The Machinery of Night

Foto Friday: Tunnel Vision

Just got off an eight-hour flight, and boy are my legs tired!

Yeah, I know that's not the joke, but they are. The plane was jam-packed, and I have long legs, and the guy in front of me insisted on his God-given right to recline his seat to the fullest. I retaliated by giving him a knee in the back at every opportunity. (Actually, I had no choice.)

After four hours my legs lost all sensation, and it wasn't so bad.

Anyhow, I have challenged the Fleck y Breen to a Yosemite picture contest. Here's my entry: The View---

Tunnel View, Yosemite National Park, Aug. 1995

David Fleck put it very well in his post: That can't be real. The earth has done an impossible thing here.

It's called "Tunnel View" because it's directly in front of a tunnel. As I told David, I'm surprised there aren't more wrecks there, where the drivers are suddenly confronted with the impossible.

That's scanned from a print, not from the negative. Often that doesn't work well, but it did in this case (after considerable cosmetic spot-cleaning). I previously posted this Yosemite photo:

Yosemite Falls, Aug. 1995

That image was scanned from a negative, and you see that the colors are not as warm as those in the Tunnel View photo (the colors in the two prints are comparable). I couldn't quite recover that warmth when I was fiddling with it, but I didn't try very hard. I was torn between the more natural look of the negative scan and the warmer, prettier print colors.

Here's a famous photograph of the Tunnel View, made back when you couldn't fiddle with the levels in GIMP or Photoshop. I have that as a poster. Apparently you can buy that original for an undisclosed price. If, you know, you're Bill Gates.

Labels: California, Foto Friday