Re: To Move or Not To Move - That is the Question ...

GeorgeGaskill Wrote:
===================================
> I think the same applies to photography.
> If you are making art, you can do any-
> thing you want with the image.   If you
> are recording history, it should be
> left as is or it isn't really history.


It's hard to argue with that, George -

But sometimes historians are constrained by the limitations of their media - such as an author whose publisher will allow only so many pages: what details can be left out without harming the narrative?   Or what little sidelight should be added to clarify the situation being described?

Here's a dilemma upon the horns of which I am currently stuck:

Volume One of the screen saver that I helped Roger put together ten years ago was in landscape format, 1200 pixels high by 1600 pixels wide.  Nearly all of the original photos were color slides in 2x3 ratio, which necessitated cropping to fit the 3x4 ratio of the output.  In a couple of cases, rather than crop out important details near one edge or the other (such as the bunk car and pole in the root post above), I added space to the top of the photo and stretched the sky upward to fill the screen.  IMHO, this did not alter the historic atmosphere of these photos enough to bother even a meteorologist.   I am currently re-scanning and re-editing all of the photos so that the revised version of Volume One will be in 2x3 landscape format, enabling the full width of the 35mm slides & negatives to be used with only minor cropping of a few of them.   The new Volume Two will also be 2x3 format - including those of my own originals in 6x7cm format, most of which can be cropped from the top or bottom without losing anything important.   There are a couple of tough ones, though.

The original of this one is a 35mm slide in portrait format; the resultant landscape crop loses quite a bit of the foreground & sky, but hopefully nothing more histörically important than the perfect smoke-ring blown by #483:


An hour or so later - after a run-by featuring helper #483 being cut off to run ahead across Lobato Trestle - I took another 35mm portrait photo as the train passed Cresco Tank.  Nearly three years later I took another shot at the same location of the same engines, but in reverse order pulling the regular passenger train, and in 6x7cm portrait format:


The 1972 35mm shot is too narrow to include the sign at the border in the landscape version (JBWX is a participant in the Phalanx of Phoamers in the background, IIRC):


... But keeping the sign in the 1975 shot required only lengthening its supporting post by four or five feet:


IMHO, the above copy-crop-paste retouching will help ferro-equinologists in the 22nd or 23rd century to unequivocally pin down the location of the shot - if a copy of it miraculously survives that long - just as the boxcar "coaches" and unique logos on the tenders of #484 and #483 will pin down the era, and this minor manipulation will not disturb the Chrono-Synclastic Infindibulum in any meaningful way.

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



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/30/2015 02:35PM by Russo Loco.