Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Friday Slide Show: Steps & Stairs
17 May 2019
When we launched Lightroom to ponder this week's slide show, Excire let us know there was an update. Delighted to be able to procrastinate, we downloaded and installed it before using it to collate images of "stairways" using that as a keyword.
It did pretty well but not quite well enough. We remembered plenty of other shots of stairways in our collection that it skipped. So we asked it match an image of one of the stairwayss it found and it came up with quite a few more, although there were a lot of wild guesses in the collection, too.
Our image collection runs the gear gamut from digicams to dSLRs and from JPEGs to Raw file conversions. So the quality of the originals varies a good deal. But we made an effort to normalize them in the current version of Lightroom Classic, tapping into the new Texture slider only occasionally where there was some texture to enhance.
We're nothing if not egalitarian. Stairways, however, are hierarchical.
Cameras in order of appearance include the Nikon 990, Minolta 5D, Kodak V603, Kodak V610 Dual Lens, Canon PowerShot SD850 IS, Canon Rebel XTi, Nikon D300, Canon PowerShot SX1 IS, Sony HX5V, Nikon Coolpix S8000, Canon PowerShot A3300 IS, Panasonic ZS20, Nikon Coolpix P510, Olympus E-PL1 and Nikon D200.
We're nothing if not egalitarian.
Stairways, however, are hierarchical. And essentially utilitarian. Yet they inherently provide a poetic punch. Ascending or descending.
This is even more true among those who navigate them with a prosthetic where the trick is to go "up with the good and down with the bad."
You can read a lot into all that.
Or you can enjoy guessing the locations, which we've put in the captions. They're all over the place.
Golden Gate Park, Telegraph Hill, UC Berkeley, Pebble Beach, Sonoma, Knockash Hill, Downtown San Francisco, Noe Valley, Cologne, Mission San Francisco, the Sunset district, City Hall, the Sunnyside district, Rochester (NY), Dewey Blvd., Forest Hill, the deYoung Museum, Fort Mason, the Cantor Center, Twin Peaks, St. Francis Wood, Glen Canyon, Glen Park and the Richmond district.
Turns out you need a staircase everywhere.
Brick, tile, iron, stone, wood, cement, it doesn't matter. One step simply has to lead to another.
Either up or down, depending on your inclination.
