three days ago they cut down a very old tree from our deceased next door neighbor’s front yard. the tree was over 120 feet tall and old. gina and sophia counted 89 rings on the stump that remained. i witnessed most of the cutting and it was pretty sad as there was nothing wrong with the tree. the irony of the situation was that the tree needed to be cut so that an oil spill could be cleaned up. the fifty year old oil tank that was under the tree had been leaking for many years and had contaminated a deep and wide area of the ground by the front yard of the house.

ruth's tree as it stood after 90 years

initially they had called a tree cutter from PA who was a total maniac. he just climb up the tree and started cutting huge branches and dropping them right onto the street. there was no way we were going to let him cut down the upper branches as they were over our house. we quickly put an end to his day or he would’ve really made a mess.

the crazy pennsylvanian

note the branch about to hit the ground. each branch probably weighed 500 lbs.

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a while back i wrote a post about tilt shift photography and how easy it was to create the tilt shift look in photoshop by simply using a couple of filters and masks. of course you can go out and buy a tilt shift lens and every photo can have that look, but they are kind of expensive. since a few friends asked me to show them, i’ll outline the technique right here.

step 1: choose the right photograph
even though you can do this to every photo, not all photographs work the same way. find a photo that you can isolate a specific object in the foreground or middle ground. this will greatly accentuate the effect. i chose a shot i took in athens of the temple of hephaestus from the areopagus.

temple of hephaestus

step 2: duplicate the background: self explanatory

tilt shift 2

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we were in athens on the day the fires started. we took this panoramic shot from the areopagus, the hill opposite the acropolis (right side). in the center of the photo is the hill of lycavitos (literally, hill of wolves, although the wolves were killed to extinction ages ago). the view is facing northeast and you can see the plume of smoke rising from behind the hill and the sprawl of athens. in the bottom left of the photograph is the ancient agora. remains have been found there dating to 2800 BC. the large building of the stoa was rebuilt by the rockefeller foundation and is now a museum of antiquities.

the fires spread quickly, due to the high winds of the following two days, burning thousands of acres. one of the many areas that were affected was the city of Marathon, historic home of the famous race. unfortunately, the fire has been attributed to arson. truly sad.

you can view a high-rez version of the photo here
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