A Long Time Ago

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nce upon a time I lived in Los Angeles. My habit of wandering around began years before, but it was revived when I lived there, this time in color.

I was looking around on Sunday near what was then called, “The Blue Whale,” when I saw it. A 1930s gas station. It was still a working gas station but not on Sunday. Instead, on the day of rest, the parking lot became a used boot store. Not just any boots, but cowboy boots.

In those days, wearing black cowboy boots with jeans, a black t-shirt and a sport coat (usually black) was very trendy. That might be the reason that there are so many red boots in the picture. Wearers were reselling them when the bought new black cowboy boots.

I’m just speculating.

T

his picture is pretty old. I made this with a Nikon SLR on film on Fuji Velvia. Not Velveeta. That’s fake cheese. Velvia was bright, contrasty, punchy film. It was intended to be a Kodachrome killer. It wasn’t. It was very colorful, but it lacked depth and richness. I liked it for pictures like this one. But, not always.

Knowing me, I used a 20mm lens. You can see that I worked close, but not too closely. I probably exposed the film at f5.6 at 1/500th or 1/1000 of a second. Velvia was an ISO 50 film. Very slow. Most of us slowed it down even more to ISO 32.

You can also see that the subject is in sharp focus, but the background falls off a bit. That’s what working at f5.6 brings to the picture. It separates the background from the subject.

That’s what I really dislike about smart phone cameras. Unless you go to the most manual of settings which is very time consuming, everything front to back is in sharp focus.

That’s the story of this picture.

Here’s why.

If you’ve gone to any of my portfolio pages — go now, there’s a lot of good work — you’ll notice that there are payment options. You can buy or license pictures for various rates.

But, there is one more category. There is a five dollar a month option for premium content. Since I get into technical and photo gear discussions more often than you know, I thought the premium pages could be about that.

I’d post once a week, with an extra holiday post on months with holidays in them. The posts would be very well researched and illustrated.

Would you like that? Would you pay for it?