Rearranging Reality

 All of my Kodak Retinas have excellent lenses, but I've always felt the Xenon on my 1949 Retina II is the best of the bunch.  Support for that judgment was found on a roll of Kentmere 100 which I put through the camera about seven years ago.  The sharpness and tonalities from the pictures seemed near perfect to me.

When I put the pictures in a blog post, though, what really stood out was the fact that two adjacent pictures really seemed to want to be in the same frame together.  So, looking at them recently, I decided to stitch the two horizontal compositions together  into a single vertical one..

The white picket fence is in front of our house.  The upper section of the composition shows the railroad tracks about a mile to the east.  Both pictures looked pretty good to me, but I thought the combination added some interesting depth. 

Kodak Retina II -- Xenon f:2/50mm

Power To The People

Ghost of Christmas Past

Poinsettia - direct scan

I took a month-long break from blogging.  It always seem worthwhile to break from routine.  I didn't get around to doing any photography until just recently, but I did spend some time tidying up my web site and the blog.  The most noticeable difference is the addition of some links to galleries of my photography organized in some of the traditional categories including still life and portraits.  That was a useful exercise for me to help me look at what I have done well or poorly over the years.  I don't know if I'll ever get around to adding a gallery for landscapes; I don't have much of an eye for the broad view.  I also renewed my yearly resolution to be more deliberate and less opportunistic in my photography.  We'll see how that goes.

Fine Arts Library - UNM - Olympus XA

I spent $35 to get a guest borrower card from the UNM library a while ago, but just recently got around to making use of it.  The Fine Arts Library is located in the building that houses the architecture school, and it has a fantastic collection of photography books.  I checked out a couple on still life photography, and also got a book about the Upper Paleolithic origins of Western Art by the anthropologist, David Lewis-Williams.

I downloaded and installed the CS2 version of Photoshop yesterday after Adobe made the program freely available.  It isn't really much different from PS7 which I have used for years, but that program developed a problem with the browser display which I haven't been able to correct.  The CS2 installation files are kind of a mess.  It took me three tries and two Win XP system restores to get everything working properly.  However, the price is right.

So that's what I did on my vacation from blogging.  I'll get back on topic tomorrow.