Last fall, I got on a foliage kick. Finally, after many years of dismissing foliage imagery as “beneath me,” I thought, okay, it does look pretty spectacular, and maybe MF3d would be a good way to capture the beauty of some of our foliage here in Central VA. So for a couple of weeks I went around shooting foliage. Most of the shooting was digital video, actually, and there’s a video I ended up publishing on YouTube, best seen on a 3DTV in HD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1mU646qYeM
But some of the trees I found were SO spectacular, digital could not do them justice. One of them is in the view I’ve put in this folio “Foliage.” I loved the structure of the tree, and the many different colored leaves that it had on display: lots of yellow and red, to be sure, but also greens and browns. The mid-morning sun was backlighting the leaves to brilliant effect. I had first been attracted to this tree, because it was dropping leaves. I was trying to get video of leaves coming down towards the camera(s). But then I noticed the tree for its own sake… The next day I went back to the tree, bringing the Sputnik and some rolls of Velvia, and it really captured the colors beautifully.
This view is almost as it would be if you were lying on your back underneath the tree. And I could have done so all day! Who needs TV, with trees like this right outside? The tree was in a busy part of UVA campus called “The Corner,” but you’d almost never see anyone taking notice of it. Truth be told, I had not noticed this tree until this fall, when I was really looking for foliage imagery, and I’ve been in that general area thousands of times over the past 30 years.
I’d been to the Puyallup (pyoo AL ip) Spring Fair on Friday night and saw a poster advertising fireworks on Saturday “at around 9pm.” I made the trek the next night, got there early, scouted where the fireworks would be and what I could get in my foreground, etc. My plan was to shoot with the TL-120, and I started capturing other images while I waited. At 8pm I had just finished a roll in the TL-120 when I started hearing boom-boom-boom behind me. Not knowing how long the fireworks would last, I zipped up my backpack, grabbed both tripods with cameras already set, and hurried over to my spot. I would have done much better with the TL-120, since I would only have to wind one camera, and there’s more to check on the 2 Hasselblads. And sync is not an issue on the TL-120.
#33 Stereflektoskop – Velvia 50