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Motel Henning.
Amboy.
Amboy.
Ludlow.
Essex.
Barstow.
Route 66, January 2007 These shots are from the Cultural Mirages: Route 66 and the Mojave Desert workshop I attended Friday, January 26 through Sunday, January 28, 2007, in and around beautiful Barstow, California. Dave Wyman led it and I helped, too. It was sponsored in part by the San Diego Natural History Museum. If you're interested in how I made these images, see my tech data page with explicit details. Subject descriptions may invoke creative licence. I include this text because so many people care about how I did this, which admittedly was the point of the workshop. How to see all these photos: There are four pages, each with a half-day's shooting with about a dozen shots. You may scroll up and down the usual way. My ingenious new NEXT button technology saves us from having to scroll carefully. Click the NEXT button on top of each photo to skip down the page exactly and instantly to the next photo. If, and only if, I've added any commentary in addition to the tech data, I've provided another NEXT button at the end of the commentary. Be careful: if you accidentally hit a NEXT button above an image (instead of the NEXT button at the end of the commentary text) you'll skip past that image. These pages are designed to look good everywhere, and especially good in a dim room with your monitor cranked up. Everything on this website is designed to look great even with dial-up telephone internet, but not this page. If you're on dial-up, hopefully these photos will have loaded by the time you scroll down to them. These images are compressed to the usual Internet standards, but there are a lot of them on each page and they are deliberately screen-filling. Here's your first link: skip to first image. Day 1: Afternoon Arrival in Barstow, California, 26 January 2007. Next Photo >> Sign Collection, Tom's Welding. Canon 5D, 14mm f/2.8L, f/6.3 @ 1/20, ISO 200, hand-held (tech details). My 14mm ultra-ultra wide angle lens lets you see left, right and straight up at the same time. It sees 90 degrees in every direction, and keeps straight lines straight. Next Photo >>
Tom's Welding. Canon 5D, 14mm f/2.8L, f/8 @ 1/250, ISO 50, hand-held (tech details).
Bars of Enriched Steel. Canon 5D, 14mm f/2.8L, f/8 @ 1/15, ISO 400, hand-held (tech details).
Sign Collection. Canon 5D, 14mm f/2.8L, f/5.6 @ 1/15, ISO 400, hand-held (tech details).
More Sign Collection. Sorry for the repetition. It won't happen again. Canon 5D, 14mm f/2.8L, f/5.6 @ 1/15, ISO 400, hand-held (tech details).
VW. Canon 5D, 14mm f/2.8L, f/11 @ 1/40, ISO 50, hand-held (tech details).
Saddam's Compressor. Canon 5D, 14mm f/2.8L, f/11 @ 1/40, ISO 50, hand-held (tech details). This is a 35-foot tall air compressor formerly used in Iraq's rail-gun research program. It was captured by Marines assigned to the Marine Corps Logistics Base (MCLB), Barstow. Next Photo >>
Barstow Rail Station. Canon 5D, Canon 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM at 70mm, f/7.1 @ 1/125, ISO 100, hand-held (tech details). This is an easy shot that impresses the innocent. Wait until the sky gets about as dark as the lights, and make a photo. You'll get the vivid color contrast you see here. This is exactly as it came out of the camera and you can do this with any point-and-shoot. The key is to be sufficiently observant to recognize that it's time to shoot. Next Photo >>
The Desert Lodge. Canon 5D, 17-40mm f/4L at 29mm, f/4 @ 1/5, ISO 1,600, hand-held (tech details). I don't need no stinking tripod, even though I always have one in the car. In cases like this I use the Continuous shutter mode and hold the shutter button down long enough to fire several shots. I later select the sharpest. This is much easier than hauling around a tripod. Next Photo >>
Neon Office Sign, Barstow, California. Canon 5D, Canon 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM at 70mm, f/5.6 @ 1/15, ISO 200, hand-held (tech details). I love Image Stabilization. I got perfectly sharp images at 1/15 at 70mm, hand held. Next Photo >>
The Green Motel, Barstow, California. Canon 5D, 14mm f/2.8L, f/8 @ 4 seconds, ISO 50. tech details. I tilted down my 5D to get weird perspective distortion. I didn't like the effect after I made these shots. Therefore I worked this over in Photoshop CS2's Lens Distortion Correction Filter to make everything parallel. The colors are as they came from my 5D; I didn't adjust any of them later. I used a tripod for this shot, but didn't need to. The results, at least printed at less than 4 feet (1.2m) wide are same as my hand-held shots made at f/4 at 1/8 second at ISO 400. Here's how it looked out of the camera before perspective correction: The Green Motel, same file as previous photo, before rectification.
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