04-SEP-A-2

 

THE VERY PROFESSIONAL,

THOROUGH AND SPECTACULAR

“CALENDAR PHOTO SHOOT OF THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL” AT DERWOOD BEFORE THE LABOR DAY WEEKEND NEAR HOME

 

September 1—6, 2004

 

            If it is possible for a house to feel like a supermodel star, the Derwood renovation would make Cindy Crawford look like a very much washed up ex-model as it took over centerfold status.  It was a very thorough photo formal portrait session coming soon to a calendar near you!

 

THE DERWOOD PHOTO SHOOT,

AS I CONTINUE SHOOTING DEER PHOTOS

 

            Dale Kramer arrived early, and we set to work cleaning up a few of the places that the photographer Randy Hall would concentrate on when he arrived with his Polaroid suggestions for the layout of the aspects he wished to shoot.  He had a van full of the kinds of portrait photography rolling stock, like master/slave flash units with umbrella light diffusers, neutral density filters, and multiple camera backs to shoot Polaroid pictures until he got just the right lighting in his still lifes.  Dale hung up last fall’s buck mount, and we cleaned a few windows awaiting the light to be swinging over the house to sequence the photos, each of which took over an hour to set up with scaffolding and tripods, then sun blocking cardboards to reduce glare from reflections, such as off the kitchen granite counter tops.   We started with the library, which needed to be tidied up as all the desktop materials were swept away, and the books and preferred backdrop of the desk with the Dall Sheep ram’s head looking on.  We cleared shelves and added some books where discs had been.  We waited for the light through the skylights to be just right, and then had to open the door to the deck to allow the glare to be reduced from the angel of incidence.  It was late morning b y the time Randy had shot the single photo on film of the library that had satisfied him.

 

            The longer set-up time would go into the Game Room for which the screens were removed, some of which would go on top of the skylights if needed to reduce incident light.  Acorns were bombing down on the skylights, and I would look out of the windows to periodically see the big bucks strolling around picking up acorns at dawn and dusk, with smaller bucks coming in when the big ones had vacated the feeding stations.  Dale shot a few photos, and I called him out of the kitchen on one occasion when I was supposed to go out to pick up carryout sandwiches for our lunch on the picnic table.  There were the smaller bucks out in force, right behind where we had moved the fixed camera.  For the next several days the deer, including each of the big bucks have been nosing right up to the fixed camera position.  I saw scores of squirrels, half of the black, and a slow-crawling tortoise, that I have to be alert for since it seems to prefer the gravel of the driveway to the better cover of the woods.  Only once did I spot the animal I really wanted to see, at a time when I would be ready for him, packing the sub-sonic long rifle .22 caliber scoped Marlin rifle—the woodchuck, which is very spooky, but likes to get under the shed and chew up whatever it can find.  The chipmunks have also made extensive tunnels in the grass around the house.  But, the only shooting to be done today was that of several cameras.

 

            I had bought three sprays of flowers for cut flower arrangements.  Dale came over with a centerpiece of very carefully crafted colors matching the Segovia Red of the kitchen and the lemon b utter of the Breakfast Room.  They had been ordered to match the requests that Sandy Shelar had made for the colors and displays around the house, but I had not gone out with her on the suggested shopping trip to fill in the missing pieces of furniture before the September 1 shoot, timed to get the production of the 2005 calendar in time.  What we still needed we made into a shopping list and Dale and I went out to buy a few things for the house.

 

            Our shopping trip began in Safeway and its very large produce department, where we bought red and yellow bell peppers, red and yellow apples big oranges, a pineapple, and bananas.  We also bought cheese and wine and crackers.  We did not see the place settings and tea towels we needed, so we went on toe Great Indoors, and there bought a four place setting of the place mats, dishes and goblets and cups with napkin rings with big yellow sunflowers—all in the colors of gold and blue to match and complement the floral spray and the other parts of the décor that were going to be set up for t he Breakfast Room.  We looked over several artificial trees, and at last bought a “café” tree in a Fijian basket, tall; enough to complement the Game Room as a permanent fixture.    

