Fake, Fake, Fake

I wanted to quickly document the state of this year's dogwoods in early bloom, and was out and about with the teenaged Canon 5D. The sound of the mechanical shutter is somehow quite satisfying, and loud. The marvelous 135 mm f/2 L lens was attached. I was able to get a nice group of images. While processing them later, I decided to combine two into a single 'panorama', which these days only requires a click of a mouse or trackpad. Voila, a nice square image! I was actually pretty impressed with how well the Adobe software lined up the complex network of branches, and it was only the next day that I noticed the problem with the out of focus electrical cable passing through the upper half of the image. Oops, that's a bit of a tell. Still, and all, the snapshot meets my needs.

Tasting notes: Canon 5D, 135 mm f/2 L lens.

Welcome to the Funhouse

I love me a good greenhouse. Always have. There used to be a nursery in our area where a photographically inclined person could wander around at length taking pictures with no hassles. The owner really didn't care as long as you bought a couple of plants before you drove off. Being married to a gardener, that was what the folks in suits would call a win-win. The old place is long gone and the new generation of nurseries are typically surrounded by chain link fences. While I generally make a conscious effort to line up my shots, in the heat of the moment, part of the fence can sometimes creep into the composition. Kind of like how your finger can wander into a cell phone shot, if ya dig. These days, it is pretty easy to photoshop those kinds of distractions out of the shot and end up with something useable in spite of your, er, sloppiness.

Tasting notes: Leica Q.

The importance of a little mystery

This is another image made in Bologna. Here, I responded to the mix of warm candle light and the cooler ambient lighting of the church, as well as the iconography, in particular, the contrast between the old and the new. The scene is somewhat mysterious, at least to me, which I like in a photograph. I sat on this photo for a long time because there was a distracting reflection of the candles in the glass that kind of ruined the impact of the image. Finally, I did the required work in Photoshop, as this really isn't intended to be a purely documentary photograph. I'm much happier with the result.

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.