At 01:28 AM 8/3/03, you wrote:
Adams Mill Bridge shot w/the 18mm f/3.5 Zuiko MC is very proposal for
such a wide lens, great job.
What care did you have to do to achieve it if any?
Daniel
This will seem glib, but had to climb down a steep embankment *very*
carefully. There was a lot of loose gravel and I kept slipping on it in
spite of cleated boots. I was worried some about falling with not only an
OM-4 in my hands, but an even more expensive lens on the front of it too .
. . and if I slide down entirely I'd end up in the water next to the abutment.
From a more technical aspect, I was faced with too much visual clutter too
close to the front of the bridge, including a massive power pole supporting
an incredibly large and ugly street/security light, a prominent power drop
line to the pole, and several of the required bright yellow load limit
signs. Tried first to shoot it with the 24mm and couldn't compose the
entire bridge without getting into the visual clutter. Even with the 18mm
I wish I could have gotten just a little farther to the right to reduce the
convergence of the horizontal lines of the bridge front. As usual, whoever
put up the pole and signs had no concept about how to do it to keep an
historical landmark reasonably photogenic. It was one of those occasions I
was wishing for my chain saw to remove them, but was lucky it wasn't in the
car or I'd have been residing in the gray-bar hotel for a while.
The hardest part was trying to hold a proper perspective of the bridge
without a tripod (had it with me, but slope too steep to use it). Took
several shots realizing the risks; this one worked OK. The 18mm works best
with a tripod that has leveling bubbles. Even with leveling bubbles,
architectural objects are not always true vertical and/or
horizontal. Alignment with viewfinder frame edges should be checked and
tripod head adjusted if necessary. I do this by leveling the head first,
then alternately rotating the camera right/left and up/down to check frame
edges with subject lines, and adjust things if needed. Same thing can be
done by hand, but with much greater difficulty holding it true. It's very
easy to end up with slightly off-kilter lines that a viewer of the
photograph later would expect to be vertical or horizontal, and with a lens
that wide it's very easy to end up with them off-kilter slightly.
Thanks,
-- John
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