Stretch and catch. Block and run. Football is upon us.
For the Dallas Cowboys, that means training camp in the cooler climes of southern California. A month-long game of plans and plays gets monotonous at times.
For this trip, I borrowed an old visual frame of reference: the tilt-shift lens. It’s a lens designed to make the world more rectilinear and straight. But for a creative, it can be an outlet to explore a different vision, one that challenges our minds.
When you change the plane of focus, both vertically and horizontally, things that appear close to one another seem far apart because of the angle and selective focus, creating a dream-type image. The 35mm lens slides left and right of center and tips up and down, changing the plane of focus in relation to the digital camera’s image sensor.
It’s the same as the early years of photography where photographers draped with a black cloth could change the lens plane and focus on large bellow view cameras. Add that to action on the field and fans in the stands, and I was able to create a narrower, at times, miniature view of life on the football field.
Find more Cowboys coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.
