I was flipping through my February Vogue the other day and came across this gorgeous photo spread of Diddy and Natalia Vodianova shot by Annie Leibovitz. I loved the beautiful train, the moodiness of the shoot, the classic clothes — and couldn’t help but feel like I’d been there before – at least on part of the project — especially when I saw the photo below.
When I turned to the last page it became obvious – they’d shot the second part of this scrumptious collection of images right down the highway from me at the Essex Steam Train – one of the Connecticut River Valley’s most beloved and ubiquitous attractions. One of my neighbors works on the train, and I can actually hear the whistle wailing up the valley most afternoons – it’s a wonderful part of living in this area. I’m so thrilled that Annie L. and the editors of Vogue thought so too.
Here’s the spot where the shot above was taken ~ I took this just the other day:
It doesn’t even look like they’ve moved the trains much since this shoot which must have been in October or so.
Vogue has a great behind the scenes video that is fabulous:
I’ll be sure to take some shots the next time I see it running and post them here – it has an ice cutter on it right now to plow through the snow and ice – that with the steam against the frozen river makes it look so dramatic.
For various reasons I’ve been waging what feels like a war with my basement over the past few months – one that I’m fairly sure at this point that I’m losing.
Where I come from on the West Coast we really don’t have basements unless they happen to be small crawl spaces or garages – everything is more or less built on slab. So just the notion of descending into an underground cement bunker seems unnatural and a bit spooky to me.
Then, to be frank, I have terrifying, unseen visitors down there that simply refuse to vacate. And in their refusal they leave behind horrific evidence of their dreadful basement dwelling lives. I would elaborate but I don’t want to give you nightmares. (Ask me and I’ll tell you if you’re really curious).
So today, when I was haunting House & Home’s website looking through post after post of gorgeous rooms I came across the site’s new video station.
They have an amazing feature about the magazine’s senior editor Meg Crossley’s basement renovation. (To my relief in the video Meg does say it was a scary basement before she made it over) – but it certainly is gorgeous now. You have to drop over to see the description of how they faked a fireplace, beadboard, wood floors, and more you’ll have to take a peek – you’ll be amazed – I guarantee.
So I’m thinking there might be hope for my beleaguered basement after all.
So last Christmas I got a nifty HD video camera ~ I had planned on going immediately to work producing and creating a catalog of scintillating and fascinating videos for both work and self expression.
So, it’s now late October and here we are! *One video*.
I guess it took quite some to come up with an idea for a clip to break the creative ice – then once I hatched my plan of a series of stories about New England the actual writing of copy, going around and shooting, and doing endless stand-ups took some time.
*Then* I ran into a bit of a wall trying to work out editing on my iMovie and *then* it took a while to figure out how to upload reasonably clear video to YouTube, Vimeo ect.
There’s been a lot of trial and error that’s gone into this particular video – but I’m so happy to actually have something to upload that doesn’t look like it is being broadcast from the moon that I am overlooking the obvious bad hair day, issues with camera work, and not matching up video to narration. These can be worked out in subsequent projects.
