Stone Bones

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Big things can be difficult to frame, hard to hold focus on, and lighting can change across their area. This is the famous Diplodocus longus skeleton at the British Museum (Natural History), one of those distributed by the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, based on a specimen from Sheep Creek, Wyoming, unearthed by the collector Barnum Brown in 1901 (if I remember my palaeontology trivia correctly!) I visited the museum in December 2006 and was amazed to find that photography for personal use was as welcome among the great collections as in any other English museum (it's not in Australia!) I took dozens of frames around this 80+ foot animal, from every perspective, and it was far from easy to get an overall image of the critter. Closeups on various bits and from unusual perspectives, but a single view of the whole beast? I walked around it for fifteen minutes, framing and adjusting and snapping. The light was also a little soft, necessitating a long exposure, thus the sharpness of this shot is important too: note the burning-out of the tall windows at the back and the blur of the man walking in the frame. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike.

Relics of the hunt

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These are caribou antlers (which the animals shed every season) and a skull -- relics of the hunt -- and before anyone gets all bent out of shape, let me tell you that these are very, very old. They could conceivably date back to the shamanic days of Native Alaska ... the Great Land is a strange, sometimes almost eerie place. I can tell you stories of Alaska, even from my own small experience of this state, which might amaze. I promise myself, every time I go through the old prints, I'll find my way back there one day. There was no especial trick to getting this image; most of the work involved was in restoring the old print, which is considerably faded. A 600dpi scan, cropping and sizing ... extra contrast and color saturation, and it looks much more like it used to! Photo by Mel, 1997.