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Friday Slide Show: Diamond Heights
3 March 2017
Today's presentation is more of an exercise than an exhibit. A mental exercise. Yoga for the brain. Pilates for the mind. An ordeal, in short.
We took a walk last weekend up Portola to Diamond Heights. We had the Nikon D200 with the 35mm f2.8 Nikkor on it but we left it in the holster, making a mental note about just what we thought would make a nice picture.
The plan was to see if the mental note survived the walk back. If it did, we'd take the shot. Except, you know, you're looking at things quite differently (back to front) on the way back. So nothing quite looks the same. And you can miss the scenes you made a mental note about.
We did pretty well. But that wasn't the mental exercise we're talking about.
We didn't have a theme as we snapped a few images and putting them into a slide show doesn't pull them together either. While we liked them individually, we were also a bit disappointed.
That disappointment came from the restriction of using a prime lens. This prime faithfully showed in the viewfinder what we'd seen on the street with the equivalent of a normal viewing angle on our subframe sensor. Which is to say 35mm on the D200 looks like a 50mm on a 35mm camera.
While we liked them individually, we were also a bit disappointed.
But what had attracted us to the image in the first place was not everything we had seen from that viewing angle. And yet we couldn't get the 35mm close enough to dispense with the extraneous.
This didn't occur to us until after we'd processed the images. But the solution was simple. Crop them.
So we did. Most of them, anyway. There were a few that stood on their own.
But the intriguing thing to us was just how different the crops were from the captures. Most of them are not just tidied up but dramatically different.
We thought of presenting them in two slide shows but that seemed to make it less likely you'd be able to see the difference. In a single show you can use the N or P keys to flip back and forth between the Next and Previous image to see which you prefer in any pair.
That's the mental exercise.
But don't strain yourself. Take it slow and remember it's OK to like all of them. Or none of them.
The trick is to be able to make the leap from one to the other.
