Gridlock

This shot of the interior of our nation’s Capitol was shot on Fuji Superia 400 film with the Canon Rebel 2000 in early 2000, a time where, like today, America was in the midst of political gridlock where it seems like nobody really knows what’s going on, Republican or Democrat.

To be honest, I never liked this picture. But, having acquired my “new to me” film scanner that scans at a higher resolution than anything I’ve ever used before, I am going back and rescanning my film so I can take advantage of all the new digital goodies, such as color reconstruction and automatic filtering of dust and film scratches. I was literally walking in when this was shot. The film negative is actually pretty badly damaged due to age, but as can be seen it appears to be in nearly perfect condition. Quite impressive. It’s a shame that this “Digital ICE (image correction enhancement” is limited to color film. Looking back, I rescanned the negative and I like the three-dimensional quality that this shot has. It has more depth and it actually looks as massive as it really is.

This, on the other hand, is what I’ve had posted here on this site and other places before that I’ve always thought was the better shot. Also rescanned on the new scanner, it has never looked this nice before. I sat the camera flat on the brass spot in the middle of the floor, made the zoom as wide as I could make it, and set the timer on automatic mode. The symmetry isn’t perfect and that’s always driven me a little nuts, but I am anal retentive like that.

I don’t want to set up a political war (there’s a place for that online and it’s called Twitter). No matter where you are politically, there’s got to be a much better way to tackle border security and immigration than just putting 800,000 workers out of a paycheck until one side gets what they want. Shoot photos, even if they’re peering up over a steel border wall, and not each other!