Uphill Trudge
05 January 2014 -- 5/365
Providence, Rhode Island
I went to Roger Williams Park this afternoon planning to photograph people sledding on one of the many hills that dot the landscape. What's interesting to me is how much the activity has morphed in the many years since I was a kid. We all had sleds. Real ones, made of wood, equipped with metal runners, and a handle in front that allowed you to steer the sled in almost any conditions. Usually, one kid in the group would have a toboggan, but since you couldn't steer it, the toboggan usually ended up standing upright at the top of the hill while the owner borrowed a real sled. Today, there's not a sled to be found. Tubes and plastic "mini-toboggan" type "sleds" are all you see on the slopes. You can't steer them, you can't link them together, and they get nowhere near the speed of a good old Flexible Flyer, but good luck trying to find a real sled in the stores these days.
As an interesting aside, back in my college days, I ran Cross Country for Providence College. Then, as in now, most of the top runners at PC were recruited from Ireland. One afternoon after a heavy snowfall, we were out for a run and one of the freshman Irish runners (he was from Limerick) was amazed at the kids sledding down a steep hill along our route. It's not something kids did in Limerick in the late 1970s, apparently! Well, I borrowed a sled from one of the kids and took him down the hill on his first ever sledding adventure. What neither of us knew was that a photographer from the Providence Journal was at the bottom of the hill photographing the kids sledding. Suffice it to say that Coach Amato was not at all pleased with the photo on the front page of the sports section the next day showing me and Eugene O'Shea roaring down this hill on a sled with "PCAA Track" clearly emblazoned on our sweatshirts. That afternoon was a painful workout...
Post Processing started with a classic filter in Topaz B&W FX. I adjusted color sensitivity sliders, adaptive exposure, regions, contrast, boost black, boost white, and protect highlights. A levels adjustment was added in PSE.
