Weekend Update: Display
Where did October go? It stole away beneath clouds of anxiety. Nothing personal, you understand. Just the usual, who’s driving this car? terror. Maybe it would help if I crouched down behind the front seat, bracing for the crash. Maybe it would help, if I were the sort of person who could do that. Instead, I’m the sort of person who is calmed down by reality, by seeing what’s actually going on in the world, and not in my head.
Even anxiety gets boring after a while, though, so I decided to do something about “things I’ve been meaning to do around the house.” We all have a little list of those. One thing that I’ve been meaning to do is to make some constructive use of the mini-studio that I bought from Hammacher Schlemmer a few months ago. The mini-studio allows you to take pictures like this:
The kit consists of two halogen lamps on retractable feet, a small camera tripod, and a four-sided cube that folds flat. The cube has only four sides because, when you aim your camera at it in order to photograph your priceless possessions, there is neither a front nor a top. The sides are made of a gauzy white fabric that diffuses the light from the halogen lamps. Also included is a strip of material, nineteen inches wide and over a yard long, to serve as a backdrop. Actually, it’s two pieces of material, sewn back to back. The lustrous blue in the photograph is actually quite cheesy in real life, and obviously a cheap synthetic. But, like the set of a TV show, it photographs very nicely. The other side of the backdrop is a matte battleship gray, suitable, I suppose for backgrounding footballs and trophies.
The whole thing cost about a hundred dollars, a shocking multiple, I’m sure, of the totaled unit prices that any arduous shopper would find on the Internet — or somewhere dingy here in New York. Which is precisely why I gasped at the price in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue: only a hundred dollars! And did I mention that the floor of the cube doubles as one side of a parachute-fabric carrying case? With pockets for the lamps and the tripod? That are covered with a flap secured by sturdy Velcro’d straps? It’s ideal for carrying over to your best friend’s house, for a play date.
I bought the mini-studio largely so that the necklaces and bracelets that Kathleen has been turning out in her spare time can be more attractively catalogued than they are by the scanner. The scanner makes even the most graceful Venetian-glass bracelet look like a murder suspect. I will save the one photograph that I took of one of Kathleen’s productions for later — for when we get a nice bust to replace the cut-rate display form that Kathleen picked up at a bead show. For the moment, you’ll have to make do with the plate, which Fossil Darling and LXIV gave us so long ago that it cost only slightly more than the mini-studio does now.
Taking pictures of plates and other tchotchkes will be useful, I suppose, for something, but for the moment my mind is wandering in other, more curious directions. What would it be like to use fruits and vegetables to stage tragic tableaux vivants? How about making a flip book in which the little dog laughs while the fork runs off with the spoon? How about crossing the Icanhascheezeburger concept with paper dolls? Something with styrofoam… and lots of pipe-cleaners! The bog mindles.