Posted on March 25, 2014
by Russ Widstrand 
0 Recent Posts
Exit Stage Right
Visiting the Whitney Museum in New York City I like to look past the art and see what...
Cornell Ave
Over the years I have passed by this building hundreds of times. This structure...
Shaped by the desert
I was on my way to Giant Rock, a massive bolder in Joshua Tree. I tried to photograph...
symbolic people
What to do. What to do. I saw many things in Robert’s architecture image, form, color and typography. In contemplating these elements, I spent the first half of the day shooting various images of storefront architecture here in Portland, some were reflected into glass. I got some ok images, but adding another storefront image to the 2 already submitted seemed… lame.
During the night, I had thought about model railroad towns and wondered how much of a long shot it might be to source and shoot that in 6 hours. As luck would have it, I hit the jackpot! I Googled some model train enthusiasts and via 3 degrees of separation, I found a great guy named Leland, about 45 minutes north of me. His model railroad layout is out of this world.
The next hurdle was the actual approach to shooting the miniature set. While driving to the location, it occurred to me that to create a believable perspective, my pro grade Canon gear would be too big to fit into the set. Additionally, the optical center of the lens would put it at the second floor of any miniature building. Hmmmm, what to do. Lightbulb!… solution… my iPhone. Sure enough, the phone proved to be the right solution. The lowest orientation of the lens was just about right for a human transported into this mini-mall-world.
Big thanks go out to Leland for his generosity and patience. Russ