Oleg Vorobyoff: Technique

This essay was originally written for our Winter 2023 Meetup. Oleg’s technique is so refined, and his stereo photography so compelling, that the essay is reproduced here.

This photo was taken using super wide 10mm lenses mounted on my Canon SLR twin rig with a stereo base of six inches.  My original intent was to show the snow piled up in front of the shop, with the shop’s colorful window acting as an ornament in the overall composition.  However, in post production the subject matter in the shop’s window looked so interesting that I decided to concentrate on it, cropping out all but the top bit of the snow pile.   The problem then became how to separate the subject matter behind the shop’s window from the confusing reflection of the sunlit street that was behind me as a took the photo.  That reflection washed out many parts of the composition.  I had to restore the “OPEN” sign and the business hours shown below it.  Those red items occupy an important part of the upper left of the overall composition.  I also had to enlarge the worm at the end of the fishing line.  After all, the story the original window dresser tried to tell is that the bear (fisherbear?) wants to catch one of the fish swimming in the lower half of window dresser’s composition.  As for my composition, I positioned my cameras so that the waterline appeared to run through horizontally through the exact middle of the shop’s window.  So my “story” concentrates on the balance between what appears above the waterline versus what appears beneath it.  The fishing line and the worm almost literally tie together the top and bottom halves of the composition    In any event I think I made enough  changes to the original to constitute “fair use” of the image.  Come to think of it, can you even copyright what happens to appear in a window?

I spend much of my post processing time trying to balance the colors in my compositions.  In fact, I should call myself a 4D photographer not a 3D one, coloration in this case being the fourth dimension.  In this photo, within the shop’s window, the primary balance is between the predominant browns above the waterline against the blues below it.  A wonderful thing about Photoshop is that it provides many ways to control the saturation and tint of the colors in an image.  In fact, you can easily change any color of an item to nearly any other color.  Personally, I would not go so far as to change a blue car into a red car.  The game for me is to capture “decisive moments” in the real world.  But colors captured by a camera can vary greatly depending on exposure.  If a color in a proof print or on a viewing screen it not what I remember, I trust my memory of a color over one that appears to me to be wrong.