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Friday Slide Show: A Menagerie
19 June 2020
A menagerie is what we politely call a strange or diverse collection, a future garage sale, evidence of an eclectic taste. To curate one, you really only need a 120mm lens to crop out the context.
After dinner the other night on what had been a hot day, the sun streamed in through the windows as if it was intent on sticking around a while. We grabbed our Olympus E-PL1 with a Lensbaby Tilt Transformer mounting a Lensbaby Twist 60 lens.
For a few minutes, we visited our menagerie, backing up to get the right composition, focusing manually, leaning in and out to confirm focus, firing away.
The colors were saturated at that hour but we wanted some way to bring the set together. And that meant black and white.
The colors were saturated at that hour but we wanted some way to bring the set together. And that meant black and white.
But we converted to monochrome only in post production, shooting Raw files in color. We may revisit a few of these in color.
In fact, going to monochrome meant eliminating a few that didn't convert well. Meaning the color was a large part of their identity. Without it, they confused.
It was fun to shoot because the long lens, a 120mm equivalent on the Micro Four Thirds camera, was the equivalent of rudely staring at these things.
And it was fun to edit because we were able to shift the luminance of key hues to bring some detail or other alive.
The first image looks back, through a mirror, or a watercolor of our house. That really sets the tone for the introspective set. It only looks out in the last image, where the teddy bear in our window to amuse children taking walks during the shelter-in-place order, is reflected in the window.
In between glass and metal and fabric entertain your eyes in various ways.
A hodge podge, a pile of junk, a menagerie.
