Flying Saddle Blankets © 1999 John A. Lind

• Olympus OM-4
• 35~105mm f/3.5~4.5 Zuiko Zoom (MC)
• Kodak Elitechrome 400
• Focal length and exposure data not recorded
• Hobson's Bluffdale, Eldred, Illinois, June 1999
• Late in the afternoon after horseback riding, the saddle blankets are hung over a hitching rail to dry out before they are stacked in the barn.  I was photographing the barn and the entrance to the farm and kept walking by these.  Each time the scene with its patterns and symmetry caught my eye.  The blankets nearly completely conceal the rail under them.  Finally I stopped and took this shot.  It was deliberately aimed with the lens axis perpendicular to the barn wall and the blankets on the rail to remove any perspective lines and remove as much apperance of depth to the scene as possible.  There is a slight amount if you look at the grass; the blades of grass are slightly larger in the immediate foreground than by the base of the wall.  It's too subtle to add much depth.  The lack of any real shadows also helped abstract the scene.  When taking it I tried various vertical positions of the blankets in the frame.  Locating them at the upper and lower one-third dividing lines didn't look nearly as good as dead center, so that's where I shot it.  The dividing line between the green grass and the red barn wall is close to the lower one-third dividing line, but I don't know that this makes much difference.  I used the zoom to frame this as tightly as possible to get exactly what I wanted out and exclude everything except the wall, blankets and grass.