Gimme Shelter

Well we've settled on a new place. It's not too bad, 1920's building with 8 units. The owner gutted it and replaced all of the windows, cabinets and fixtures and added central air and heat and a washer / dryer and dishwasher, both of which were prerequisites to any place we considered because of the imminent arrival. And it's bigger. An extra bedroom and larger livingroom. So, it's ok.

The flaws became apparent right after we signed the lease and handed over a bunch of money. When you're alone in a place and can really look at it, the whole thing changes. All of the scuffs and worn knobs stand out. The views suck and the garage is fit for nothing larger than an RC MGB. And it doesn't help that all of the sudden we remember all of the things we put in storage a year ago. We have a bike?

So we'll see. I'm sure it will work. It's not a bad place, we just don't want to leave where we are. Who knows what the next year will bring?

One more...

Here's another new one, for me anyway. Jessica showed me a website with this kind of thing months ago and I recently came across it again on another website. You basically take a picture by shooting down through the waistlevel finder of an old medium format camera. In this case a Rolleiflex. I could probably use my Hasselblad just as well (or anything with a waistlevel finder) but the Rollei is suitably beat up which is what I like about it. It's a bit of a hassle because you have to deal with two cameras at once. Not ideal for hand holding.



I like the effect though.

Tiny Pictures 2

Here are the rest. Some are more successful than others.

Arles

The Loire Valley

Mougins

Silverlake
Downtown LA

The French pix work better, I think, because I had a higher perspective. The trick works by mimicking the very shallow depth of field of a macro lens. But if you're not looking down on the subject it falls apart and doesn't work as well.

Tiny Pictures

Part of my time during my semi-unemployment has been spent honing my photoshop skills and to that end I've learned a couple new tricks. One is how to make pix look like tiny models of things. Like toy trains or something. I got the idea from this site. It's got a lot of cool stuff but I found it looking for Olivo Barbieri photography. There is a link on the page. So I thought I'd give it a whirl and found the following pix in my collection that suited the experiment. Sort of. I think some of them worked and others didn't.






These were taken on our honeymoon on Kauai. I learned the technique here. Anyway, kind of fun.