 

            When we came back, the deer were still milling around outside, a distraction for both me and Dale, and even Randy who is also a wildlife photographer, but most animals do not hold as still as the house would for its portrait.  We had set up the Game Room for a single aspect shot, and Randy rearranged a few things to get the right lighting.  The next room was going to be the kitchen, in midafternoon, for which we had to scrub the windows and then block the sun from bouncing off the granite counters to the ceiling.  Only one aspect was taken, and that was from the Dining Room over toward the gas cooktop stove and splash tile under the fan and hood with the cherry cabinetry all around.  On each counter were cut flowers in vases, the fruit bowl with the color coordinated fruits, and a cutting board with wine and cheese and crackers.  No photo was shot over toward the double ovens, Viking refrigerator and microwave, nor were any pictures taken of the Dining Room, absent its dining room suite and the Den was also used to store the things we had not wanted in the picture.  We went upstairs, skipping all the bedrooms, with a single shot, also skipped.  We might have taken a photo f the master bathroom, since it has the nice appliances and hot tub, but without the candles, silk flowers and a special window treatment (that is hardly necessary at its very higher upper story level) it looked just like “a new bunch of fancy plumbing” without any character to make a special portrait, so we skipped all of the upstairs, attic and basement/garage.  We focused on only a few shots of the major overhaul rooms since the calendar is going to have limited pages for every aspect.  Probably the most colorful picture was that of the Breakfast Room decor which the sun was overhead thorough the custom fitted dome, and it made for a colorful table setting with the places settings and floral centerpiece.

 

            D G Liu delivered a dump truck with scaffolding which was set up on the northern face of the woods looking back at the decks and the Breakfast Room.  All the light facing the north side were turned on inside, and he waited on the scaffolding for the light to be right.  There is another outside shot, but that is only of the front door with all the lights on inside, but only a ten second lighting of the new porch lantern in the thirty second exposure as I lay on the floor under the umbrellas to turn the porch light off and on. 

 

By this time it was 6:00 PM.  I had had one conference call with my group from ELDP to discuss the project we are supposed to prepare for the course meeting in two weekends more.  I also had Bryan Henry the Director of the Audubon Society came over since he is going to be convening a group at Derwood on September 15 to discuss the alternatives to the ICC which his group and several cooperating groups are working to combat.  In the middle of the morning, I received a call from Alden Harken who reports that Laurie did well with the first round of chemotherapy and would like to try going to the Halsted Society meeting down in the Stanford Court at San Francisco.  But Alden had a cancellation of his Grand Rounds speaker for Thursday of next week, and I volunteered to fill in for him.  This would mean that I could give the talk after leaving directly from the medial students’ presentation on our DR/Haiti tip on September 8, and staying with the Harkens, I could give their Grand Rounds as a substitute, then make another conference call with the ELDP group, then go on to the Stanford Court to attend the Halsted Society for the weekend with Alden and Laurie.  It is an ideal time to make such arrangements as she is feeling better after the recent treatment of the diseases that had recently taken her mother’s life.

 

The next go for the portrait was in the Living Room, which Randy set up while I made travel arrangements for SFO and talked with Bryan Henry and other callers.  I then helped as he shot the living room from a couple of aspects, through to the Game Room.  He seemed especially eager to come back to photograph the shed, which is an item of great appeal to him as it is covered over with fallen oak leaves and acorns on top of growing moss.  I think he is also coming back to shoot the north face of the house for which the scaffolding is left in place.  If the master bathroom gets gussied up in the future, he will return to shoot that too, but hat may be too late to be in the calendar.  There is nothing in the bedrooms to be worthy of a photograph as yet, and at the professional posing that the other rooms have had, it will be a long time before it comes up to speed to match them.

 

So, Derwood completed most of its “posing” by 9:00 PM when I helped Randy pack up his equipment.  Bryan Henry had gone out to distribute flyers in the far side of the neighborhood and immediately I received a phone call from an engineer woman who was very eager to help to reduce the further dependence on foreign oil by building yet another highway and this one a toll road at that.  So, I will have to get up to speed on this topic upon return from San Francisco, which means that as I am hosting the gathering, I will get Derwood ready again. Between now and then, I will have to deal with the large assignments of books to be read and papers and projects to be completed.  I received a further group of manuscripts on the on-line editing part of the Landes page.  And I will work on the additional items that may include preparing a talk for Taiwan which I am due to travel to the Tuesday morning the nation goes to the polls.  Since I will be standing in the security screening line at Dulles, I will have to vote by absentee ballot so I put in my request for this method, the first time I shall have voted as an absentee

 

LABOR DAY WEEKEND AND A FEW GOOD RUNS

 

Joe called, and he had received contributions and well wishes from each of my family and friends; he will leave for Athens when I am in California.  I went out to KenGar, delayed by my early Saturday morning waiting for the woodchuck I had seen twice at early light, but who disappeared leaving me with four deer to watch from the open window right above them.  They must have shot all the film in the camera below since they were standing directly in front of it.  I spent some time stalking around the house, sparing the turtles and abundant squirrels around the house awaiting the woodchuck, the most damaging of the varmints.  As I kept checking for the ground hog, I spotted the big deer, now each cleared of velvet and magnificent in their head gear, with another roll of film dedicated to their posing—like the house had been doing for the days around their preening and fawning good looks.  I am getting ready now to complete the first of the ELDP papers, then go to bed early, since I ma going to try to run the point-to-point with Ed and his group of Greenway trail runners, from 355 north to Damascus for over 20 miles.  We will see how well I do on a long run for which I ma overdue.

