Lost Art Press

Tag: Photography

Studley Ensemble Art Prints

Posted on by fitz

Yearbook

Signed, limited-edition art prints of the image above will be for sale at the Studley Tool Cabinet & Workbench Exhibit in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on May 15-17. Come by and say hi, get a book signed, buy a print and, oh yeah, go see this tool cabinet and workbench everyone keeps talking about.

I refer to this image endearingly as the ensemble’s “yearbook” photo – it’s one of a few photographs I took that contains the entire tool cabinet and workbench, and I think it’s a fitting keepsake for a truly special viewing experience of the full Studley Ensemble. An image like this one appears across the title spread of Virtuoso, but the book features the empty tool cabinet and a cropped workbench base.

The prints measure 24″  by 24″ (the image is 20″ x 17″) and are printed with archival inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308, a very thick matte art paper whose silky-smooth, reflective-free surface yields prints with outstanding depth, detail and character. They will come packaged in clear archival bags and will cost $100, payable by credit card or cash.

This art print edition will be limited to 100 prints, each one signed and numbered in pencil by me. I’m hoping to bring all 100 prints to Cedar Rapids (production time might be an issue), but given the pre-release interest in Virtuoso, Handworks, and the H.O. Studley exhibit, I’m fairly certain the prints I bring will sell out, making this poster an event exclusive. The prints will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis, though I will ensure that some are reserved to be sold on Saturday afternoon for those of you who won’t be in the area until the weekend.

I know many of you are interested in prints of images from Virtuoso, and you’ll be happy to know that I intend to offer prints of other images from the Virtuoso photo archive at future woodworking events (such as WIA). But for the time being, prints will not be offered for sale online anywhere – I won’t quit my day job to become a poster-making factory, and I prefer the kind of care and quality control I can exercise in these small-batch production runs. There’s already a made-for-the-masses poster for sale and, for what it’s worth, I have one myself.

Speaking of care and quality control, I’m still tweaking and proofing the image; I’ll post a photo or two on Instagram or on the LAP blog when production is in full swing.

— Narayan Nayar

Drowning in Pixels and Paper

Posted on by fitz

picks

Back in January, Chris came to my studio in Oak Park, Illinois to help cull the thousands of images in our Virtuoso archive down to the several hundred-or-so that are featured in the book. It took several days, but at the end of that process we had the scaffolding in place for Wesley Tanner to begin designing the book, and I had a pile of selected photographs (“picks”) to begin preparing for print. Though photographs are standard fare for any print publication, they play a significant role in Virtuoso. I thought I’d provide a behind-the-scenes look at how we approached the final stages of image processing.

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And…cut!

Posted on by fitz

The core “Virtuoso” team is currently returning to a normal orbit after the fourth (and ostensibly last) pilgrimage to the Studley tool chest. As Chris has described elsewhere, after this visit I can finally check off a nagging item on my “Virtuoso” to-do list: getting the tool chest off the wall.

Writing up a list of to-dos has preceded every single trip to the tool chest, (which, if you’re wondering, is located on floor 7–1/2 of the ACME Corporation headquarters in West Alahampshiresippi). For our first visit, the tasks were largely centered on achieving as much breadth as possible with a brute-force documentary survey of the chest and every single item in it. Subsequent trips focused on specifics such as joinery or inlay, the bench and its vises, specific tool groupings and “non-documentary” photography.

The list for this last trip may have featured the fewest number of things to get done, but the list was perhaps the most logistically ambitious. The to-dos for this trip included getting the chest off the wall, photographing the closed chest at 45° rotations, staging various “ensemble” shots of the chest and its accompanying bench and shooting a video. I also brought a new, higher-resolution camera this time and wanted to redo a select number of shots from earlier trips just to have a few more pixels to work with.

In 2.5 days we set up four or five distinct “sets” for still photography and video, captured views of the chest that very few people have ever seen, and then packed everything up. As with every trip to North Texassourington, we left exhausted, exhilarated and inspired.

Don opening the chest

While we’ve posted many informal videos since we began this project, the video footage we shot this time will be released in concert with the book (details TBD). The video will feature the wealth of knowledge and some of the stories that Don has accumulated in his research on Henry O. Studley, his tool chest and his bench. I also spent some time in front of the camera droning on and on about the approach I took to the project and my perspective on the chest as a designer, woodworker, and photographer.

Studley Video Set

My favorite parts of the video footage, however, involve Don and I ’fessing up about which single Studley tool we would “keep” were we not the fine, upstanding individuals that we are. We had different answers that won’t be revealed until the video is released, but feel free to guess. There are only a few hundred to choose from.

— Narayan Nayar