Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Although the middle two thirds (I checked the ratio using 'wc') of my earlier post about yesterday were taken up with the tale of my encounter with the rock-throwing, sense-challenged individual and a few less violent but similarly annoying folk, my walk wasn't entirely unpleasant. The weather was more comfortable than I'd been expecting, and the setting sun played gently over old brick buildings. At one point this church caught my eye and I detoured half a block out of my way to try to capture what the light was doing (though I fear I didn't quite manage to retain the glow when I adjusted the levels, so I'll make another stab at editing it later).

There are a lot of churches with this kind of feel to them in Baltimore, and I really ought to make a project of going around to most of them around sunrise or sunset (the "golden hour"), depending on which direction each building faces, and shoot them properly instead of just grabbing snapshots now and then while on my way someplace else. This one isn't far from my house (duh -- given where I was walking yesterday) and there are others nearby that I could start with (including the double-spired one at the far end of my block, which I've already shot on film), but there are also a couple of really interesting ones up on North Ave., and some more ornate churches, even more striking but with a completely different feel in Charles Village and ... uh, Mount Vernon or whatever the neighbourhood just south of that is -- I'm a bit fuzzy on neighbourhood boundaries other than my own Union Square. The ones closer to the middle of town will be harder to photograph because one cannot get to a suitable distance without winding up inside of some other building. (A wide angle lens helps, but even at 24mm the distance is kinda close.)

Anyhow, I was just playing with GIMP, and wanted to see whether this was as interesting a photo a day later. I didn't notice perspective distortion so much in the viewfinder, but when I tried to straighten it on the monitor it suddenly seemed like a Big Problem -- I couldn't make it look as though I'd held the camera straight, especially after cropping it (because visual context about distance and angle of view got removed when I narrowed the image to the church). My first thought was that I really want a PC (perspective-correcting) lens, but then I realized that my digital camera doesn't have a replacable lens anyhow (and even with the 35mm, I don't think I'd be carrying a PC lens as my general walking around lens, unless they're less bulky than I imagine, so it would come in handy on the days when I specifically plan to shoot buildings but wouldn't have been mounted yesterday ... and a 35mm PC lens is wicked expensive, so it seems more likely that I'll eventually manage to own a Speed Graphic or some other large-format camera where the PC movement is a feature of the camera body rather than the lens). So after that bit of daydreaming I remembered that GIMP has a perspective tool that I'm really not very good at using, and that I'm not going to get better with it until I practice, and lo, here's a shot to practice on.

It's not quite right, but it's better than it started.

So there was that unpleasantness which occupied enough of my thoughts to consume the majority of my story-of-yesterday, but the day did also include the useful trip to the doctor and the acquisition of a small quantity of groceries, and a bit of photography. Just to put the ugliness with the rock in ... perspective.

And when I came home, of course, there was my delightful kitty waiting for me, which is always good. (Hah, an excuse to add a second picture!)

I don't think I'm going to get out anywhere tonight, alas, however much I'd like to spend an evening with entertaining people who don't want to throw rocks at me, and to help a friend celebrate. My knees hurt, my neck hurts, my head hurts, and I didn't manage to get that nap. And I think the boss is trying to tell me I have cat-furniture duty tonight. (Of course, in her opinion that's one of my main functions, at least in the colder months.) But I think I'm going to disturb her for long enough to go cook something.