Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Home is the nicest word there is. — Laura Ingalls Wilder
On today’s #WaybackWednbesday post and I’m veering away from the normal assortment of photography tips, tools and techniques on this blog to get a little personal…
Other than how to pronounce my name and where do I find my models, people sometimes ask, “where is Daisy Hill?” The community where I live is located about 30 miles south of Denver and according to the 2020 census has a population of 11,311 souls, that’s up from 10,517 in the 2010 census. My Daisy Hill is on a tiny, lightly wooded lot that’s located within that 10.4-square mile community, which includes Bingham Lake, where I often make photographs. Our home sits midway up the small hill that I named Daisy Hill as a homage to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm where Snoopy and his siblings lived before they were adopted by their new owners. The Daisy Hill reference first appeared in a Peanuts strip on May 4, 1965.
Eleven years ago today, Mary and I moved here from the semi-rural community where we lived that was located north of Denver, a distance of about 50 miles from Daisy Hill when traveling the E470 toll road. The above self portrait of us in our living room was made on this same date eleven years ago just after we got the keys to our new home. The three tone Mondrian-style paint scheme surrounding the fireplace behind us was one of the first things to go replaced with the softer tan color that covers the rest of the room.
One of the many things the new house offered me was a nicer but not necessarily larger home office with two glass-paned French doors. The room also has two large windows. There’s a glass-paned exterior door that opens onto a small covered porch that lets me see the outside world where I can catch a glimpse of the mountains in the distance along with the near tame mule deer that stroll by our home on their way to feasting on our grass, bushes and plants.
Instead of shooting in an unfinished basement next to the furnace and my model train layout as I did in my former house, I currently have a dedicated 11×15 studio space that’s located in a finished basement although if you’re a regular reader of the blog, you know its future is in doubt. Near the studio is a work room that was conceived to be an image, book and magazine archive as well as a place to make fine art prints. The large format printer I purchased ended up being more trouble than it was worth and I sold it after a few years. The room is slowly being repurposed to become more archive and film-related set up with a small light table as well as plans underway to add a film scanner to digitize some of my extensive library of film images. Stay tuned for updates on that progress. The nearly 40-year archive containing all of my published magazine articles has been recycled to make space for my collection of Lionel train catalogs, including one that was autographed by Neil Young, LEGO books, instructions and my LEGO Batmobile collection. I did however save the last print edition of Shutterbug magazine, which has one of my columns/features in it.
Since many people have written asking about my model train layout that was often featured in my reviews and articles in the former print edition of Shutterbug here’s an update: My previous layout measured 8 x16 feet and I was without any kind of layout in the new house until November 2016. Because of my newfound interest in LEGO, this new, smaller layout features both Lionel and LEGO trains. Shortly after setting it up, I shot a short video of the layout that you can see here on Vimeo. The layout has grown in size and has changed considerably since 2016 both in content and size and I promise to post an updated video real soon now.
If you think I’m happy living here on Daisy Hill that is an understatement, I am deliriously happy here. But Mary keeps talking about moving to warmer climes (It snowed here the day I wrote this and the temperature was 9 degree F and snow is forecast for today. This particular winter has been colder and snowier than normal, so ya never know…
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