 

I have got to do at least one long run, but I am still recovering from only a few of the hard runs I had done in Annapolis and out on the Needwood trail with Rick Byrd last week that left me stiff and with left pyriformis spasms.  I am reluctantly aware that the problem in this muscle group is probably not the primary problem, but that it is most certainly in my back, which seems to be herniating a disc, getting more symptomatic all the time.  I think the way to handle this is to ignore it, and a 20-miler is one way of ignoring it big time—until it stops me somewhere in the headlong pursuit of the next marathons in the MCM and MITP, counting up closer to a hundred marathons, when I can quit—counting, at least!

 

A SUPER RUN OF THE SENECA GREENWAY TRAIL

WITH ED SCHULZE AND ULTRA-RUNNERS:

A 22.5 MILE RUN THROUGH OUR CONTINUOUS GREENSPACE

 

            I am sitting here in Derwood, surrounded by deer on an Indian summer day of the Labor Day weekend, with the satisfied exhaustion of a good long run well done.  I had resolved to join with Ed Schulze who has been the tireless point man on the planning, trail making, and trail guiding of the Greenway Trail runs, and now there would be an extension of this park system streamside trail run all the way up to and through Damascus.  I responded to the email by letting him know I would be coming, and met the hearty small band of ultra-runners at dawn in the Damascus Regional Park.  We drove back to the Route 28 Seneca Creek car park, and took off at 7:30 AM running north.  We ran through deep woods with climax forest of large tulip poplar and oaks.  I saw tortoises and orb spiders, and groups of deer bedded down did not even consider it necessary to get up and run away from us. We hopped over the few stream crossings and a few bridges that Ed has had installed with some of his work parties, and we crossed roads I had only read on street signs in closer to the corridor of civilizations—running under Route 118, 355, the huge 270 and across Watkins Mill, Watkins, Huntmaster, Wheatlands, Brink Road and others that are places where water and Gatorade could be left for an extended trail run. 

 

In the spring Ed had organized a muddy marathon along this trail, but now it was dry and dusty with a tang of fall overcast in the air.  It was the right time for me to put out a long and steady run at a slow pace, watching my feet for the rocks and roots.  There were two young women who had not been out on this trail, and one, an immunologist who was wondering what she had got herself into when she heard about the ultra runs each of the other participants had run.  Stacy Plum is her name, and she was already faster and better at this run than I and looked better doing it.  Ed stayed along with me so I would not get lost in the turning of several alternative trails as it entered places like Seneca Creek State Park around a lake. Last year Ed had done a “Double Ironman:” a 4.8 mile swim, 128 mile bike ride and a 52.4 mile run in 36 hours.  His wife tolerates his habit only if he comes home to the “honeydo” list and activities with the kids, but he is inspiring for me to run with since he just enjoys 1 life, 2 the run, and 3 the ability of bringing these two together in the untrammeled woods.  We saw more deer than people on this the Labor Day holiday weekend in the most extensive park system cutting right through the middle of the biggest conurbation along the East coast with all wilderness settings and ancient climax forest along the stream.  Wonderful!

 

I am drowsy just now sitting after the first use of the hot tub in cranking up; to prevent the stiffness that I know will come along from the degenerative back disease that is causing the muscle spasms in my butt.  I did no t even have to get up to shoot another picture of the abundant deer posing for me in the rapid rain of acorns outside my window.  I am content to not only enjoy the woods in a run through them, but to be so fortunate as to actually LIVE in them.   The long trial run was overdue in my training for the fall marathons, and a perfect time with a good group.  Ed even had a full cooler of fruit and picnic supplies for us to enjoy upon return to the Damascus Regional Park—ideal!

 

This has been the highlight of my holiday weekend, and now I have to pack up the lectures for the UCSF with Alden Harken, the materials for the Halsted Society, and the lectures to be given in November at Taiwan.  I must also work on the conjoint papers to be given at the next ELDP session, which is at least one down now since I wrote one last night for my individual paper to be sent in in advance of the ELDP course now only two weekends away.  I will have to find a phone for an hour after my Thursday lecture in the UCSF since the conference call scheduled with our smaller group will be held then, three hours earlier on west coast time.

 

With Joe Aukward calling to tell me he is leaving on the 9th to go to an overnight at Dulles Marriott with the other athletes and then take off for Athens for his own special fall run.  Happy Trails to each!