Re: La Jara & Westward in 1967 (More Moldy Oldies)

Greg Scholl Wrote:
===================================
> Russ ... interesting picture.  Not too bad really,
> but I notice the front is much sharper than the
> back.  Is there some way to remedy that in PS?

Not that I know of, although a friend mentioned just this morning that there is some very high-end
(and VERY expensive) software that can selectively correct some issues like focus and motion blur.

> I have seen this in film as well, so I guess its a
> focus issue or the **### extender.   {My} 35mm
> & Pentax 6x7 make nice door stops today, along
> with several vintage pieces of video equipment . . .


Great Minds - and Old Foamers - think alike, Greg -

The 180mm and 360mm lenses for m' Mamiya 6x7 were bookends for a long time, but I finally traded them in for a 16GB SD chip about three years ago.  Mama Mia, I didn't get even close to what I had paid for them back in 1975 and '85!

At least the center of the 2X extender was fairly sharp, and only the backgrounds were blurred IF the focus was right on and the aperture small - like f8 or f11.  The 3X was useless. Period.

*****

Speaking of the 2X, I finally located the tin box with all my old slides - the ones deemed not good enough to project for fellow foamites, but worth keeping as mementos of my youthful adventures.  Here are the rest (actually the beginning) of the series posted a couple of days ago; the slides taken on August 28 of the freight that John Gruber rode to Chama - scanned, cleaned up, and converted to black & white to hide the color shifts.

It looks like this first one, #498 passing the water tank in La Jara, was taken with the 2X extender in place - it's fairly sharp in the center where I focused on the air pump, but pretty fuzzy at the edges.  It's hard to tell from this photo, but I think the spikes had already been pulled from the center rail of the siding:


The next two - #498 crossing El Rio de los Conejos that was posted on [ngdiscussion.net], and this subsequent going-away shot (just for Scott Turner) - are reasonably sharp all the way to the edges; they were probably taken without the extender:


All the rest are at least a little fuzzy at the edges, although not real bad if not enlarged too much.  None of them are worth printing, but at least they illustrate a typical westbound train near the end of D&RGW narrow gauge operations:

Is that John Gruber getting a shot of the Red Devil Loader in the first one, above?

JBWX will probably accuse me of trying to copy his famous triptych (see [www.lifewastedchasingtrains.com] et seq), but I didn't see his photos for the first time until almost forty years after I took the following fuzzy foursome:


The last one of this group taken near milepost 302 is REALLY fuzzy - probably because the sky was getting darker and I had to open the lens to f5.6 or probably even wider.  But at least I had managed to get most of the cinders out of the camera, so the scratches were minimal:


That's it for now - it's 10:15 and I haven't had dinner.   And my puppy-dogs still need to go for their evening walk ...    

- El Abuelo Histœrico, Greengo y Curmudgeoño de los Locomoturas Viejos y Verdes,
aka Der Grossväterlich DünkelOlivGrünDampfKesselMantelLiebHabender



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2020 11:21AM by Russo Loco.