Tuesday - Snippets

Taking the long route to and from the library today, I caught some things while out walking. Unfortunately the light was very harsh, and most of what I shot was too contrasty to fix - no way to lighten the shadows and darken the bright spots without making it look even worse. But I did manage to get some things right. This little feller to the left sat very patiently while I took its portrait several times. This was the best shot. But it's not a macro; I know grasshoppers well enough to know that getting close enough to use the macro would have driven this one away. So I used the zoom and shot it at a 400mm focal length. Didn't lose any detail at all!

While getting to where the grasshopper lived, I turned down one of Newport's lesser-known back-streets, West St. No sidewalks, many of the front stoops of the houses back here empty right into the street. It looks like the whole thing was an afterthought; you have to look hard to see the street's entrance on Perry St., as it looks more like a driveway entrance than s street entrance. It may originally been intended as an alley to serve the back ends of houses on Perry and Pope Streets, but empty space invited the filling of it with more houses as Newport's population grew. I shot this in color but converted to black & white because that was the effect I wanted from the start; "developing" it as a b&w shot in Photoshop™ yields much better results than the camera's built-in b&w capability.

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger