Mix and match

When I was a teenager and first learning how to work in the darkroom, I remember someone showing me how to tilt the enlarging easel while making a print to take care of perspective issues such as the keystone effect. I also remember making a solarized print of my cat that kind of blew my mind when I saw the process in real time. Which reminds me, I really need to see if I can find that image. At any rate, these darkroom manipulations always amazed me, they seemed like a kind of alchemy.

Nevertheless, for some reason, I initially balked at working on my analog images using the computer, as if it were somehow important to maintain a 100% analog workflow. What was that all about? I'm happy to say I'm over it now.

Here is an image I held onto for quite a while because I was unhappy with some converging lines in the concrete as well as the over all crop of the frame. It was shot on a roll of ORWO film that expired in 1975. The image was taken on a hot August afternoon using the Rolleiflex SL66 and 80 mm lens. Now that I've made some digital adjustments to my analog image, I'm so much happier with the final result. That said, although I did crop, I maintained the original 1:1 aspect ratio. Baby steps.

Here is a panorama made by stitching two 35 mm frames together in Photoshop. The two images were shot using the Leica R6 and the 50 mm Summicron.  

So much easier than trying to accomplish the same thing in the darkroom. And so much less expensive than going out and buying a dedicated panoramic camera!