A bleak view

Another shot from Alcatraz today, taken in October 2007 during my honeymoon… don’t worry it wasn’t all spent in a prison! I took this through a small window on an external door that we passed on the tour, with the light was falling outside and inside getting colder.  There’s something bleak about the photograph that suits its circumstances, and I think the fact that the window is grubby, and that as a result the view, not particularly pleasant anyway, is somewhat obsucred, adds to this bleakness.

A trick that portrait photographers used use (and maybe some do) to achieve a “soft focus” type effect, which was deemed to be more flattering to certain models, was to put vaseline on the lens before taking the shot.  During the commercial photography course I finished recently, Ronnie Norton, the instructor, showed us an alternative which was to use “nose grease”.  This has the advantage over vaseline of being readily available, and free – you just rub a finger between your nose and your cheek and then rub it on the lens.  Of course it’s dependent on the photographer how much of the “product” you’re going to have available to you, and so how much of a soft focus effect you get.

This shot, and the marks on the glass which have that sort of a soft focus effect, reminded me of Ronnie’s trick.  He illustrated this to us, not to do some soft-focus photography, but to show the importance of keeping a lens clean.  When he applied some of this magic ingredient to his lens and shot into the light, the resultant flare on the lens rendered the image he got practically unusable.

Keeping the lens clean is important to bear in mind at this time of year also for another reason – the air temperatures are dropping, and as a camera is brought from outside to an indoor environment it is very possible that something will fog up.  If possible you want to give your cameras and lenses time to adjust to the new warmer temperature in this scenario, or that flare, and lack of contrast that results, will impact on the image quality.   I noticed it during Aileen & Neil’s wedding when I switched lenses for the speeches, and the first shot I took looked as if it was taken through fog.  A quick rub of both ends of the lens with a lens cloth sorted the problem, and I was thankful for the instant feedback of digital which allowed me to spot it.

Incidentally, initially in post-processing the actual shot was cropped to a letter-box panorama, but for consistency on the blog I keep all shots in a 900×600 pixel canvas, and so much of  the black around the window is due to the canvas and is not representative of the initial crop.  However, I’m liking this format for the image the more I look at it.