Just Another Brick In The Wall...

Downtown Los Angeles - 1972

Click on photo to enlarge - © 1972 jim otterstrom

Downtown Alameda - 2007
Click on photo to enlarge -© 2007 jim otterstrom

Brick wall photos, old & new.

I was a newly-hired Postman (a Special Delivery Messenger to be exact), back in the early 1970s when I took the "No Comment" photo at the top, but I still had delusionary ambitions of making a living as a free-lance photographer/artist/craftsman (before I realized that would also entail becoming a businessman, something I have absolutely zero talent for).

In those days I mounted, signed, framed, and hung my pictures in any joint that was interested in having art 'for sale' hanging on their walls, and I actually sold quite a few too, at funky little galleries, restaurants, saloons, grocery stores, and craft fairs.

At that point in time, when I prepared my photos for framing, I always rounded off the corners of the prints (using a quarter as a template for the radius), then sanded a thin white border around the edges before mounting them on black mat board (you might say it was my signature style of matting).

Those ancient mounted prints are either long gone, or, too deteriorated to display anymore, so, just for fun, I thought I'd try to duplicate the look of my primitive old technique in Photoshop.

So, if you enlarge the 1972 photo at the top, you will see it presented exactly as it was 35 years ago, when I was 27 years old.

Then I decided to take one of my recent photos, from this past November, and 'mount' it the same way.

There's 35 years of life in between those two pictures, yet they look to me as if they could've come from the same roll of film.

"Some things change very slowly, if they ever change at all."

But the art of photography has sure changed. In 1972 you actually had to acquire some skills & knowledge to make a good picture, where any of today's digital cameras capture near perfect images in simple point & shoot auto-mode. I still like to compose my shots with manual settings though, which is why I have a digital camera that allows me to do so.

I love the way color photos look against a black background (similar to the way Earth looks against the blackness of space) which is also why I chose this particular blog template (although I've noticed that, on some laptops, Earth Home Garden comes up with a white background??).

The days are short and the weather's cold, so it's as good a time as any to be messing around with photographs, old or new.

The Los Angeles photo was taken in 1972 with a Nikon F2, and probably a 24mm wide-angle lens. All exposure data is long forgotten.

The Alameda photo was taken on November 12th, 2007, with an 8 megapixel Canon S5IS, in manual mode. Settings - ISO 80, f /8.0, 1/160 second, 32.2mm zoom (35mm equivalent).