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Friday Slide Show: Obscurity in the Bunker
7 June 2019
We get to work rather early in the morning, stumbling down the stairs to the bunker with a cup of coffee sloshing in front of us like a lantern with dead batteries guiding the way. Still, we get there.
One particular morning this week there was sunshine. And the light in the room was strangely comforting. A warm glow. Something to take in for a moment.
But we spoiled it by reaching for our Nikon D200 with a 50mm f1.4 Nikkor on it. We couldn't help but walk around taking photos of some of the things that, in the pleasant glow of morning, our gaze had fallen upon.
It wasn't easy. The light was charming but not bright. It left everything in obscurity.
The light was charming but not bright. It left everything in obscurity.
The D200 was going to have an awful time recording color images with any dynamic range at ISO 1600, its limit. Don't ask us how we know. But we do.
So we decided to conduct our image safari in black-and-white. That eliminates color noise, at least.
But we were capturing these as Raw files, so the data included color information. What we saw on the camera's LCD, though, was a monochrome rendering of our image. Which was nice because it let us cruise the room thinking in black-and-white.
As we did, we realized that these were particularly revealing images.
Not revealing in personal information so much as revealing in the era in which we have lived. Which is not, apparently, quite the current one.
Who has a Sony transistor radio from 1974 (which costs us $20, we can still recall)? Or a lighter that requires Ronson flints? Or an AM/FM/PSB radio for that matter? Or (why stop now) a Hacky Sack? Or a coffee cup with 1960s-era flowers on it (great shape for a mug, though)? Or a stack of newspapers and magazines? Or books? Or, well, lamps even (work being illuminated by screens these days)? Or tape? Or drafting tools? Or a rack of CDs? Not to mention a WordPerfect cap.
You get our drift.
These things are little monuments to a bygone era. They are not entirely useless now but you'd be hard pressed to come back with them from a scavenger hunt.
Not that that concerns us. We got ours, after all.
