This shot was taken a few years ago after a fire at Custer National Park. A friend of mine from North Dakota helped in putting out the fire. He tells me that the forest rangers often start controlled burns late on a Friday. In this way, he says they often need to get overtime to put out the fire. However, in this case it got out of hand & ended up destroying several homes nearby. The pic was taken on Delta400 & printed in a darkroom. The image was scanned using a epson 1200u.

-- gary przyborski (garyprzy@crosswinds.net), September 04, 2000

Answers

Couple things: 1) the scan of the print leaves much to be desired. There is not much of a range int he midtones. I would aim for bringing out some of the deatil in the shadows and forground. Also, can the sky end up with a greater transition between the light and dark bits.

2) It looks like the camera back was titled up and the trees are suffering from converging lines.

The photos strongest point is what is ont he ground. It looks like there is a lot that. I would focus on tones in that area. Also, a large dispaly image would help in showing this detail.

-- Chris Gillis (chris@photogenica.net), September 04, 2000.

Chris-- I used a X-700 35mm with 28mm lens which could have caused the distortion. Sometime soon I'll try re-scanning the print by adjusting the tones. I'm fairly new to this scanning thing & I'm learning as I go.

In the guidelines for this website, It says to keep the image size down to a certain size, which I tried to limit. How big can you make images here?

I'm curious about going back & scanning the original negative & then manipulated the densities digitally. Thanks for the comments.

-- gary przyborski (garyprzy@crosswinds.net), September 05, 2000.

The scan could have been better, but other than that, I really like it.

The image conveys the feeling of destruction and ghostly desolation, which to me is much more important than the technical details of what a burnt tree or the underlying grass look like. Too much detail might distract from the mood.

-- Bob K (bobk@webforia.com), September 05, 2000.

I like the mood of this shot. I bet it would look even eerier with 3200. Bad scan, but it happens.

Also, I doubt the 28mm caused the "distortion," especially since this doesn't look like distortion. This looks like parallel convergence, avoided by keeping the film plane perpendicular to the ground. The 35mm Shift CA for Minolta helps a lot.

-- Christian Deichert (torgophile@aol.com), September 21, 2000.

3200 would have just made the shot grainy and you would lose some of the detail which is why this picture is interesteing. of course it would have alot better if you had used a 16x20 camera.-J

-- josh (devil_music@usa.net), September 22, 2000.