Thursday, March 26, 2015

On the Sidewalk

Naugatuck, Connecticut

No idea what's going on here with the rope. The white stuff on the sidewalk is salt or some sort of ice-melt. The handwritten yellow sign in the shop window says, "buy one get one free," which doesn't explain a thing. Maybe because it was so weird I shot ten frames of this over nearly a minute, which is unusual for me, but this first frame was the best.

2 comments:

lyle said...

is Naugatuck a sister city to Salem? I would guess it is an attempt to not have the thing blow over in the wind. On another note, I have been revisiting the work on the blog over the last couple of days, concentrating on just looking at the corners and edges. Studying how you fill the frame (very well I might add) and it is interesting to me that holding a piece of white paper over just a bit of an edge or over a corner, and the whole 'feel' for the image changes. I first became aware of this (and hence forgot, damn), when my ground glass broke. The camera originally came with the corners cut, the new glass was the full dimension. Damn I missed a lot!

Carl Weese said...

Lyle, somewhere in The Daybooks Edward Weston says something to effect that it's the edges that make the picture, and I expect that's one place where HC-B would agree with Weston. I think you could expand that to say that you start by looking at a subject, and that looking doesn't become a picture until you've set the edges.

In practice, setting the edges is almost all I use the viewfinder for—I always try to form the picture, choose the exact point of view, camera position, looking directly at the subject. Then use finder to focus and decide on exactly what I want at the edges. This is true with hand cameras or with a view camera. In the latter case focusing and framing may include various camera adjustments beyond simply pointing, but the process is the same. If I frame up a picture and decide I have to change position, it's a sure sign that I'm "not on," that day.