This is a photograph of a city, Minneapolis, in the daytime. on Flickr.

Crown Graphic | 135mm f/4.7 Optar (wide open/titled) | Arista/Foma 100 (@80) | R60 filter | Grad ND filter | Rodinal (1:50)

Recently, I’ve been taking Highway 55 to downtown which takes you through a not-so-nice part of town that has some great vantage points of the skyline. I think it’s interesting to see the city with the industrial part of town in the foreground. Don’t get me wrong, the Stone Arch Bridge and all is a nice area, but you’ll run into about 500 other photographers there, aiming their cameras at the same place you are. This view (above) had always intrigued me as I drove by, so last weekend I decided to venture through the maze of road construction from my apartment in Longfellow to this spot, on a dead end of a road that runs parallel to Olson Memorial Highway (the other name for 55). I was standing in a field of spring-long grass and it was windy as hell. My camera tipped over once with the lens extended and everything, but thank goodness for cameras built like tanks. All I had to do was pick it up and re-level it and it was good to go. I suppose I’ll tire of this “tilting” business sooner or later; I mean, I can do it whenever I want on Instagram. But there’s something like the real thing (notice the swirl of the old, wide open, tilted lens in the bottom corners) that makes it special. The ability to isolate an important element (the skyline) in a scene while also noting its context (Industrial North Minneapolis) is the key to this technique. The 135mm lens is the equivalent of about a 40mm lens on a 35mm camera. It’s a pretty wide normal lens, so taking landscape shots like this can be difficult if you don’t have a way of isolating your subject, be it through a vignette, good light, or tilt (or all of the above).

All analog all day.