Keuka Lake, New York, from the park at Hammondsport, at the South end of the lake. This was edited from the DNG. Notice that the Lake is glassy calm in the far distance and we're seeing a mirror image of the shore. Very cool that the camera picks that up.

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The hills down to the lakeshore where I live are so steep that the access roads have to be S-curves. A few of my houseguests have reacted with alarm. You need to drive with care if you're transporting something that could tip over or roll around.

Recently someone or other left a trail of spilled paint behind them. There are no stripes on the lower road, so it couldn't have been a malfunctioning line-striping truck. I picture an open five-gallon bucket tipping over on the back of some tradesman's pickup truck. Maybe. No telling.

Recently on the website we had been discussing Jay Maisel's famous dictum to "shoot it now," and when I first saw this I remember thinking, well, this is something I certainly don't have to shoot now—I'll probably be looking at this every time I leave the house for the next ten years.

But I had recently lost a shot I wanted because I had been too lazy to stop, so, coming home, I rather grumpily parked the car, walked back up the road, and snapped three quick frames of it. I remember thinking, "I really don't have to do this now."

A mere three days later, the road was repaved for the first time since I've lived here, and the funky paint spill was gone forever.

Shoot it now!

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These little farms are all over everywhere up here, thanks to the Mennonites and Amish.

These files are converted with an app called Monochrome2DNG. The DNG is opened in Adobe Camera Raw and then I massage the tones to taste with the sliders. On this one I applied a slight amount of Vertical correction in the Geometry tab, to correct the leaning wall in the building with the "H" on it. Maybe I should have applied a bit of Dehaze to it too, as it was a very humid day, and you can see that down at the end of the road. But I didn't.

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Just kinda playin' around with the insane level of detail of the monochrome converted Sigma. I don't know how much you can enlarge this, but I believe Flickr actually downsizes these uploads. And I cropped this. Enlarge this as much as you can and wallow in all that detail. It's pretty fun. Do you know how hard I would have had to work thirty years ago to get this level of detail in a conventional darkroom print? It's crazy. I had a Burke and James Rembrandt 5x7" tailboard camera once. Using it was about as convenient as taking a picture with a lawnmower. I'm not saying something like this would have been impossible, but it would have been several orders of magnitude more of a pain in the katuschka.

Just as an exercise once, I tried to make the sharpest print I possibly could. It was a studio portrait of a couple made with the best short tele I knew of, the Mamiya G 150mm ƒ/4.5L for the Mamiya 6, loaned from Mamiya; Speedotron Black Line strobes; Kodak T-Max 100 (new at the time) in dilute Rodinal; printed on Oriental Seagull RC paper, which was very crisp and selenium-toned nicely (yes, I used to selenium-tone RC prints sometimes), using a 90mm Apo-Rodagon lens, the original one (this one: www.ebay.com/itm/134745669197 ). All using extreme technique at every step and stage of the way. It was just an exercise, for fun. You could take a magnifying glass to that print. But it didn't have much on this, and this took me like ten seconds to take and half an hour to process and post. Half of which was spent writing this!

It's past my bedtime.

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These gulls are a little in front of the plane of best sharpness but you can see the look in his eye! This is better than 24-MP Bayer sensors resolve, I b'lieve.

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