Dr. Evermor's Forevertron & HH Bennett's Studio

I had a very busy spring, and now that it's summer (how'd that happen?), I'll try to take advantage of the holiday weekend to catch up on some blogging.  In June we had a family gathering in the Wisconsin Dells with the obligatory boat rides on the Upper and Lower Dells and a lumberjack breakfast at Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty.

But the two things I had always wanted to see in the Dells? Dr. Evermor's Forevertron and H.H. Bennett's Photographic Studio!

The Forevertron is an amazing outdoor sculptural environment created by Tom Every a.k.a. Dr. Evermor from salvaged items.


He was doing steampunk before steampunk was cool. I won't even try to describe this in words. You can see my full Flickr set here. We were fortunate to meet him on the day, and the official Dr. Evermor website is up, but still under construction. Besides the Wikipedia article linked above, you can read more at Roadside America and PBS.org.

On a slightly different tack, the H.H. Bennett Studio is small museum run by the Wisconsin Historical Society, which preserves a 19th-century photographic studio. (If you've ever wondered, my on-line name is "vintagepix" because I have a collection of vintage photos.)

So this site might not be for everyone's tastes but I am entertained by giant cameras and stereocard viewers (modeled here by my big brother)

and taking a family photo through the lens of an antique camera.

(For those of you who know your optics, we are upside down in the original photo.) So if you're in central Wisconsin this summer, consider a road trip!

Make It Mondays - Vintage Photos

I'd fallen off the MIM bandwagon this last month or so, but this past week's Make It Mondays theme is Vintage Photos! Hmmm.... wonder where I'll find some of those.... So here are two digital ATCs that I've been working on since I took the "Intro to Photoshop for Non-Professionals" class at Mount Mary College. This month's theme for the Milwaukee ATC group's live trade is "May Day! May Day!" so the Queen of the May above started out as a vintage lady from the Ten Two Studios Tinted Twenties Cuties image CD. She quickly became smothered in flowers from a Dover "Old-time Floral Vignettes" clip art CD and then run through some of the Photoshop standardized filters just to see what happens. Poor girl doesn't know what hit her (hence the dazed smile)!

And I say "quickly," but actually the process took me hours of cussing and redoing and so forth as I learned my way around the commands. I'm planning to do a limited edition series of prints of these, but even then one print will probably represent an hour of grumbling - I mean "work" :D

Below is "The Merry Month of May," which uses a scanned black & white image from my personal vintage photo collection.

The right edge of this one is cut off by my blog format, but you can click on the image to see the full version on Flickr. The original photo is tiny, only about 1.5" x 2.25," but scanning on a higher resolution picked up more detail of a group of women outside taking photos of each other in artsy poses. I thought it looked a little like they were doing a May dance. This scan below shows the original at actual size (or close enough depending on your computer!)