Letters from the Forest

Letters from the Forest  [Canon 5D]
Maine, Oct. 3, 2007
(click in the image to see a larger version)

This still life was taken on my last trip to Maine in Acadia National Park. I had found the old letters at the garage sale of an antique dealer on my trip to Maine earlier in the summer and brought them with for my late September trip. In terms of image processing, this is pretty much a "straight" image.  The raw file was processed in Photoshop Lightroom and some minor edge burning was applied via a Curves adjustment layer in Photoshop.

I was photographing the letters as subjects for some pinhole photographs using my ZeroImage 6x9 camera. Since this camera has a very wide field of view, I realized when I was setting it up on the tripod facing straight down at the letters on the ground, that it was very likely that the front tripod legs would be in the shot. Of course, I could have just made the photos anyway and then retouched the tripod legs in Photoshop, but I am a bit of a purist where my pinhole images are concerned and since I print these full frame with no cropping and showing the actual edges of the negative, I really didn't want to have to retouch the tripod legs if I could figure another way of working the problem. The old mantra again: get it as right as possible in the camera and that means there's less work to do in Photoshop.

Fortunately, I had a special flexible tripod with me that I had purchased earlier in the spring but had not yet used. The Joby Gorillapod is a very cool design with bendable segmented legs that allow you to wrap them around other objects and mount the camera in all sorts of otherwise tricky locations such as tree limbs, fence posts, etc. I mounted the pinhole camera to the Gorillapod and then molded it's flexible legs around a Bogen Super Clamp which I had mounted on the head my tripod.  The Super Clamp was used to create additional extension as well as to provide more surface area to wrap the Gorillapods legs around. The combination of the Gorillapod and the SuperClamp provided enough forward extension so that the camera could be pointed straight down at the still life setup without the tripod legs showing in the shot. Fortunately, the wooden pinhole camera is very lightweight and is easily supported by the Gorillapod. The model that I purchased can support 1.75 lbs (800g). They have a more robust version designed for heavier SLRs with zoom lenses that will support 6.6 lbs (3 kg) Below are a couple of photos showing the setup in action.

The ZeroImage pinhole camera mounted on the Gorillapod, which in turn is attached to a Bogen Super Clamp mounted to the tripod head. I'll try and scan one of the pinhole negatives of this scene this week and post that either towards the end of this week or early next week.

*Upcoming Workshops *

My next workshop will be a 5-day class called  Digital Black and White at the Lepp Institute along the beautiful central California coast February 18-22. Click the link for a course description.

Comments

[Darrell Shurtz]

Very interesting image Sean. I like that Gorillapod. Really a great idea. Wanted to let you know that I just got your new calander and love it. Already have it up on the wall in my office.
All the best,
Darrell

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