Author: admin

John Woods, co-founder of the Ottowa Medieval Sword Guild, demonstrates the use of sword-and-buckler (“swashbuckling”).

An AEMMA student poses with a fencing weapon in front of our colorful backdrop.

Shots from the Academy of European Medieval Martial Arts’ display at the Royal Ontario Museum’s ‘Medieval Madness’ program for March break schoolchildren. Our booth put on displays of historical European fencing (after the 15th-century treatise of Fiori de Liberi) and allowed children to handle practive weapons and reproductions of arms and armor.

I am volunteering all week for the Royal Ontario Museum’s ‘Medieval Madness’ program for elementary students on March break, and do not have time to produce anything new, so I thought I would bring back one of my quirkier projects, from the Summer of 2003, designed to keep me from going mad while taking the intensive medieval Latin program at the Centre for Medieval Studies. I did a whole series of Squirrel Lords of the Sith, and even started on a theatrical poster, but, alas,duirrels are very uncooperative actors, and the project eventually petered out.

 

Inspired by David Hobby’s Strobist self-portrait, I decided to try a self-portrait lit from a flash bounced off a white card (read: a sheet of printer paper) on my laptop. I wanted it to be a scholarly portrait, so I found the right coat, put on a tie, waxed up my moustache, and ran back and forth while trying to look composed. It was less than an ideal way to take a self-portrait, and I am going to work out a better solution next time. I only had one flash available when I decided to do this, so I look forward to trying it again with a gridspot on the computer and a hair light to provide separation from the background.

As seen from a very cold, windy, ice-covered parking lot at the end of my street in Toronto. This composite represents full moon to total eclipse.

I am working on a somewhat more ambitious way of presenting the photos taken–if it works, I will publish it here.

Tradition has it that nine saints, missionaries from Syria, introduced Christianity to the then-Axumite kingdom in what is now Northern Ethiopia. This ceiling fresco depicts eight of them.

Aside from its location and access, the most impressive feature of Abune Yemata Guh is the well-preserved set of 15th-century frescoes that adorn all the interior walls. This one, on the ceiling, depicts nine of the apostles.

Abune Yemata Guh (the ‘t’ has a velar plosive quality that cannot be truly rendered in English) chuch is a monolithic (lit. ‘one rock’ — a church quarried from the living stone; in this case a cave-church) with stunning 15th century murals in fantastic condition, perhaps due to the somewhat difficult access (see earlier post). Due to the high contrast range, this picture is composited from 4 different photographs, to preserve detail fom the inside of the door to the well-lit outside.