My Personal Space Shuttle

My Personal Space Shuttle – Texere Plaza, Downtown Los Angeles, CA, USA

It started out simple enough. I was walking to my car in the parking lot at Texere Plaza, Downtown Los Angeles when I looked up at the sky and saw these weird and wispy clouds. My camera bag was on one shoulder so I made a handheld capture with a 80-200mm zoom just because it was already on the camera, then switched to a 50mm which I thought would be the ideal lens for the situation and made a few more captures. They were pleasantly pretty, but not art by any means. My 24mm was in the bag so why not get an overall capture of the entire sky? Looking at the results on the camera’s LCD screen, convergence typical of all wide-angle lenses was clearly apparent.

This is the moment my creative juices began to flow. Normally, any lens distortion is corrected in post-processing unless you want it for an effect. What if I didn’t correct the bulbous effect caused by the distortion of this lens? It would make the sky appear round especially with the light falloff in the corners typical of wide-angle lenses…but still the light falloff is not enough. If you’re not familiar with filters, wide angle lenses need “slim” filters since their field of view is so large that a filter for use on any other lens will actually be seen in the image. I put a “fat” circular polarizer (filter) on the 24mm wide-angle lens and it was visible in the viewfinder, and my viewfinder shows 100% of the frame so what you see is what you get. Great!…but still not enough. Since I already had polarization, I mounted a fat ultraviolet filter on top of the polarizer and now the corners of the image have gone completely black the way I had visualized it.

So I have completed my vision.  I am now looking down at planet earth out of the window of my personal space shuttle. Granted there are a few continents missing, but I’ll leave that to the viewer’s imagination…

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Copyright 2014 O. Bisogno Scotti,  All Rights Reserved.

Nikon D3 DSLR, AF Nikkor 24mm f/2.8D, exposure: f/10.0, 1/25 sec., exposure index: +1.33, ISO 200, B+W 52-E circular polarizer, Nikon L37C UV filter, Program: Aperture Priority, White Balance: Auto, Manfrotto 3221 tripod, Manfrotto 3221 tripod with Manfrotto 3265 pistol grip ball head,  Nikon MC-20 remote cable release, capture date and time: 7/18/2014 6:21 pm.

Tags: art, blue, CA, California, clouds, Downtown, fine art, O. Bisogno Scotti, photographers, photography, photos, sky, sphere, USA

• July 28, 2014
• airplanes, Bisogno
• 14 Comments