A Couple Different Alleys
These photos make me wish for a tilt-shift. Of course with a Nikon Coolpix 5600, this is completely absurd. All the distortion tricks I know in Photoshop are annoying to work with: I used to know how to do all the ‘free transform’ options, but the last time I tried, I couldn’t get it right: I was going to take some up-pointing photos of gridded windows on a building and pull them back into plumb - but it wasn’t as easy as I remembered it. I might have to go back to the manual for this. And the pinch settings are very hit-or miss: I have to widen the canvas and move the image into place for the pinch to land in the right spot - but finding that place is a matter of trial and error. Maybe I’d be better off abandoning the wide setting on the zoom (if only I could have it start up in a medium zoom position).
These are my attempts to pinch filter and free transform the distorted original. As you can see, there are some tradeoffs. I was able to straighten the vertical lines at the cost of stretching the white car. I stopped because the laptop was getting sluggish from all the disk trashing.
It should go without saying that I liked the look of the back windows on this building. Too bad about the plywood patch, but this is exactly the kind of organic character that isn’t built into new buildings. The brick is probably original, while the big block of windows and door on the left is a later adaptation.
As I was gazing into the alley with my camera, some old woman waiting for a bus came over to look too. When she couldn’t see what she imagined I saw, she was distinctly puzzled. I didn’t exactly confront her, but we had a moment… She had some preconception about what would be worth taking photographs of, and I didn’t match it. I have a variety of sentimentality for the built environment that other people have for relatives or pets. That’s just the way it is.
Posted by Evan Bittner Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:10:00 GMT
