Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.—Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s been my experience that photographers draw their inspiration from many places. One of my friends finds it in old master’s paintings; I get the inspiration for some of my images from the movies.
From The Movies
I recently watched Frank Capra’s 1937 classic film Lost Horizon, a film I dearly love,and was struck not just by Joseph Walker and Elmer Dyer’s black and white cinematography but by still images that were shot with 4×5 cameras and used to illustrate a “making-of” video on the disc. This was truly the golden age of Hollywood still photography. All this was going through my head when I made this image of, what else, a railroad car sitting, alone, on a siding in Colorado.
How I Made this Photograph: This image was tangentially, anyway, inspired by an underrated 1973 film called Emperor of the North, starring Lee Marvin and Earnest Borgnine. The IMDB description of the film says, “In 1933, during the Depression, Shack the brutal conductor of the number 19 train has a personal vendetta against the best train hopping hobo tramp in the Northwest…” You can visit my my YouTube channel for reviews of new and classic films as part of Joe’s Movie Club. But this image has an interesting back story…
This photograph was originally made for an (unpublished) review of the 18-megapixel Canon EOS Digital Rebel T2i. While visiting Fort Collins, Colorado one day, I saw this graffiti covered high cube boxcar and thought it would make a good subject for HDR interpretation. The lens used was the EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS that exhibited more than a little barrel distortion and that I attempted to partially correct in Photoshop. The lens has a DxO rating of 14, which is pretty much a “Poor” rating. The nominal exposure of the image was 1/500 sec at f/14 and ISO 400. The image file was processed Photoshop’s Merge to HDR command and lightly tweaked using the Sunshine filter firm Color Efex..
The photograph wasn’t published because of the poor lens performance. I submitted the review to the magazine in a timely fashion, always a concern when YouTube was able to upload camera review faster that the two months it took for print magazines to publish similar reviews. Instead of publishing it right away, management sat on the review so long that it bgan aging unlike fine wine and sat untouched so long…How long, was it? It sat so long that Canon introduced the EOS Digital Rebel T3i that replaced it, making my review moot. Did I review the Rebel T3i? Yes.
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