206 - 49 & 50



This is a streetcar on tram line 49 and I have shot it yesterday morning with my Nikon 50/1.8. So much for titles 🙂

I have not used this lens in quite a while and I am a little bit unhappy with this image. Not because of the lens, but because this is a snapshot. I took it while walking, without much consideration, and when I later found out that I like the composition, I saw with despair that I had shot at f1.8 into the blinding sunlight. Don’t ask.

Anyway. I still like the image. At least focus is where it should be.

It was a bit hard to get it to look like this, because the original from out of the camera was all contrast and almost no color, with the streetcar almost black. I tried my best in Photoshop and finally had to give up: it would not work, no way, regardless of what I did.

Enter Capture NX. Goodness, how I love this program! I don’t use it often, but whenever I do, I am amazed how easy it is to get decent results. Hmm … did I ever say Nikon seem to know a bit or two about their cameras?

Dylan again? Sure. “Days of ‘49” is the Song of the Day. Hear it on his much-maligned 1970 album “Self Portrait”.


There are 1 comments

Ted Byrne   (2007-05-12)

You're right about the composition here, it's a study in weight balances and linear mechanisms. First off the way the mass of the upper left is balanced by the dark/light interplay on the lower right holds things in check.. keeping that heft up there on the left from falling off the frame.
Then the way the dark shadow on the upper right again offers to balance the mass across the frame from it works importantly to keep the teeter totter of this image steady.
Finally, in terms of weight distribution, the great splash of color on the upper left his offset by the other corners.
Then there are the lines all pulling the eye to that color pool on the upper left. Yeah... this is... as are so many of your tilt-a-whirl captures... quite formally composed... Is this our Germanic nature coming through? You can impose a powerful sense of order upon a seemingly random composition. And you do it so consistently and easily that it goes almost unnoticed.

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