Dreamy Sylvia

Sylvia, Thelma, Patricia and my sister Kelley were the “Four Musketeers” throughout their junior high and high school years. All four girls were almost always willing guinea pigs as I was learning photography. Any time I had an idea, they were game to model for me. This is one of the first shots I remember taking of Sylvia. We shot it out in the country, not far from where she lived. She’s wearing the dress my dad helped me picked out for my graduation from high school. I’ve always loved this photo—she has such a classically beautiful profile. And she still looks the same, decades later. This is another one of my vaseline-on-the-uv-filter vignette images. It kind of has that Holga look, too, with the out-of-focus dark areas around the edges. I most likely shot this with my Sears Pentax K1000. 35mm slide scanned by ScanCafe.com (FYI: I received my DVD with high rez scans from ScanCafe a week ago, followed with the arrival of my original slides today—all safe and sound. I highly recommend this company if you have a slew of slides to contend with.)

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

From my 35mm slide archives: Southwest images

After reading glowing reviews (by professional photographers, no less…and from my favorite graphic design guru, Chuck Green) about the scanning services of www.scancafe.com, I thought I’d give them a try. While I own a really nice Nikon Coolscan dedicated slide scanner, the thought of (eventually) scanning thousands of my old slides is daunting. I also wasn’t happy with the results I’ve been getting lately from random slide scans. Although it takes awhile to get the images scanned with this service (they outsource overseas), the price is phenomenal. I took advantage of their recent quicker turnaround and 25% off special this weekend and expect to have an online review of the images around the 18th of December. They return the slides with a DVD of the final scans. What’s really neat is—you can reject up to 50% of the images you send in. How they can profit from that, I don’t know, but it was enticement enough for me.

Photo 1: one of my favorite places in Arizona—Canyon de Chelly, in Chinle, Arizona. After a lengthy hike to the bottom of the canyon with my father, I photographed the White House Ruin (Photo 2). The White House Ruin was made famous (photographically) by Ansel Adams in his beautiful black and white image here.

Photo 3: Hovenweep National Monument, archeological site near the Utah-Colorado border. Remind me someday to tell you a funny story about how my dad and I discovered Hovenweep.

Photo 4: Kodachrome Basin State Park, near Cannonville, Utah. My cousin Bill and I stopped at this park on our Vegas-to-Lake-Powell adventure. How could I not stop at a park with the word “Kodachrome” in it? (Never mind that I shot almost exclusively with Fuji Velvia at the time!)

Photo 5: Petrified Forest National Park in the Painted Desert, Arizona. While we’re on the subject of the Petrified Forest, I just stumbled across an instant message discussion on AOL that I had with my dad after that road trip so many years ago.

Me: Remember how beautiful the light was when we visited Petrified Forest? Those stormy clouds coming in over the bright blue sky?

Dad: I remember it.

Me: And how you wanted to steal a piece of petrified wood but I told you that it wouldn’t look too swell for a U.S. Customs officer to get arrested for something like that?

Dad: So we bought some at the rip-off gift shop. Guess where they got ’em!

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.