Look at the first picture, Washington, D.C., circa 1920. Eddi In a Abbott-Detroit roadster. Nice car. Nice picture. And what a wide-angle lens. I'd guess a 24mm equivalent from the perspective. He even got the front end of the camera bottom plate in the picture!
It's interesting to me how much I like pictures like these. For desktop use for example. I don't really know why. Maybe the nice grey tones. Maybe the detail. Maybe the abstraction of an age gone by. Maybe the relaxed straightforward but careful compositions. Maybe all of the above.
But then I don't like all of them equally. So maybe it's also just that they are good pictures, some of them.
They had image stabilization back then? Wow, that's amazing! ;-)
ReplyDeleteBack in the day, that technology was called a "tripod".
ReplyDeleteLive and learn.
The image stabilizer was a boy named Rodney, who for 5 cents an hour would hang off the center pole of the tripod.
ReplyDeleteIt's a funny thing that nearly all new and "better" technology is, on closer examination, actually worse.
ReplyDeleteTake this new image stabilization technology, for example. If your camera doesn't shake (such as when it is attached to a tripod) the IS system actually creates wobbling!
And, besides, it never can match the stability of a tripod anyway. So, it turns out that all the electronic image stabilization brings you is freedom from having to carry a tripod (which are down to as light as 500 grams these days). But your pictures will look worse.
There are countless other examples:
□ sound: vinyl → CD → MP3 (sound quality drop with each step. Also, no longer archivable!)
□ food: pesticides, preservatives, long storage times
□ automobiles: no longer user maintainable
□ telephones: no longer safe to use, requires constant "charging", poor sound quality
□ home appliances: engineered to last max 5 years, ugly
... and, of course, my pet peeve, the computing industry, which appears to be dedicated to the study of how to make things worse.
You don't say. It seems that with every "corrective update", my Windows gets slower and slower.
ReplyDeleteCan't be a coincidence. Can't be an accident.
Unless you count that accident of the Universe commonly known as "the birth of Bill Gates"...
The Ego is truly devious!