The space Within is now available!

       

          The Space Within by Cynthia Farr-Weinfeld | BOOK INFO
       

(If you click on the shopping cart icon with the word BUY below it, within the 

above preview, it will take you to Blurb, where I'm selling the book.) 

I am very happy to announce publication of my architectural photography book, The Space Within, on Blurb.  My proof copy just arrived and it looks fabulous!  It is an 8x9.5" perfect bound, 80 page glossy book filled with my architectural photography and interesting notes on the history of many of the buildings and houses within.  I hope you'll take the time to check it out and maybe even buy a copy of your own!

Best wishes,

Cindy

Maine State House Rotunda Revisited

Last Friday morning, I met my good friend, Bruce, another Pentax shooter, in Augusta at the beautiful Maine State House for a photo trip.  I have been interested in trying out my ultra-wide 12-24mm lens in the same places I previously used my kit 18-55mm lens and I wasn't disappointed.

Altogether, I have found that I need far less shots to create stunning panoramas and the results are crisp and clean, with very low noise, compared to my kit lens.

We had a lot of fun taking pictures and having "photo-chat" as we went from area to area.  You can click on any of the pictures to see a larger version and then pres the back button to return to the post.

The first picture is a 12 image horizontal panorama of the Rotunda itself, and my favorite of the day.  The second is the Maine Senate Chambers.  The third piece is a a single shot of the Rotunda upstairs.  The final shot is a four image panoramic view of one of the hallways leading up to the entrance to the Rotunda, where one can look up through three floors and see the beautiful dome above.

After that, we had a delicious lunch at Slate's Restaurant in Hallowell, Maine, and back home to process all the photos!

I'd love to hear what you think about my work at any time.  Thanks for looking, Cindy

Portrait Shoot with Suzanne Nance

A couple of weeks ago, I had a portrait shoot with MPBN's lovely producer and morning show host, Suzanne Nance.  We had a lot of fun and I'm very happy with the results.  She's an extremely photogenic subject, as you can see, so it wasn't a difficult shoot at all.  The shots I've enclosed are my personal favorites.  Hope you like them!  You can see some of the shots on Suzanne's new website, which I also hope you'll visit.  Best wishes, Cindy

New Work at Kennedy Studios

Well, it was tedious, but I spent the morning matting photos and then dropped them off at Kennedy Studios early this afternoon.  Stop by the gallery sometime and you'll see all of my matted prints in a bin near the front of the store!  (This image, Good Red Wine, is one of the many photos for sale there.)  Let me know what you think!  Cindy

New Re-designed Landscape gallery

Please visit my newly re-designed Maine Landscapes gallery on smugmug.  You can now purchase prints in all sizes, whether by themselves or matted and framed, mounted or gallery wrapped canvases directly from many of my galleries just by clicking the Buy button to the right above each large picture.  I am really excited with this new development!  Look for more exciting changes to come, as my graphic designer and I, Mozelle Studio will be working together to make my professional website and the smugmug website join together seamlessly.

If you are technologically inclined and even know what such things as digg or stumble upon are, please feel free to digg or give a thumbs up to my site!  Thanks for checking it out!  Cindy

Greater Portland Convention and Visitors Bureau News

I recently sold four photos to the Greater Portland Convention and Visitors Bureau for their beautiful 2010 Event Planner's Guide .  Click on the highlighted words to visit both of those sites.  The first photo is one of the four: Sunset from Portland Observatory. 

They were really easy to work with and very friendly and I was absolutely thrilled to see my photos in the guide.  You can actually click through all the pages, and it has great information on all the local happenings and things to do within its almost 50 pages of information and beautiful images. 

A Visit to Washington, D.C.

Last week, my mother and I visited Washington, D.C. for a day and a half, where we got to see the beautiful National Cathedral and The Library of Congress.  I want to thank Donna Urschel, in the Public Affairs Department of the Library of Congress, for making my photo shoot in the Reading Room happen.  She stayed after work for an hour to let me in, which was so nice of her.  I hope the results show that it was worth it! You can click on any of these photos to see a larger version.  Just press the back button to come back to the blog.

The photos, from the top: an amazing hallway of endless, graceful arches, painted beautifully.  This is a small, 6 image vertical panorama.

The entry wall of the Reading Room, a 16 image vertical panorama.

The next two show floor to ceiling views of the Reading Room and its fabulous dome.  You can read more about it by clicking here.  It opened to the public in 1897 and its design was based on the Paris Opera House. 

The final Reading Room is a smaller panorama of just the ceiling to give you an idea of how it looks to gaze upward at it.  There's a wonderful hush in this enormous room.  It almost has the feeling of a cathedral.

