mattblaze

One of the challenges of very long lenses is that they tempt you to compose images of subjects that are very far away. But the farther away something is, the more the atmosphere can distort the image. The effects of heat distortion, pollution, humidity, and weather are amplified across longer distances, no matter how sharp the lens is or how high resolution the sensor.

Very long lenses like the 400mm, with their narrow field of view, are essential for some compositions (such as this one), but I find I only rarely actually use them. In fact, the longest lens I have for my main medium format camera system is 180mm (which yields the 35mm equivalent view of about a 120mm), and I hardly ever use even that for the most of the photography I do.

For wildlife photographers, on the other hand, 400mm is practically a wide angle.

This was captured with a DSLR and a 400mm lens, which contributed to the compressed perspective. The conductor boarding the leftmost train is essential to the composition, I think.

Ewing, NJ ("West Trenton") is the last stop on SEPTA's commuter trains from Philadelphia on the former Reading Railroad's line to northern NJ. CSX freight trains still use the tracks north of the station, beyond the end of the overhead electrified wiring used for passenger service.

The Rodenstock 138mm/6.5 is unusual for a larger-format lens in that it has a floating internal element that has to move as it's focused. This means it has to be focused with a helical ring (like an SLR lens) that moves both the focus and the internal element, rather than simply by moving it back and forth with a bellows. This makes the lens big, heavy, and cumbersome (not to mention spendy), but it's an extremely sharp design.

@[email protected] I'm not sure what you're suggesting. I post a lower resolution version (to not clobber my instance), and a link to the full version, which contains licensing information. That seems OK.

Captured with the Rodenstock 138mm/6.5 HR Digaron-SW lens (@ f/8), Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50, 1/30 sec), vertically shifted 15mm.

The glass curtain and reflection reminded me of Saul Bass's iconic title sequence for North By Northwest (imitated in Mad Men), though this is across town. The film also used a somewhat different perspective, looking downward, and at a sharper angle. Here, our focus is on the impressionistically rendered Times Square skyline rather than the street below.

Captured with the Rodenstock 70mm/5.6 Digaron lens and a bit of vertical shift. The afternoon light highlights the basic arched form of the bridge structure against the background and foreground foliage. A polarizer darkened the clear winter sky.

The Taft Bridge, named for the notably hefty former president and SCOTUS chief justice, is the largest unreinforced concrete bridge in the world. Comprising seven major arches over Rock Creek Park, it links the Kalorama and Woodly Park neighborhoods.

@[email protected] I think distortion from tilting the camera up is mostly a learned expectation from recent times. If you look at architectural photos from 50 or 75 years ago, when fancy cameras routinely supported movements, parallel vertical lines are almost always rendered correctly. It was only after the proliferation of small SLR and rangefinder cameras, which lack movements for correcting this, that tall buildings started tilting backwards.

My photo practice is hipster-retro in that respect.

This was an opportunistic capture from a hotel balcony, made with a small camera and 90mm lens. I made several exposures, waiting for good light, which came out briefly for this one.

The wrong gear is definitely better than nothing, but still not as good as the right gear. This is a perfectly acceptable image, but I can't look at it without wishing I had used a view camera, a higher resolution sensor, and a slightly longer lens. But if I had insisted on that, I'd have no image at all.

The Inquirer building also housed (until a few years before they moved) their printing plant, making it one of the last major dailies where it was at least theoretically possible for an editor to run downstairs and yell "stop the presses!" if a major story came in. But I'll bet that never actually happened.

This was captured with a DSLR and a 19mm shifting lens. There's a bit of barrel distortion from the lens, but I decided this image looked better uncorrected.

The Inquirer building, completed in 1924, to me evokes a cigar-chomping editor who calls everyone "kid" and who says things like "bring me back a scoop".

The building had been vacant for a few years when this photo was made, the paper having moved to cheaper and leaner facilities. It has since been repurposed as police headquarters.

Precisionism, a roughly century-old modernist American art movement related to cubism, is a strong influence on my work. Its practitioners included Joseph Stella, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Demuth. Paul Strand was probably the most prominent precisionist photographer.

Precisionism is concerned with structure and geometry as well as the relationship between humans, machines, and the industrial landscape.

I'm interested in how the precisionists might interpret the world as it's become today.