Thanks everybody for the complements. When I went through the required
ritual of immediately ripping open the package and leafing through the
slides (held up to the ceiling light, of course) this one brought a gasp and
a "wow". In fact, the entire roll had serious wow factor. After 15 minutes
I realized I hadn't close the door.
When I wrote the post and originally put the image up, I thought it was the
35/shift as I was using it extensively at that site. But in looking at the
converging angles and the spread of the road, I realized that I had changed
over to the 24/2.8 for that shot and the next.
Checking my notes and remembering my shooting style, I can reconstruct what
was going through my mind when I shot the picture:
The horizon was perfectly flat and any tilting of the camera with any of the
wide-angles would subject this flatness to lens distortion. The only way to
keep the line straight is to center it perfectly in the viewfinder.
Secondly, I was very intrigued by the converging lines--even by the cloud
top-left-center. If I put the horizon in the bottom part of the viewfinder,
the converging lines lost their impact and the subject became the clouds.
If I raised the horizon, the clouds lose their impact AND there is a sense
of emotional depression as it is the angle of hanging your head downward.
Perfectly centering the extinction-point created an image of geometry. The
subject isn't the clouds, it isn't the fields, it isn't the road. It's all
about the sames. It's an abstract. As an abstract, it falls under a
different set of rules than what we normally apply to an image.
I did take other pictures with the horizon high and low and neither one made
me go "wow" like this one did. As previously noted, the colors and
contrasts are very close to what the original Velvia slide looks like. No
Photoshop (or PWP) magic here. The Nikon scans a little on the flat side,
so I did have to re-energize the shot in post a little, but only enough to
match the slide. However, the intense green in the field on the left was
slightly muted in the scan--which is very typical when scanning Velvia
whereas the greens will intensify when scanning Provia.
BTW, the OM-2S was set on auto-exposure with a +0.3 exposure compensation
and most likely the lens set at F11 for maximim DoF. Camera height was just
over 1m.
It's a little misleading in the picture, but this road was quite challenging
to drive and walk on. It had just rained very heavily and it was a slimy
mess. I was parked nose in on a field entrance and had to use 4WD to get
back out.
AG
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