So, I made a list of posts that began with the word, “So,” and it’s way too long. So I’m trying to stop doing that.
Just to let you know, this is the first time I attempted using the slide scanner after the failure, oh, this many weeks ago – I’ve just been using archive scans from my harddrive since then. The scanner worked fine this time around, so maybe it was a simple system glitch. We’ll see.
This Sunday’s slide dates from the days when I lived in Raleigh and had searched out a couple of natural areas to visit regularly because I was dwelling within a big city (it was convenient to work and inexpensive without being ‘cheap’ – you do what you have to do.) One such location was a spur of Falls Lake that had some hiking trails more-or-less following the lake edge, more less than more, really. This section of the lake fell into some steeper valleys, so as you moved away from the water’s edge you tended to rise sharply, and most times the trail simply followed the more level and stable terrain, which was often removed from the water by a notable distance. At one point, there was a section of almost-entirely-enclosed mini-lake, a bay with an isthmus that was most likely manmade, and along that isthmus sat a few trees. One foggy morning when I got out early, the view down that mini-lake was quite interesting to me, and I did a couple of abstract compositions.
As I was touching out the little specks and tiny scratches that are pretty typical of slides, something wasn’t seeming right to me. How was I seeing sharp reflections in the water of trees that weren’t sharp when seen directly?
Oh. Yeah.
It helps if I have the slide the right way around in the first place – it’s the mist rising off of the water that obscured the reflections more than the direct images. But I think you can understand how easy it was to get it the wrong way.