Perspective is everything—straight lines aren’t always rendered straight unless you get the camera in the exact right position.

In the above image, it looks like the sagging barn has a raised roof on both ends. But look at the next image, where I corrected my position to get square with the barn: the left side is not actually pointing up.

The difference is a small difference in perspective. In the first image, I was tilting the camera a small amount which distorted the relationships in the image. In the second image, I took a moment to get my bearings.

The second image is also a panorama, made up of three shots to get a wider view, to add a little space around the barn to let it ‘breathe’. I would have had to stand in the middle of the road to get that wide of a shot, but then I would have had a fence in the view as well. The panorama seemed to be the best option to get a clean shot.

These were shot with the new 50mm F/1.2 lens on the Sony A7r IV. I had a lot of fun with it; I drove around Enumclaw looking for interesting things to take pictures of. I haven’t used a 50mm lens for a long time—several years at least, maybe much longer. Having just one lens, I had to think carefully about how to frame shots, what kinds of things to shoot, and so on. Paying that much attention was fun; I saw the world in new ways, which is why I like to take photographs: I see the subject of the photo more intensely that I could just staring at it.

The 50mm lens is a miracle worker; one of the highest quality and sharpest lenses I have ever shot with in the 35mm format. It renders color really accurately, too. Fun to shoot with, and fun to process the images. It gives me a lot to work with.