Category Archives: Photographs

Greyhound Bus

Photographs

American history.

The rise and fall of The Greyhound Bus (can there ever have been a greater misnomer?) tells the story of America. At first offering cheap transportation to the poorest, it gradually fell into disfavor as affluence increased and with it car ownership. Now it’s probably the second worst way to travel, the first being on commercial air flights.

Greyhound Bus depot, Salinas, CA. G1, kit lens @ 18mm, f/8, 1/800, ISO 100.

This sad little scene in the center of California’s farm country, Salinas, typifies much of what Greyhound is about. The waiting yellow cab, the lonely passenger stumped for a fare and the tired depot, still proudly displaying the greyhound mascot, in the worst part of town.

The Oakland Bay Bridge – 2

Photographs

Another view.

This one was snapped from inside the shopping area in the Embarcadero.

G1, kit lens @14mm, f/3.5, 1/1000, ISO 160

I processed this in the Beta version of Lightroom 3, a free download at this time. While some of the enhanced processing controls are nice to have, Loupe previews are simply impossibly slow to render after sharpening or correction of lens aberrations, making the application unusable. Doubtless Adobe will fix this as the Beta release progresses.

Allard

Photographs

The best of both worlds.

Take a suspension proven in British trials racing and drop in a huge Cadillac V8 engine and you have something both nimble and fast. That was the post-war Allard J2, a detail of which appears here:

Allard J2. 5D, 100mm Macro, ring flash, f/9.5, ISO 250.

Those air intakes mean business and the car was successful on both sides of the Atlantic, the big American engine proving reliable and easy to work on.

I took five pictures on my Helicon Focus Rig, as I increasingly think of it, the camera perched on a monopod. The Rig comprises a Canon 5D, the 100mm Canon Macro and an aftermarket ring flash, with a QR base mounted on my indispensable Manfrotto monopod. The monopod is not there to stop the shakes but rather to keep the camera more or less in the same position between snaps as the lens focus setting (on manual focus) is gently varied to cover the depth of the subject. I round tripped the image through Photoshop CS2 to remove the reflection of the circular flash tube – I find the retouching tool in Photoshop far subtler than the one offered by Lightroom.

At these close distances the 100mm does not offer much depth of field! In the event, I ended up only using three of the images for stitching in Helicon Focus for an overall result that is breathtakingly detailed. Helicon Focus can make amends for small amounts of camera movement between snaps, and a monopod is a whole lot less trouble in a crowded paddock than a cumbersome tripod. Images like these make for lovely garage art for like-minded friends.

Here’s a detail section – and this is simply a screenshot from within Lightroom! The original, if my printer was large enough, would come in at 30″ x 45″:

Allard – detail

As you can imagine, the original print in large format does not lack in impact. Snapped on August 13, 2009 in the paddock at the Laguna Seca Historics near Monterey, CA. My ‘rolled up on a PVC pipe’ black velvet backdrop keeps things simple behind the subject.

Now do you see why I refer to the Canon 5D as my ‘medium format’ camera?

More on aspect ratios

Paintings

A fascinating subject.

Some three years ago I wrote a brief piece on Aspect Ratios after acquiring my Panasonic LX-1 which came with a widescreen 16:9 picture option.

While 30 years with film Leicas has me pretty much convinced that 3:2 is the best for me (and that’s what I use most often on both the LX-1 and the G1; the 5D is, of course, 3:2, take it or leave it) a recent email from a reader got me thinking about the subject again.

Peter writes:

A subject that has annoyed me forever is the disconnect between common print and frame sizes and the aspect ratio of the most broadly used cameras.

The most common size for enlargements and frames is still 8×10. What percentage of photographers do you think are still using 4×5? How obscure is 11×14?

The move from 5×3.5 to 4×6 took hold just as digital was coming in at 4×3. And why 4×3? Because cathode ray tubes for TV were that size and could be used for early computers. As a fan of 16:9, I pretty much have to crop anything that needs to be printed.

Peter, by the way, typically views his digital pictures on a large screen LCD TV which, of course, is 16:9, consonant with the widescreen format used by most moviemakers today.

Rather than dwell on photographs, I thought it might be fun to pull twelve favorite paintings from memory and take a look at their aspect ratios, so here they are, in no particular order. These have been in my mind’s eye for, what, 45 years (I am 58)? With the sole exceptions of the Raphael and Uccello, both of which are carefully posed, all the others share an almost photographic snapshot vision, never more so than in the two Degas examples. No surprise, really, as that’s the way I tend to see things. To keep matters simple, I show the aspect ratios in the order longest side: shortest side, regardless whether the format is portrait or landscape:

Botticelli – Portrait of a Young Man – 4:3

Degas – L’Absinthe – 4:3

Caravaggio – The Conversion of St. Paul – 4:3

Degas – Place de la Concorde – 3:2

Seurat – La Grande Jatte – 3:2

Manet – A Bar at the Folies-Bergere – 4:3

Ingres – Bather – 3:2

Monet – La Grenouillere – 4:3

Titian – Noli Me Tangere – 5:4

Uccello – The Battle of San Romano – 16:9

Raphael – The School of Athens – 3:2

Seurat – Baignade – Asnieres – 3:2

I learned some interesting things from this little exercise. 4:3 and 3:2 dominate in my choices. Had you asked me what ratio Noli Me Tangere or La Grenouillere or The Bather or Baignade were, for example, I would have sworn up and down that they are 16:9 or even longer! Turns out nothing could be further from the truth. And, indeed, when you look at vast canvases like Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (Louvre, National Gallery, Uffizi) their unusually broad aspect ratio for the times – 16:9 and the only ‘widescreen’ painting here – is an awful lot to take in.

So maybe 16:9 is really largely a modern development, one of the movie age, because classical art uses it rarely. I realize that a dozen selections hardly constitute ‘Classical Art’ but I doubt you will find too many widescreen paintings ….

Thanks for those thoughts, Peter.

And as I’m dying to answer the question “Which of the above would you like on your wall at home?” let me say there’s no contest. By a huge margin it’s that magnificent Botticelli work at the beginning of this piece, prosaic as its 4:3 format may be. It’s in London’s National Gallery and once you enter the large gallery in which this very small painting is exhibited you will understand why.

Paris Metro

Photographs

Les couleurs de France

Some like the BART, filthy and noisy. Others swear by the Underground, or at it when it is on strike. The perverse adulate the BMT and its cousins in New York, though not on steamy summer days when the air conditioning is out and you can’t see for the graffiti.

But any true underground train aficionado will tell you there is only one worth eulogizing and it is the Metro in Paris. Once you have seen the Louvre station you will understand.

Keeping it clean – the Paris Metro. M3. 35mm Summaron, Kodachrome 64.