ARGUS C3-CINTAR 50MM-F/3.5-1/100TH-EKTACHROME-ISO 80
... nunaka valley, alaska, spring of 1959 ... the slide mount was labeled "june," but the bare garden soil seems evidence that pa snapped this picture sometime in late april or early may ... since it was "store processed" it's likely that once he'd shot the last frame he cached the film canister inside the little air-tight tupperware container he kept in the refrigerator's vegetable bin ... when he'd accumulated enough to justify a trip into town the rolls would all be taken in at once, along with a large dressed and foil-wrapped frozen hunk of forest critter, or, as likely, some odd metal engine thingy rare enough to insure it would be prized greatly by any of his kind who built their own cars ... either of these would be the "barter" for the processing of the color slides ...
"How like a prodigal doth nature seem,
When thou, for all they gold, so common art!
Thou teaches me to deem
More sacredly of every human heart,
Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleam
Of heaven, and could some wondrous secret show,
Did we but pay the love we owe,
And with a child's undoubting wisdom look
And with a child's undoubting wisdom look
On all these living pages of God's book."
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
... so this could've been easter, or mother's day, or just a sunday morning we-don't-ever-play-in-these-clothes church service ... whatever the occasion, it was of a time when not having yet been taught that dandelions were weeds, little boys and girls remained innocent enough to find the bright yellow blossoms to be of the most beautiful of the things in their world ...
... and, some may find the following a related thought ...
NIKON D200-SIGMA 17-70@70MM@F9-1/30th-ISO400
... practicing my skills with photoshop, a never ending process, this evening i worked at mastering a "selective graduated blur" filter, simulating what is commonly called the "shallow depth of field" effect produced by "fast" lenses ... in the olden days of 35mm these were relatively common f/1.4-2.0 lenses, now in these digital times virtually non-existent for those of us who can only afford to work* with aps-c and smaller format cameras ...
... here, you can see, i've done a fairly good job of blurring the background while keeping the subject and foreground in sharp focus, producing with an aps-c camera and lens set at an aperture of f/9 the same effect that would result with 35mm camera and lens set at approximately f/4 ... in other words ...
... non-technically, other than with horrendously expensive full-frame nikons and canons and the like (some costing as much as a new car), an image like this should be very sharply focussed in the center, and to the eye almost as sharp in the extreme foreground and background ... indeed, that's what the original image look like, the effect you see is "photoshopping" ...
... okay, so what does this all mean ... hmmmmmmm, how to better say this ...
... this was my supper tonight ... so, either i've been single for way too long, i'm way too single, or ...
... or, and this is how i'd like to think it, i'm just an older guy who remembers that his childhood dreams of being an adult were never visions of cell phones, automatic transmissions, flat-screen televisions, or microwave popcorn, rather, it was as a small boy i smiled myself to sleep wondering in a future when i could have whatever i wanted for my supper ...
*hmmmm ... there's a hint to a wealthy benefactor if i've heard one ...