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.

Manhole Cover Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

5 April 2021

If it's Monday (oh, it is), it's time to go back down the manhole into the slime and slop of the world we inhabit and get back to work. This manhole cover struck us as something of a shield, though, from all that. Were life a video game, we'd pick it up.

Manhole Cover. Nikon D200 with 43-86mm Nikkor at f3.5, 1/5000 second and ISO 200. Processed in DxO PhotoLab's DeepPRIME and Adobe Camera Raw.

We had fun lining up this shot. We found it at our feet, of course. The sunlight hitting it gave it a nice glow, emphasizing the embossed ironwork.

The question was how to frame it.

First, we got our feet out of the way. We couldn't shoot straight down at it.

The question was how to frame it.

At an angle straight on, though, we were introducing unearthly distortions. We weren't going to be able to precisely match the distortion on the left with the one on the right. The image would look disturbingly off balance.

Unable to work around the "balance" problem, we worked on the "disturbingly" part. Like the hands of a clock, we rotated around the cover to the 7:30 position and liked the way the spokes radiated like rays from the center of the cover.

There was no particular reason to use DxO's DeepPRIME processing on the Raw file captured at ISO 200. But sometimes you do something unnecessary and find it functional. We knew it wouldn't hurt and it didn't.

We didn't feel we needed to crop the image into a more symmetrical layout because the center of the image was nicely placed and, being text, easily read.

We forged this shield in fun and take it along now for further adventures in the world at large, glad you're riding alongside.


BackBack to Photo Corners