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Friday Slide Show: Glass Pagliaccio
7 May 2021
This Murano glass clown has entertaining us since Christmas 2004. Joyce discovered it in a little store that was closing and made a present of it. It stands in the alcove where once the telephone of the house, with a cord long enough to reach any bedroom, would (clown-like) ring its own bell.
It's always a cheery sight, its bright colors radiating above the three dancing elephants that circle it in the alcove.
That's not a great spot for a portrait so we brought it (carefully) downstairs to the bunker to photograph it.
Well, not really. We weren't, that is, trying to document it for insurance purposes, say. We were more interested in catching the colors as they flowed through the glass, some opaque, some transparent.
We were more interested in catching the colors as they flowed through the glass, some opaque, some transparent.
They seemed a little like music.
So we screwed a macro converter to the front of the Olympus 14-42mm kit lens and lit the clown up from the back and the front with a Flexi LED macro flash leaving the background dark and fired away. We used Manual mode at f5.6, 1/40 second and ISO 200 to shoot handheld so we were free to dance around our glass pagliaccio.
The lights were just bright enough but we still gave the exposure a half-stop bump in Lightroom. We also collapsed the blacks a bit so the background disappeared. Not much more. We synced the set and were done except for a tweak or two and the crops.
When we pass this glass clown in the hallway, we never think of that Christmas 16 years ago. But as it posed there in front of our lens, we reflected on that day again. The clown was a gift but so was the day.
It was an ambitious but a pleasant holiday. The stars aligned so there was none of the usual holiday anxiety that accompanies trying to do too much. Instead, we kept it simple so Dad, who had been suffering through a long medical crisis, could enjoy the party. And by keeping it simple, we were able to exceed our hopes for the day.
The children have children of their own now and the older people are no longer all with us. That was, in fact, Dad's last Christmas. It saddened us, as we shoot these images, to remember what happened next. And yet what did we expect?
Having no speaking parts, no clown ever said, "Life goes on." But life goes on. And every clown knows it.
