tribute to Mary Colter
I bought these mugs for my wife while I was on a Bruce Barnbaum workshop. On the final evening we feasted at La Posada in Winslow AZ. I think Mary Colter's work for Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe Railroad is some of the classiest design work of the previous century. Suffice to say I am a huge fan.
Concurrent with her designs, a lens maker in Boston, a Mr. Smith of the Pinkham & Smith Co. was hand crafting lenses that are like no others on earth. Indeed since he hand ground each lens, no 2 lenses in any series were truly identical. This image was made with a Pinkham & Smith Series II f6 Semi Achromatic of 15" focal length. The lens is pure magic. Somehow it makes a soft image within a sharp image. There is no absence of detail here, just luscious tonality. This is made with an enormous Century studio 8X10 camera fitted with a 6½ X 8½ back. I used Aerial Recon Kodak Panatomic X film and developed it in PyroCat HD. Film scans were made on my little 2450 Epson and sewed together to make a single image.