The next image is a floor to ceiling vertical panorama of part of the National Cathedral.  I worked and worked at this one, just to get it straight, as it is such a tall building and has so many different leading lines and curves that Photoshop was quite confused by it!

The next one is a small six-image panorama showing how immense each of the Romanesque columns are that support the cathedral. I had to put the tripod and camera literally next to the column and point it upwards.

In the basement, or crypt area, of the Cathedral, I found a really interesting arched stairwell and long arched hallway that I loved.

And the final image is a six image vertical handheld panorama, taken outside obviously, in a portico or covered hallway at any rate, leading to some part of this immense, European-sized cathedral.  As you can see, I was really intrigued by arch-filled hallways on this trip.

As always, please feel free to forward any of my blog posts on to your friends or relatives if you think they will be interested, and please scroll down through the blog from the top to find the "FOLLOW ME!" button, where you can show your support for my blog and photographic work by joining the other followers.  It doesn't mean that you will receive any more emails or be put on any lists.  It just shows that you like my work and enjoy reading my blog!

Additionally, posters supporting the Pink Tulip Project are still for sale here.  You can scroll up to the top right area of my blog and click on "BUY NOW" to purchase one, 15% of the proceeds of which will go to support the Maine Women's Cancer Fund.

Thanks for reading!  Best wishes, Cindy

Pink Tulip Project Posters to benefit the Women's Cancer Fund

I just finished designing this poster and I'm really excited about it.  I was looking at the Pink Tulip Project website this morning where I discovered that they raised $27,385 this year and over $50,000 last year for the Women's Cancer Fund at The Maine Cancer Foundation by planting gardens of pink tulips "to raise funds, create awareness and support those affected by breast cancer."


I thought that I would plant a photographic garden with my new poster.  My grandmother, Mary Joyce Farr, died in 2000 at the age of 92 of breast cancer that recurred after over twenty years of remission.  I brought her to her radiation treatments twice a week for many months before she passed away.  I have always wanted to find a way that I could help propel the mission to stop breast cancer. 

Here is the part I'm most excited about:  I'm donating 15% of the poster price to The Maine Cancer Foundation!



So, I will be selling prints of this poster for $45.95 through Paypal, which includes shipping and handling directly to your house or P.O. Box.  The poster is 16x20 inches and printed on archival quality Kodak e-Surface paper, which is rated for 100 years in home display and 200 years in dark storage.  So no worries about fading.  While it is perfectly suitable for gallery matting and framing, it's sized so you can simply buy a standard 16x20 frame of your choice, drop it in and be ready to hang it on the wall in moments!  


If you're interested in purchasing one of these posters please click here "Buy Now" or on the Paypal button in the upper right hand corner of the page. 

As always, please feel free to forward my blog posts on to friends or relatives you think might be interested.


Best wishes to you all, Cindy

The Haunting of Hill House

Here is my tribute to Shirley Jackson. . .  I went back to my favorite abandoned house the other night at twilight and took this HDR (High Dynamic Range) panorama.  It was really just a great excuse to try out my 12-24mm ultrawide lens, and it proved to me again why I love it!  I stood in the same place I stood in to take the second image here, and took a series of five shots, with different exposure times to expose for highlights, midtones and shadows and then combined them all, using a wonderful program that I finally bit the bullet and bought called Photomatix 3.0 to make the two exposures you see here.

I'm equally happy with both of them, but the first one, is amazing to me, because it shows just how wide an ultrawide lens perspective is, in comparison with my 18-55mm lens.  I love the moody twilight feeling in these shots.  Hope you like them.  Thanks for looking, Cindy

PS--you can click on either of these shots to see a larger view.

New panoramic views of Merrill Auditorium

Merrill Auditorium, City Hall, Portland, Maine.  Taken at 12mm and stitched together using Photoshop CS4.

This morning, I went to Portland's beautiful Merrill Auditorium in City Hall and spent almost an hour making four panoramas of two different views of this elegant theater.  I'm really fond of the angles they were taken from.  I think they show the architectural details very nicely.  (Thanks go to Gregg Carville, Merrill Auditorium's Technical Director, for letting me in again!)

One of these two photos will be in the 70 page architectural photography book I am in the process of designing.  I've titled it The Space Within, after a quote by Frank Lloyd Wright:  "The space within becomes the reality of the building."

The book will be completed when I come back from my February trip to Washington, D.C. where I will be lucky enough to photograph the Library of Congress.

Once I put the finishing touches on the book, I'll make a post about it with a link to the site I'll be selling it on, Lulu.com.  I'm really excited to hold the first copy in my hands!

Thanks for looking, Cindy