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Friday Slide Show: An Exercise in Composition Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

10 March 2023

There isn't always a Tomorrow, Scarlet, and Never Again comes before we're ready for it, so we walked the camera one morning well before our usual hour, marveling at familiar sights in a new light.

That's all it took to interest us. A different hour of the day. An earlier hour. With the light coming from a different direction.

We enjoyed composing these images but there were two compositions per image.

The first was in the camera, which was just pure bliss. But our camera work tends to suffer from an impatience learned from photojournalism and street photography.

Our horizon is never level and our parallels converge.

So the second is on the computer, which is a fun challenge. We know how to level a horizon and how get vertical lines parallel. Then a little crop tidies the table.

There was, however, one thing we couldn't fix.

But there was a little bit more to both situations.

On the camera side, you can't play this game without a zoom. Sure, you can zoom with your feet, as the saying goes, but no, you really need a zoom lens.

But the 43-86mm Nikkor we used wasn't quite enough on either end. We were fond of it years ago for covering events where it was wide enough to capture a small group of say four people without distorting anyone on the edge and yet get us a little closer to the action at the other end.

But on our D300, it was a 65-130mm equivalent that just didn't get us close enough for several of these.

On the editing side, we had a lot of optical distortion to correct. We were either pointing slightly down or slightly up, enough to get those verticals converging noticeably.

That's a simple fix these days but we also found we needed another simple fix. We had to crop most of these images to display what it was about the composition that attracted us in the first place.

Blame that on the 86mm reach of our zoom.

We left the color alone, concentrating on the tonalities so there was some detail in both the highlights and the shadows. That was challenging with some of these high contrast images. But that's the fun of it too.

There was, however, one thing we couldn't fix.

The one heartbreaking thought that stuck with us as we lined up each of these shots was that one day we will never again be able to see these things we have for so long taken for granted.


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