17th Annual Palo Alto Weekly Photo Contest
Second Place, Views Beyond the Peninsula

"Jelene, Lithuanian Barmaid"
By Bill Blankenburg

About Bill Blankenburg

Click on photo for larger image.

Last fall Bill Blankenburg and his wife, Pat, took a riverboat cruise up the Danube from Bucharest. While half of his fellow passengers were felled by gastric turmoil, Blankenburg chatted up the crew, one of whom resembled women painted by Vermeer.

Later, in Vienna, Blankenburg compared his picture to Vermeer's "The Art of Painting" in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and concluded that Jelena looked less like a Vermeer maiden than a cheerful girl from Vilnius. Nothing wrong with that, either.

Blankenburg, 76, a retired college professor, is a previous Weekly Photo Contest winner. He took up photography in high school in South Dakota, using an Ansco Folding Buster Brown, which he still has. Unfortunately no one makes film for it any more, so now he uses several digital cameras and a Rolleiflex whose days are numbered.