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Friday Slide Show: Glass Pens Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

28 April 2023

We have horrible penmanship, which we assiduously developed over the years to mask our copyrighted thoughts. Even from ourselves, as it turns out.

It all began, though, in a grammar school classroom whose walls were bordered with instructions for drawing each letter using the Palmer Method. We felt rather strongly that there were more creative alternatives that should be entertained.

And indeed, no one reads letter by letter but by the shape of the word. As long as we mimicked the shape of a word, we would remain readable. We thought.

So here we are, an old man with terrible penmanship who uses his phone to peck out notes when necessary and signs contracts with an "X."

Except we have acquired, over those years of scribbling illegibly, three glass pens.

We have used them but they are devilishly difficult to work with. You dip them in a bottle of ink and write no more than half a page (and usually less) before you have to dip again.

They are remarkably easy to clean, though. Just rinse with (or dip in) water. So it's easy to change colors. Except we always write with them in Peacock Blue.

They are all handcrafted. But that's tricky too. You have to get the tip, which never wears out, just right so it holds a lot of ink but flows evenly. The capillary trick, you might call it.

There are three of them (which appear in this order in the slide show):

  • The Nail. This six-inch Abraxas glass pen of Swiss origin has a tubular body with an end cap that resembles the head of a nail. It's the only one with a colored tip.
  • The Dragonfly. This delicate 4.5-inch green pen resembles the body of a dragonfly.
  • The Oar. This Francesco Rubinato pen was made in Italy for Cavallini & Co. in San Francisco. The eight-inch pen is made of hand-blown Venetian glass and feels long enough to steer a gondola.

We've always wanted to photograph them. Because, well, they are easy to break. And we wanted to preserve them as images. And they're beautiful objects.

But they aren't photogenic. They are long and slim and disappear in the lens.

We thought of backlighting them to bring out their color but we weren't happy with the greenish cast of our light box. So we shot them in full sunlight but into the sun. Which gave us some interesting shadows.

We used a Lensbaby 10x macro converter on our Olympus 14-42mm II R kit lens and zoomed in close.

Then we worked on them in Lightroom, using Adobe's Vivid color profile to saturate them and adding a post-crop vignette (with a lot of cropping).

It was a challenging series but we enjoyed waging battle. And it gave us other ideas for shooting these objects, so we just may have to revisit this challenge.


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