View allAll Photos Tagged Midsummer
Lana Smith, Katia Stotsky==
Midsummer Party 2013==
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY==
July 13, 2013==
©Patrick McMullan==
Photo - Owen Hoffmann/ PatrickMcMullan.com==
==
Midsummer arrives almost as suddenly as frost. One week it's lush and green, and the next week everything's golden.
I took this shot late on a hot afternoon as a storm was brewing, pretty much the usual weather this year. A tiny rainbow tried to get off the ground but got stuck just a few degrees above the trees. Nothing seems to get much altitude this time of year.
It has been hot in the Mid-Atlantic states, record highs being topped every day, it seems. Thirteen people have died and two million are without electrical power following a 700-mile-long storm front that passed through the region. It's hotter still in the South and Midwest.
We didn't lose our power, and our hilltop is six to eight degrees cooler than valley towns just a few miles away. There's much for which to be grateful.
Before I went to celebrate Swedish Midsummer yesterday, I took a walk to hunt for insects with my IR camera armed with the macro lens. Didn't get many keepers, but I liked this one.
JUN-21 @ 18:06 UT (GMT)
Litha also known as the Summer Solstice or Midsummer is the longest day of the year, it is the festival of the Suns rebirth and a time to honour the god where he is at his strongest, highest and brightest It is a time of celebrating the fertility of the land and the abundance of the earth.
The Goddess during this time is full and pregnant an they say it is a good time for any women wanting to conceive to walk bare foot or sky clad through there own vegetable/herb garden at night and pluck some St Johns wort.
"Solstice" is derived from two Latin words: "sol" meaning sun, and "sistere," to cause to stand still. This is because, as the summer solstice approaches, the noonday sun rises higher and higher in the sky on each successive day. On the day of the solstice, it rises an imperceptible amount, compared to the day before. In this sense, it "stands still."
(In the southern hemisphere, the summer solstice is celebrated in December, also when the night time is at a minimum and the daytime is at a maximum.
Happy Midsummer 2 All!
.
Yesterday night, just 2 days after midsummer, was so-called supermoon – and here in Helsinki it was accompanied by this crazy beautiful fog rising from the sea, making everything look magical.
Midsummer's eve, 2024.
37th roll of film
Kodak Pro image 100
Olympus OM-2n
Zuiko Auto-s 50mm f/1.8
Scanned with Plustek Opticfilm 8200i
This is the last of this series. 32nd Midsummer fest, Sweden hills, Tobetsu, Hokkaido on July the 21th 2015.
Canon T90, Tamron 28-80mm F3.5-4.2,negative for cinema (F64D) developing time 6 minutes at 37 Deg.C.
33rd Midsummer fest, Sweden hills, Tobetsu, Hokkaido. Last of this series.
Canon AV-1, FD 135mm F2.5, F 3.5-4.5, negative for cinema ( F64D ), exposed as ISO 40, developed as below. Scanned with Epson V700 with Epson software at 3200 DPI, edited with GIMP.
1. Rem jet removal : Soaking and shaking in diluted NaOH.
2. Washing.
3. Development with P1 + P1R ( paper developer ) for 5 minutes at 30 Deg. C.
4. Rinse.
5. Bleach just like C41.
6. Rinse.
7. Fixation just like C41.
8. Rinse.
Step 1 is easier for Fuji film. For Kodak manual removal would be needed.
Step 2 is the substitute for ECN-2, whic is based on C3, while C41 for normal negative film is based on C4.
Scanning needs to check the option "compensate color saturation as depleted film".
Only a few days left to enjoy the offerings @ Midsummer Enchantment. Don't miss it! Info & links on my Dark Blog ~ aznanasaccouterments.blogspot.com/2019/06/me-19-1.html
Alan Macdonald, Hilary Geary Ross, Wilbur Ross, Christina Macdonald==
Midsummer Party 2014==
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY==
July 12, 2014==
©Patrick McMullan==
Photo - Owen Hoffmann/PatrickMcMullan.com==
==
the evenings have been chilly (where is summer?) so this is my second pair of mittens this month. Details are here: www.ravelry.com/projects/bunnyknitter/welted-fingerless-g...
(FRIENDS - I did my best not to go overboard, but let's all agree to assume that most of these links are at least *technically* NSFW, ok?)
*******
"Hi, um, is this where I get the tickets for the Masquerade?"
The girl across the counter gave me a bored look, raising her eyebrows as she approached. "You mean for the Midsummer Night's Dream," she said by way of correction. "Yep."
For some reason or another, the only place I could purchase tickets for this event was at a sex shop, which made things awkward. It's not like I was in any way a novice at being in porn shops -- and this happened to be an exceptionally upscale sex shop at that. But I wasn't in the custom of making conversation with the people who worked in them, much less asking for their assistance of any kind.
However, she was far less uncomfortable with the situation than I was, in her cat's eye glasses, retro sailor tats and ill-fitting pistachio-green tee-shirt, all of which screamed, "too cool for you scenester".
"One?" she assumed.
"Yup," I said, feeling smaller by the second.
The printer spat the tickets out, I handed over my $35 (!!!!!), and out the door I went, not even bothering to check out any other merchandise in the store.
