84F-5

I was a commuter in 1984, driving two or three times each week to the beach for sculpture as I waited to see if the City would hire me. I didn't know what I was doing.

Build number:	84F-5 (lifetime start #7)
Date:	sometime in October, I think
Location:	Santa Monica beach, Tower 18
Start:	not recorded
Height:	3 feet (approximate)
Base:	2 feet by 2.5 feet, estimate
Photography:	half a roll of 5247 (Red Tag) w/Anne's Ricoh

All I cared about was making sculptures. I'd park the car, walk to the beach with my kit over my shoulder, make the sculpture and drive back to Anne's apartment. She pretty much made me take a camera. At first I used her Pentax Auto 110 because it was small. Then I got a little bit more interested and took her big camera, a Ricoh. Still, I didn't keep any records. This was a magical period. It's when I really learned the basics of sand sculpture, and I still use what I learned in the autumn of 1984. Technical Note: Kodak 5247 film is for movies. The studios sell the short reels to various repackers who put it into 35mm cassettes and sell it to folks who want both slides and prints. The problem is both look bad. The film is designed for specific processes and the shop I used didn't do it well; prints and slides both were strongly blue. I was able to correct this somewhat in the scans. I've never used this film again.

In the image above, note the depression around the sculpture. This resulted from old technology: scraping away the soft surface sand to get at the better packed damp sand underneath. After a few more sculptures I got tired of this and built a raised foundation for sculptures. This introduced new problems, but I solved those and continue to build raised bases so the sculpture isn't buried in its own lost sand.

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