Homestead

[Ken Bennett]

The buildings are what make me think it's slightly tilted. If I open the image in Lightroom and tilt it left about 1.5 degrees, all the vertical walls are more plumb. But it could be all the coffee I've been drinking....

Edit, now that I look again, and blow it up to 200% in LR, maybe half a degree.

Not sure about the D800, but the level built into my Fujis has quite a bit of slop built-in. Kind of annoying, actually.

[RSL]

Hi, K, Depends on which vertical you choose as your reference. I've pulled the 7360 x 4912 pixel raw into Photoshop, expanded it to 100%, and checked several verticals. The left corner of the house tells me the picture is slanted a bit, but other verticals give me different answers. The fact is that a log cabin like this one is unlikely to be exactly plumb, especially after more than 130 years. Also, not only is the whole countryside slanting down to the right, but there's a depression behind the house that amplifies the feeling that things aren't level. I'm almost tempted to do an arbitrary "straightening" since I get the same feeling you do.

The D800 has some slop too and shows some fairly coarse blips when you're out of level, but when you hit exact level a little arrow pops up. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to keep that arrow showing while you shoot. I'm trying to think back to whether or not I double-checked before I raised the mirror and popped the shutter. Don't remember.

Here are a couple more shots from the same place. The B&W is a root cellar just out of the original picture to the right. The color shot is the inside of the house. I was lucky enough to drive by one Sunday when the park service was having an open house.

[Ken Bennett]

Yeah, I was wondering about the plumb on the various walls of those old buildings, too. Blowing it way up in Lightroom doesn't help, as some things look straight and others don't, even at the lower res. I guess it was more of a gut feeling.

As an aside, I'm one of those people for whom a crooked picture frame on the wall is painful. I lived in an 1880s frame house for awhile, in which there was not a single plumb or level surface -- really drove me crazy.

[RSL]

I have the same problem. Another problem I have is that if I'm in a room with a "grandfather" pendulum clock and if the clock's not level, the irregular beat drives me nuts until I can get out of the room.

[seamus finn]

Russ,

Big, overwhelming skies are common in good weather here in the the West of Ireland. On the right morning or evening, the light can be extraordinary.  I get what you're doing in the mountains, I appreciate the technical difficulties, I understand the vision, but if it was me, I'd be getting nearer to the buildings, their texture, their feel, and maybe what's inside them. But then, I suspect, you've done that too. Despite your oft-repeated preference for street, I think that within your old soul (if you'll pardon that rude expression), a landscape photographer secretly lurks.

[RSL]

I don't think I've ever been terribly interested in proper landscape, Seamus, but what you're describing is more like what I call "wabi sabi," a Japanese expression that more or less describes something made imperfect and beautiful by time and use. And I've always been fascinated by things that encompass wabi sabi., maybe even more than I've been fascinated by street.

When I got back from Vietnam in 1965 and was stationed in Colorado I began cruising the prairies east of here, photographing vanishing farmhouses and dying towns. To some extent I did the same thing in the mountains. I have a fair accumulation of pictures of artifacts from that period that reflect wabi sabi and that since have vanished from the face of the earth. You can see some of the collection from the sixties at http://www.russ-lewis.com/photo_gallery/Ruins/index.html. I put some of these pictures together in a little book whose online incarnation is at http://www.russ-lewis.com/Voices/intro.html. But I've continued to do that kind of thing, and since I moved my studio out of Colorado Springs I've really done more of it than I've done street.

My "old soul" is in these pictures. I've been around long enough that I can visualize the people who inhabited these places. I can visualize the people who worked the goldmines too. When my old soul was a young soul it was around a lot of people just like those people and those people inhabited a similar milieu.

[seamus finn]

Russ,

'Voices on the Prairie' is a beautiful piece of work - verbally and visually. It's not the first time you've resurrected great stuff like that here. I remember one time you did the same thing with military faces from your time in the Service. 

[RSL]

Thanks, Seamus. I lived through the period I discussed in the introduction to Voices on the Prairie, beginning about 1937, traveling as a seven-year-old with my younger brother in the back of the family car as my parents made vacation trips from Michigan to Arizona and back, through the construction of the freeways in the sixties and seventies, and through the gradual disappearance of most of the remnants of old Route 66 off to the side of the new freeway. I watched the prairies' transition from subsistence farming and ranching to corporate farming. I watched small towns shrink and die and deserted ranch houses sink gradually into the earth. So the whole thing is very personal. My "old soul" is accompanied by an old head that remembers those things, and that probably accounts for my interest in the ruins from those years. I'm glad I was able to photograph it before it all disappeared.

[seamus finn]

A noble enterprise. I'm trying to do the same thing here in Europe with the recession - struggling to depict businesses going down and so on,and making some kind of meaningful observation, but they don't have the same drama and abandonment of your subjects. It's very difficult to portray the decline of a shopping mall against the grandeur of the Old West!

[RSL]

It sounds like a tough nut to crack, Seamus. I was lucky. When I was ready to shoot, the subjects were already there with their drama.

I went out on the prairies again twice in 2006 for several-day trips by myself, hoping to find more grist for the mill. I was hoping to do a book that I tentatively titled: "For the Wind Passeth Over It." I shot a lot of pictures, but in the end I wasn't satisfied enough with the shoot to go further. You can see some of the stuff from those trips in "Ghosts" at www.FineArtSnaps.com. I don't think they measure up to the earlier work.

I hope you can find a way to make your project more successful than my last one was. Good luck.

[Tonysx]

Even though the camera is level, the landscape -- unfortunately -- may not be.

Huh?  Have you never seen a slope.  The treeline being level has little to do with it unless the landscape is completely flat and the trees all exactly the same height.  However if Russ says it's level then I accept that.
Ps - Russ, I've just looked again - It's not level - take it from me your spirit level is wrong.  You should try a Canon one....

So, please explain what is "LEVEL"? The tree line is as level as you will ever get. The side of the main edifice is within 1/2° of vertical. So are you concerned that the landscape appears to slope? Please explain, I'm only a beginner here.

[RSL]

I finally made an 11 x 14 print. Even though I know the camera was level -- at least pretty level -- I couldn't stand the fact that it just didn't look level, so I made an arbitrary adjustment.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

That certainly passes my "plausibility" test.