(Within maybe 5 minutes, I felt the need to correct this, so I pulled the rental car up to one of Atlanta's never-ending choices of low-brow adult boutiques to check things out. Immediately, some little old creep approached me, and apropos to nothing at all, blurts out, "Fuckin' women. Ole O.J. had the right idea all along."
I turned slightly, looked over him for a split second, and forced an empathetic smirk that made me feel a little queasy. Taking this as an invitation to converse more freely, this little weirdo asks me if I'd ever been to the lingerie shop next door. "They won't let ya touch em, but they sure will get close to ya."
No matter how curious this statement was -- and it's a doozy, for sure -- I declined to inquire. I instead put down whatever it was I'd been considering buying and got the hell out of the store, wondering the entire time exactly WHAT IS IT with this weird town.)
****
The hours passed and I'm sure I wasted each of them in anticipation of my porno star party that night. Eventually, I trucked on down to the neighborhood where the club was at, maybe see if I could find the Varsity for a quick bite, then try and be there when the doors opened. (Such a rookie move).
But when I hit the neighborhood, I freaked. There was a line of maybe 50 men already formed, and the place wasn't scheduled to open for another half hour. This was crazy! In desperate fear of missing something, I threw all common sense to the wind, parked the car in the first paid lot I could find and rushed on over to the gate so I could stand in line in the Atlanta summer heat with a whole bunch of other dudes.
This was utterly nonsensical.
Mind you, this was a few years before the wide availability of Internet porn...a time when the concept of porn was slightly more stigmatizing and sleazier, and when the porn-consuming community truly was a cult collection of misfits, freaks and losers. And here I was, sweating my butt cheeks together with them all.
The absurdity of it all became even more clear when one of the starlets scheduled to appear that evening came out of the club briefly to deliver a few pitchers of water to the crowd control employees. A cheer of hoots and whistles rose up, immediately followed by the chant of "Ron! Ron! Ron!" - an ultimately futile evocation of the nights emcee, Mr. Ron Jeremy.
(I overheard one particularly self-aware enthusiast asking his friends, "Y'all think its weird that we're 20 feet from Coral Sands, but the only person we're excited about is Ron Jeremy?").
Impressively enough, the doors opened shortly thereafter, and the party got rolling on schedule.
First up on the agenda was a band unfortunately slated to warm the crowd up, then to play in between "sets" of Mr. Jeremy's emcee/comedy duties, and the obligatory parading of porn stars onto the stage to tease the crowd of sweaty dudes.
They were talented for sure, but they played a long-winded set of mathy, vaguely Rush-style rock which only made the crowd surly and impatient. Before their last song of the first set, a young, muscular African American man behind me bellowed out "GET THE FUCK OFF THE STAGE!" He and the people around him grinned mischievously, but they clearly spoke for the crowd, which was growing more hostile by the moment.
Finally, the Hedgehog took the stage to a wild, cheering ovation. I can't remember much of his material, but I do recall being impressed with his jokes, his improv, and his timing. What can you say....the guy's a legend.
He did four or five minutes of material, then brought out a few starlets at a time to get the crowd rowdy. After another five or ten minutes of teasing the boys with half-hearted boob flashes, Jeremy would come back and introduce the band again. After another twenty excruciating minutes of music (for the crowd as well as the performers, I surmise), Ron Jeremy would waddle back on stage and repeat the process.
I'm not saying that it wasn't fun or exciting, because it was. But the evening was also a shit show of the highest degree.
Sure I got to see Shane's precious butt crack when she crouched down while dancing on stage. From the back of the club I thought I saw the diminutive Rebecca Lord pull up her skirt for the masses. Later, a bloated and rather unattractive Kaitlyn Ashley stumbled onto the stage and made a whole lot of gestures to the crowd that were, frankly, kind of gross (only men in KISS are supposed to have tongues that freakishly long).
Then, some African American girl with extreme breast implants attempted to perform her soon-to-be-released "hit single" only to have to restart twice when her dance routine fervor forced her to miss her cue. Next, a lanky Christi Lake took the stage to solicit applications for new talent for her upcoming ami-pro video concept.
Maybe an hour into the show the cops showed up and issued a warning about the nudity (of which there really wasn't much, but the rules are the rules, I guess).
Things were tamer for much of the rest of the night, and the crowd thinned just slightly. In fact, at some point during one of Ron Jeremy's sets, I'd found enough room to get myself up near the front of the stage. Surveying the crowd around me, I noticed that I somehow was standing directly next to 1980's legend P.J. Sparxx...whom I'd been told by no less of an authority than PornMaster-T, had "the greatest ass in the entire adult entertainment industry."
This was an odd twist, as the vast majority pf the performers this evening were not really socializing with the crowd. But there she was next to me. She might have smelled like a mixture of perfume and cigarettes, and she might have been sporting a brand new set of fake breasts, and she might have been shorter and more broad-shouldered than I'd expect her to be, but in her conservative green sweater-shirt and floor-length black skirt the women was something of a vision. I believe that she was probably the only woman all night who I would call beautiful.
