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Friday Slide Show: Ghost Town Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

17 September 2021

On the very day that the New York Times reported that people who took 7,000 steps a day (but not more than 10,000) lived longer than those who did not, we were able to count our steps on our toes.

It isn't that we sat in a chair all day. As has been the rule (with the exception of earlier this month), not a lot has been going on in this business lately. No, we were out on the back 40 of the estate, hacking away at the overgrowth, raking leaves (already) and whacking weeds.

But not walking much.

So after a delightful dinner of spaghetti with salmon, shrimp, capers and lemon in an Alfredo sauce and watching Blackthorn, in which Sam Shepard plays Butch Cassidy long after he has buried the Sundance Kid, we took a walk.

By then it was about 10 p.m. and we couldn't see much going on in the neighborhood apart from the last dog walkers of the day, so we kept walking into the village where we thought we might see some signs of life.

It was a ghost town.

The garbage had been put out on the street, the restaurant floors swept up, not a single store open, not a bus moving, not a light rail vehicle in sight.

We did hear some laughter from the two bars we passed but it sounded like the howls of the dead emerging from some circle of hell.

Rather than join them, we took out our iPhone 6 Plus and captured the moment. It features optical image stabilization and with exposures down around 1/4 second at ISO 500 wide open at f2.2 (not that we had anything to say about it), the shots needed that bit of help. They aren't blurry.

They were distorted, of course, by that 15mm wide angle lens. But that's what Lightroom is for. We enabled the phone's profile correction and then hit the Auto button on the Transform panel to square things up on all of these.

That did an admirable job. Only a couple needed further cropping to tell their story.

Not a soul appears in any of them, though. Not even a ghost.


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