Mediterranean

I find that this picture evokes the Southern European light: bright sky, dark Mediterranean pines, never far from the shimmering of the sea. The balustrade suggests the elegance of old seaside resorts.

Technically, this not a great picture. The contrast is bad, and it is not sharp. There are scratches. Yet, this forces the viewer to fill in the missing details, and our brains have no problem doing so; in fact, I think pictures that require us to fill in something engage us more than the ones that don't. If this picture had been sharp and clear, probably it would have no interest.

The picture was taken with a 1930s Autographic Kodak. Since the film rolls that the camera is designed to use are long out of production, I cut a piece of photo paper to size, and put it behind the film gate, which by the way is huge - more than 5 inches wide, putting this "coat pocket" camera (that is what the original marketing materials said) in large format territory by today's standards.
Back home, I developed the paper negative, scanned it, and reversed and toned it on the computer. Paper negatives require long exposures (their sensitivity is roughly equivalent to ISO 4, which means the exposure has to about 30 times longer than for ISO 100 film), and the camera must have moved a little during the exposure.

Interestingly, nothing of the place this picture evokes is real. The picture was taken in Seattle, at a city park not far from the I-90 bridge; the body of water behind the trees is Lake Washington, not the Black Sea, and the trees are Douglas firs, not mediterranean pines.