Richard J. Fateman photos

Photos by Richard Fateman

The following jpeg image is my first experiment in scanning black/white photos. This is a small 256-gray level panoramic photo Yosemite Valley from Washburn Point (19kbytes). Here is another rendition Yosemite Valley from Washburn Point (80kbytes) that will probably require you to scroll sideways to see it all.

Technical notes

This is a composite of 3 images taken on T-Max 100 film with a Rolleiflex E-3 TLR (3.5 Zeiss Planar lens) using a Rollei panoramic tripod head that provides for swiveling around the center of the lens. I used a medium yellow filter.

I printed each of the three sections at 10.5 inches square on Ilford Multigrade RC paper, with modest burning in on the sky and slight dodging on some of the dark valley areas. These were scanned on an HP flatbed scanner at about 1000 dots/inch. The TIF files are about 7.1 megabytes each.

I merged the files into one 19.4 megabyte file, using Adobe Photoshop, where the opacity of the panels near the joints was modified and feathered to smooth the panoramic effect. (Thanks to Paul Debevec for help using Photoshop in the UC Computer Science multimedia and graphics labs.) The only other operations in photoshop included dust spotting and a modest lightening of the valley in the right.) It was downsampled to JPEG substantially to make the file above. Much more detail is available in Yosemite Valley from Washburn Point (2.23meg jpeg) but you would need a fast connection and/or lots of patience, plus a browser willing to display large JPEGs to see this. Most browser plug-ins seem to fail on this one, and display it as a little broken-picture icon. You should be able to save this (washburn.jpg) to a file and look at it in a photo-editing program as an alternative.

Printed at 72 dots per inch the original file image would be about 120 inches wide and 33 inches high. I'm still trying to find a way to print this nicely.

Some other photos

A small photo of a A lined bubble is remarkable principally because this tropical snail shell is about 3mm long. It was taken with a Pentax 35mm SLR (ME Super) using a 28mm wide-angle lens reverse-mounted so that the normal front of the lens is facing toward the film. Pentax sells a ring adaptor for this purpose. A short extension ring (10mm) was also used for even closer focusing. Exposure in bright sunlight on Kodak Gold 100 film was 1/60 second at f/22. The rough surface under the shell is smooth matboard. This photo a 70kbyte jpeg scanned at 72dpi on an HP scanjet, starting from a commercially printed snapshot.

My wife collects tiny shells and humors me by encouraging me to take photos of them.

I've taken some digital photos more recently. Lots. But I'm not posting them, at least yet. Except for this 2003 video taken with a Canon S230 camera, of Laysan Albatrosses clacking, hooting, sky-pointing, bobbing, and poking their own chests. This was taken on Kauai, in a side yard of a house on a cliff in Princeville. The area is dotted with Albatross nests and chicks, in the right season. Anyway, here is the movie. The best part is at the very end.

To see what else I do, see my home page.

Email: fateman@cs.berkeley.edu