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This is another iPhone photo taken during my spontaneous 60-mile, shoulder-trashing bike ride last Monday. The "developed" image shown here is actually somewhat more ambitious than it may look.
First, the sun blinded me when it peeked through the gaps between as each coupling passed, immediately alternating with deep shadow during the late afternoon. The finder was barely any help in framing. For that reason, shutter release timing was complete guesswork.
Second, the iPhone's digital shutter is pretty unresponsive compared with any mechanical shutter, and changes in the available light may slow it down in unpredictable ways. This "dynamism" further challenges the photographer trying to guess when to release the shutter.
Third, the scene was a worst-case example of extreme backlighting, which makes it very difficult for the low-end camera sensor to expose either the background or the foreground correctly.
I think the result is interesting. Making only two exposures, I lucked out and framed the train just as I'd hoped to. The classically bad lighting was treatable in Adobe Bridge, and it even gave me a bit of aesthetic lens flare radiating from upper left. The exposure and color adjustment tools in Bridge are very good for bossing pixels around; don't know why they don't use the same interface in Photoshop, but there's probably a reasonable explanation. Anyway, the exposure tools let the user get very selective about scene exposure, information recovery from blown-out highlights, and finding detail in deep shadows, even with an underwhelming cell phone camera. The Bridge detail tool helped a lot to define edges in the deep shadows. And the interface for the color adjustment tools made it possible to goose up color that was almost invisible in the raw exposure, in this case the greens and golds in the field beyond the carriage coupling and even some blue, reflected from the sky, in the rail heads.
The other interesting aspect, which was none of my doing, is the significant skewing of the railroad cars in the opposite direction of their movement. It's almost an animation-type motion-exaggeration effect like you might see in a cartoon. This effect is accounted for by digital shutter technology, which scans what the lens sees similar to how a photocopier captures the image of whatever is laying on the platen. A digital shutter can create other random interesting effects, too: if you snap someone who blinks shortly after the shutter is activated, for example, the result can be a portrait in which the subject has one eye opened and the other closed.
RC- Fun reads catching up on your posts. I'm really enjoying the photography. Gives me a chance to see a part of the USA I have not seen since my days in Elk Grove Village.
ReplyDeleteI'm not big on political commentary, but under the current conditions with which we find ourselves and it being so close to Halloween, perhaps some YouTube "Fire" by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown would be in order for a future "Prayer Meeting - Fish Fry - After Hours" kind of thing. Take the edge off of things. Alice Cooper has nothing on this guy.
Peace!
59er
59er: Fanx, Sam! At the risk of trying and failing to read your mind correctly, I want to offer a caveat about the political side of this blog.
ReplyDeleteI should try better to communicate in that my commentary on what passes today for conservatism is most definitely not intended to tar the opinions and beliefs of people who hold truly conservative opinions in good faith. What I mean by that is over the past 40 years or so---longer if you go all the way back to the origins of Nixon and Joe McCarthy in the late 1940s---true, traditional conservatism has been continuously hollowed out and injected with the mutant fetuses of terror (of Commies and their psychological surrogates) and middle-class resentment of the poor, and the transformitive Final Solution of laissez-faire capitalism to every problem troubling our country. Most of us didn't notice this happening, and many of those who did were ineffective at describing the real issues, framing them instead as minority identify politics. We've all been sold a sinister bill of goods, in my opinion---especially good-faith conservatives.
And that's why one reason this blog is called Fifty50: there are things I feel compelled to say because of my dedication to what I consider the ultra-conservative and fundamentalist view that the U.S. Constitution, and all legal creatures thereof, embody the pent-up political genius of Western Civilization and are therefore worthy of protection against all enemies foreign and domestic. And then, I feel equally compelled to share some outstanding Lummox Rock with everyone or just say shit-cock-balls whenever I please.
I hope this makes some sense to you and my friends, most of whom in this town are reality-biased conservatives.
And, yes, Halloween is coming...!