Photography

Court House, view from the back.Photo: Barbara Bloom

Pullman Park, built in 1934, was used for minor league baseball for twenty years until the Pittsburgh Pirates farm team left in 1951. The ballpark saw many famous faces during its professional baseball days, including Lou Gehrig, Whitey Ford, and Joe DiMaggio who played for a farm team of the New York Yankees.
As of 2009 Pullman Park is the home of the Butler Blue Sox.

A quick bit of self-indulgence here as paying jobs have been sealing me away from blogging.  Here’s mine – I’d love to hear what’s on yours or comments on mine.  

                                                    

The Printer's Devil

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

 

 

 

 

         Cloudsplitter: A Novel

 

 

  Letters from a Stoic

 

 

 

 

 

Dead Souls: A Novel

 

 

 

 

 

  American Rust: A Novel

 

 

 

     Facing East from Indian Country: A   Native History of Early America

 

 

 

 

The Point of Pittsburgh: Production and Struggle at the Forks of the Ohio

Keeping up, getting ahead . . .

 

 

 

 

Check out the Oil Region Indie Fest on Facebook or MySpace.  See you next year.

The kid and I had been searching for a good father/daughter project.  After a week of family ER and multiple hospital visits for a variety of reasons and after teaching online for four hours Sunday morning, we were ready to get our hands dirty.

Originally, I had wanted to figure out a way to put together a photobooth for her upcoming graduation party - but price wise it was prohibitive. So when found this project, a trompe l’oeil wall photobackground, we knew it was a place to start.

But I felt that, for our purposes, their design could be improved - using plywood and 2X3s seemed overkill for our faux wall. We went with 1X3X8 furring strips and 1/2 inch foamboard. We also added legs and feet to the design and drilled them out to all staking because the original looked a little tippy.  We ended up cutting their price in half - around $40 for us, all told - and spent about 8 hours making it. The results:

You can see the basic framework above - the furring strips were fantastically crooked, but it didn't matter because they were going to be hidden.

Below you can see the 1/2 inch holes we drilled out to stake them in the rental place’s yard for the party: Foam screwed on with drywall screws with a little gorilla glue added to frame for security:

We added a skim of drywall mud to make the wall look more “wall”-y once the paint was applied:

Like, I’m assuming, everyone else in the world, we had odd half used gallons of paint from various projects that we put to use here.  We ended up with a two tone and a scrap piece of molding used a chair rail. 

We found the frame at Ollie’s for $15 with a hideous painting of a cappuccino and a leopard skin matt that we knocked out.   The frame itself was plastic and very lightweight, so we used gorilla glue and only two screws, on the vertical ends to attach it.

   

The final project, ready for the party: