidents, the dream and seeing the soap, were a message to all of us that he is in peace now. Whether or not it's really true, it means a lot to me and I will treasure my memories and many pictures of Rufus always.

You left us too soon, man. . .

Rufus with Maya, her first Thanksgiving, November 1999. . .

You will be missed. . . .

Dawn Visit to Portland Headlight

Maya and I got up superbly early on Saturday, May 24th and drove out to Portland Headlight in Cape Elizabeth Maine. I took 4 panoramas as the sunrise changed, but this one is the one that has come out the best so far:

Click on the picture to see the full-sized version. Hope you like it! Cheers, Cindy

Now selling 18 x 24 gallery posters of Dawn on Portland Headlight!

I've been learning how to do more complex things with the wonderful book my father gave me at Christmas (among many other awesome things!) The Photoshop CS2 Book by Scott Kelby. I learned today how to create gallery prints and I put this one together. I am very proud of figuring this out!

I am selling the prints at $25.00 plus $5.00 S&H. I hope people will be interested, as it would certainly help publicize my photography business!

More splashes and a new self-portrait. . .

Still trying to get the crispest splash photos possible in my quest to become an istockphoto provider at some point. This high speed experiment has been a real learning experience, I'll tell you. (if you click on the pictures, they will open into a large view.)

These were shot at f/16, ISO 200, and this time, set up my shoot with the martini glass standing on two bricks with a white dropcloth covering them and the picnic table to reduce shadowing on the bottom of the glass, which is what I got when I shot with the glass atop the dark wood alone. It really paid off--the first shot is my favorite.

What I encountered with istockphoto the other day when I uploaded 3 of the former images was this: rejected, due to overfiltering. . . (cue the funeral dirge!) In doing some research and with the handy advice of a fellow Pentaxian on the dPreview Pentax SLR discussion group, I discovered just what I was doing wrong in Photoshop CS2. I was really booping up the shadows in camera raw, as well as adding quantities of 50% in the luminance smoothing, color denoising and sharpening categories, which basically is overprocessing for istock. They want minimal denoising, no sharpening and the right exposure every time. . .

Not so much to ask, you say? Well, it's easier said than done, but I'm learning! I'll keep you posted (literally!)

Also, as a last point of debatable interest: take notice of my new self-portrait, taken yesterday in the back yard for my upcoming show this summer at Terrell Lester's Deer Isle, ME gallery!

High Speed obsession!!!

Martini Splash. . .

So I spent the last few days learning how to take high speed splash photography, much as I did last spring with the Canon poin-and-shoot. Only, as I have recently discovered, the Canon did much of the work for me! I've had to actually learn how to set the camera to freeze the splashes. Here are some of the best work so far, using only available full sunlight and a black cloth background I bought at Joann Fabric for about $2.50:

Strawberry Margarita. . .

Orange Splashdown. . .

Manhattan Style. . .

I understand how to set the camera, but even with bright sunlight, the black background sucks up so much of the available light that whatever pictures I took were extremely underexposed. Taking them in RAW really helped, because Photoshop CS2's camera raw feature allowed me to adjust the exposure settings and end up with the nifty-looking photos you see here, but blown up to 100% size, they look grainy and full of artifacting from being so underexposed.

So, I have been on a quest to find an less expensive light source that would work but not cost me an arm and a leg, so to speak, by purchasing true studio lights.

Orange Vertigo. . .

I discovered that Halogen worklights are extremely HOT and have a yellow cast to them. Then I discovered that there are such things as Painter's Halogen worklamps that in addition to having a true color bulb, they also have a frosted front panel that acts as a diffuser, which won't make hot spots on my photos. So that may be the way I go. . . To be continued!

And last but not least:

Raspberry Margarita! Cheers!