I smiled to her. To my surprise, she smiled back at me. What was happening? Was I connecting with a porn star? Where could this go? Was the impossible about to happen? Would we talk? Would I go home with her? And had I just found the crucial professional connection who could help get me out of the Yellow Pages business and into a career field more suited to what I considered to be my natural talents and God-given gifts?
These thoughts had little time to materialize, as she looked directly past me and flashed a huge Cheshire cat smile. Still grinning, I turned around to follow her gaze, only to notice a split second later that she was posing for a professional photographer who had been covering the event.
There I was, standing close enough to a porn star that I could feel her breath on my shoulder (...ew), grinning like an idiot, and getting my picture taken by "industry media". No doubt, the editors at AVN News couldn't be bothered to crop out my goofy-ass mug, and somewhere in a back issue from 1997 there's a picture of P.J. with my dumb scarecrow face looming above her.
I prefer not to give this much thought.
It really didn't take long for the party to wrap up. Ron Jeremy said good night, the stars waved good night, and the band declined to play a final set. The place was emptying out, and most everyone had lost interest in the novelty of the evening some time ago. Like the rest of the trip, this evening had been a great disappointment.
I spotted the skinny, bespectacled guitar player of the band dragging his amp off the stage and I moved forward to offer a word of encouragement, from one musician to another. I was in a mathy-rock band of my own, called the Queegs, and I thought that perhaps if he ever toured the D.C. area we could work together for a gig.
"Hey man, you sounded good tonight."
"Thanks," he said smiling in a kind of shell shocked way.
"Listen, do you think you'll ever play D.C.? Cuz I'm actually in this band, and...."
"Or L.A.??? Are you gonna play L.A.? You guys need to play L.A.!!!"
I had been interrupted by one of the performers from that evening, an attractive, petite blond who had exposed her bolt-on breasts earlier in the evening (Despite my troubling, nearly encyclopedic knowledge of 90's porn, I have no idea who this young woman was).
"Actually, we are playing L.A. in October," the guitar player said, brightening up but still dazed and confused by the circumstances of the evening.
"Can I help you with your stuff?" she asked him, gesturing to the mountain of equipment that his band was loading out.
"Sure," he said, shrugging at me in a way that dictated that our conversation would have to end now. It seemed like a fitting end to the night, and to the trip.
Defeatedly trudging back to the bar, I settled my tab and headed to the doors.
And that is exactly when I ran into Ron Jeremy, who was headed TO the bar.
I didn't want the night to be a total bust. I wanted to have a story - any story - about something awesome that had happened in Atlanta. And so I approached him and said the very first thing that popped into my head.
Extending my hand, I smiled and announced, "Sir, I just wanted to say that I love your work."
He stared at me for a very long time, saying nothing. It gave me a chance to really look the guy over. He was impossibly short and overweight. He was unshaven, and his porn-stache needed a trim, as did his hair. He was dressed in brown corduroy pants and a Hawaiian shirt, and he was carrying....of all things....a crocheted hand bag.
He was a legend of adult film, and he looked like nothing quite so much as a wino.
We held our stare for another second and he smiled slightly as he shook my hand. (He has very soft hands.....).
He said nothing, but his weary smile told the story of a tired man who would thank me if he could. But he would prefer if I would get out of his way.
Defeated once more, I found my rental car and headed back to my hotel room, disgusted with how I'd spent my vacation, and wondering if a stop at the Tattle-Tail would make things better, or make them worse.
The answer, if you're curious, is not "better."
ahistoryofbadtaste.blogspot.com/2009/01/masquerade-previe...
ahistoryofbadtaste.blogspot.com/2009/01/masquerade-part-i...
ahistoryofbadtaste.blogspot.com/2009/01/masquerade-part-i...
Happy Midsummer's Eve!
I took this late last night. As I was standing in the field with my boyfriend, a deer came out from the forest, he/she was calling for something, either from the chock of seeing two humans standing there or perhaps calling to its fawn? I wished I had a tele lens because it was standing still for quite some time amongst the buttercups before it skipped away back into the trees.
2 image stitch
Canon 5D, 17-40f/4L, CPL
The ceremony is introduced from Sweden. The houses in this town are all imported from Sweden.
31st Midsummer fest, Sweden hills, Tobetsu, Hokkaido on July the 22th 2014.
Pentax MZ-7, Pentax FA 100-300mm, negative ISO 400 expired.
Bigger sizes: www.flickr.com/photos/threepinner/14513099383/sizes/l
Exhibited at the National Museum of Scotland.
This is a clock designed by the inventor Dr John C Taylor - the man who invented the switch that turns off kettles when they are boiling.
It features a mythical creature which eats time (the Chronophage). There are several versions of this clock, each one having a different creature.
The large, toothed wheel is a giant example of a "grasshopper escapement", usually out of sight within the clock. It was invented by John Harrison, the man who in the 18th Century, invented the marine chronometer which allowed ships to calculate their longitude.
The clock displays a light show every minute, and shows the time on digital displays every five minutes. The creature opens its mouth over the course of 59 seconds and bites down on the sixtieth, (so "eating" time) and the disc advances by one notch.