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| Rosa 'Escimo' 9 July 2021 |
Clothes pins have been part of my life since I can remember. In my 1950 Buenos Aires I remember having siestas and seeing the flickers on my shuttered window of Mercedes, our live-in housekeeper, outside hanging clothes to dry.
As soon as I started processing film in my darkroom I used clothespins to hang my negatives to dry. Because sometimes the springs were not that tight, the negatives would fall and I had to re-wash them.
I don’t quite remember if by the mid-70s in Mexico or once we arrived in Vancouver in 1975 when it was that I started using stainless steel clothes pins.
Not a day now goes by when I invariably notice a string with clothes pins that Rosemary liked to spread across our fern dell to dry our clothes in the sun. It is a melancholy sight made worse by the fact that her posthumous rose gift to me Rosa ‘Escima’ is blooming right below.
Beyond the Grave - A Posthumous Gift
Wooden clothes pins with very tight springs have been one
of the reasons for my success with over 2000 scans of our garden plants since 2001. As you
can see in the photo here it is the only way I can get white roses (or other
white flowers) to be very close to the scanner bed without touching the glass.
When they do touch they overexpose and it is almost impossible to correct the
image with my Photoshop. The use of the mylar over the setup eliminates the complete black background and adds a little blue which I am warming up to.
