panic

Believe me, I share the pain of those students who found all kinds of technical and emotional difficulties with the self-portrait assignment (not that they didn't negotiate these difficulties very well).   Tonight has been the first night in which I've been truly pushed into a corner with this blog....   Earlier today, I was very much taken by some late C19th photochrom images that someone else had posted to a web site.   Yes!  I thought - one of my smaller enthusiasms is trying to mimic old photographic techniques in Photoshop.   And - I checked - there was a tutorial on line as to how to perform precisely this conversion.   So I took an o.k., but in many ways Dull picture of Murray Hall, with good intentions...

...only the on-line tutorial was predicated on one using Photoshop Elements - and I have the full-blown CS4 - and the transition between the two isn't easy to follow - and after trying four times over I realized it was past 10.30, and I'm still trying to do teaching prep, and deal with administrative correspondence, and no one would want to see a very, very, very boring picture of Murray.   And I didn't have time to work out the techniques on my own.   And so here's an image of me looking quite disconsolate, and the only further details that I'll add belong to the realm of memory: this mirror was the only thing I've ever bought at auction, at a sell-off of architectural antiques in a yard in Jericho, in Oxford (shades of Jude the Obscure), and the deep red wall coloring is the identical shade that graced the living room in James Street, also in Oxford - a way, I guess, of carrying my former environment around with me by way of a chromatic scheme.