Thursday, April 19

Skin Trade

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About seven miles south west of Lancaster city lies The Great Minqua Path which was the chief trail used by the Minqua or Susquehannock Indians to carry massive wealth in beaver skins to the white settlements on the Delaware during the mid-seventeenth century. The Swedes, Dutch, and English warred for control of this trade. Just out of the frame to the right is the wide Susquehanna river rolling down to meet the Chesapeake Bay about eighteen miles south. See, Spring has come finally to this part of the river valley, a tiny hamlet on Turkey Hill, called Blue Rock.


About the technique (NOTE: this revision to this day's posting was made early in the morning of 4/24/7): If you'll look at the comments... I have grown to HATE this image. I particularly detest the way the barn wood has lost all detail, resembling a badly adjusted HDTV monitor. Or a particularly cheap one. The thought of taking it down appealed to me, but that would have lost Andreas's important comments. So instead, I think I'll leave it - but instead add this revised enhancement of the same photograph. You tell me... Any improvement?

5 comments:

Jing said...

emmm....

Andreas said...

And another experiment :)

Nope. As much as I liked "Parking 1934", I don't think this is it. Why? Too photographic. Basically it looks like a B&W image with extremely exaggerated contrast, that has been colored in a very lazy way. For these almost comic book colors there is too much detail. It simply does not match.

Btw, whatever this building is, it looks fantastically surreal with the seemingly random arrangement of windows.

Andreas

Ted said...

I'm with you in this critique. In fact I hate this image so much, I might pull it down. It was an experiment gone terribly wrong. All texture is lost. Here I buy a zillion dollar camera with bazillion dollar optics and then mush it up like this. AAARGH!

Andreas said...

Yeah, of course this is better. It's still not my favorite image and I see it more as a documentary photo, but as hat it is very interesting. I *am* positively fascinated by those windows. Obviously I am so accustomed to order in the face of a building, that this disturbs me just like a person with three eyes would :)

Anonymous said...

If there's an element of story in this image then it's in the end of the barn and, specifically, as Andreas pointed out, in the windows. The assymetry in the window placement as well as the reflections are intriguing.This makes me want to crop away some of the foreground grass, crop to the outer edge of the shed on the right and, using curves, tone down everything but the face of the barn. I tried this and it works better for me. Or maybe not, but thanks for the challenge.
And Happy Birthday Ted. Mine's tomorrow - the big six oh.