My wife Tess and I took a canoe trip on one of the local rivers on New Year's Day. She wondered off into the woods and when she came back she said she wanted me to take a picture of a twisted oak she found. I told her to take it herself and gave her the old TLR rolli. She doesn't know any thing about cameras and the rolli is no-point- and-shoot. I encouraged her to take the camera and get the image in the view finder the way she liked it and to come get me to set the exposure. When I got there the camera was mostly in the shadow of the backlit oak. This was certainly not optimum exposure conditions, especially since what she wanted to show was the twisted wood, not an oak silhouette, so I exposed for the shadow. The trunk didn't print well at low contrast and the background didn't print well at high contrast so I printed on Ilford multigrade (#3.5 tree / # 2 background). I like the results and wondered why I had passed by this tree several times before and never saw the potential that my wife saw.
-- Tess Korhnak (tek@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu), March 13, 2000