Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

A Scanner Obsession Distraction

Saturday, April 29, 2023

Objects of floor I photographed from above with a studio softbox

This blog will lead how the above photograph and this link led me to now in April 2023 to become nicely obsessed with doing similar photographs using my scanner. Wade Davis points the way towards biography

In percentage, my 52 years shared with Rosemary, because I am now 80 is 65%.

That means that I was not alone for most of my life. Now more than two years later I find it next to impossible to adapt to living alone. The house is a museum of the time we spent in Mexico and our trips to Buenos Aires. The portraits of the family, especially of our two daughters Rebecca and Lauren are a constant reminder of the good time we had.

There is a feature that I sort of like in FB. Every day, they send me 8 to 10 past blogs on today’s date. Because I have written 5799 I forget I wrote some of them and when I read them again I realize how much spare time I must have had to write at length and in detail.

With my first serious camera a Pentacon F purchased in 1958

They say that when one is having a car accident or a near death experience, one’s life goes through one’s mind. I must write that I get the same feeling as I read these old blogs and post them, in many cases with my opinion on how things have changed since that blog was written.

My youngest daughter comes for a visit at least once a week and my eldest, who lives in Lillooet calls me almost every day. I cannot explain to them that it is not enough and it does not change my feeling of isolation. The one bright moment is that I share my isolation with my brother and sister cats, Niño and Niña that since we got them 5 years ago are now bonding more with me and with each other. I understand that we are living together our isolation and I have no idea if they remember their former mistress.

Hilary, my youngest daughter tells me to keep busy. It is spring and my deck garden that used to be Rosemary and my deck garden has become a museum garden in her memory. I am not buying some of the of the colourful perennials and annuals at a nearby (it is wonderful!) seasonal nursery called Urban Roots and it is on 4^th Ave a few blocks from the house. I drove for one hour and 15 minutes without turning left or right on Lougheed Highway to go to the Fraser Valley Rose Farm. I went to get a peach coloured rose that Rosemary adored called Rosa ‘Buttercup’. The rose did not survive this past winter. I had to replace it in her memory.

The garden is busy distraction.

Argentine nostalgia - my mother's poetry and my father's 1940 mate

Argentine Nostalgia

Do this in memory of me

But of late I have a distraction that has become a pleasant obsession. I have been using my flatbed scanner, an Epson V700 Photo as a camera. In the past I did a few pictures that we used to call tabletop photography.

There is an autobiographical one here that is just that. I taught my Focal Point students (I taught there until they closed their doors some years ago) to place personal objects on the floor, arrange them and then photograph them looking down on them.

I used this for my recent blog on Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence and Personal Style in Photography

I now do this with my scanner and I mix objects with photographs (framed and unframed). It is lots of fun to arrange the stuff and the limiting size of my scanner bed, 9/12 inches makes it more fun, too.

I will place all these scanner shots here and when possible I will explain what led me to do each one. In some cases the pictures are related to blogs. I will insert the links.

Hilary is right, the distraction and keeping busy helps, but it is hard not to think that all I have done with my life is done and now I am simply waiting. One question in my mind is, “Who will go first my cats or me?"