A nice day, cool and sunny. The best sand came from outside the storm drain's dogleg. Rich was there, photographing, and said this was the first sculpture he'd seen where the arches were shaped to the sculpture instead of just being there for the sake of the hole.
We waited as the tide rose to see if we could get some nice photos of the sculpture surrounded by water. A passerby named Bob, from New York, stopped to chat and then asked if he could shoot a few photos with my camera. He was quite fascinated with the sculpture.
Four years later, I still like this sculpture. The comments above are what I recorded at the time.
This page came about because of fixing a problem with my scanning software. When it was working I ran some test scans, which led to looking at negatives, and in that process I found my color negs of this piece. Among them were many detail shots I didn't remember making and I thought "We have here the makings of a nice Web presentation." My current standard includes a page of detail images because these help give a better idea of what a sculpture looks like.
The scans didn't go well. Maybe I just didn't have patience for color balancing (you can see this in the details page), maybe the film wasn't exposed or developed well. I got frustrated, then remembered that in 1996 I was shooting Scala black-and-white slides.
Scala is hard to scan. It looks good when projected with a very bright light, but the scanner has a hard time with the dark areas, and the typical sand sculpture has many of those. I went ahead, doing the best I could but wasn't very happy.
Then I got an idea: scan the color negs in greyscale. This experiment worked pretty well; you can see the results on the image page where images 1, 5 and 6 are Scala (top left, bottom right two), and 2, 3, and 4 are the Royal Gold scanned as greyscale. The Scala versions of these had nearly impenetrable shadows.
The six full-length images are sized to the same scale, about 8 pixels per inch, I've used in the other catalog images. This sculpture, right in the middle of the Small Sculpture Revolution, was made with my "short form" and an extension. In August, based on my experience with this two-stage construction, I had a one-piece form made that was somewhat bigger. This sculpture required about 6 cubic feet of sand.
