Monday, September 11, 2023
This wasn’t anything planned, and I’m still debating on whether or not it was a good idea, but here we are. I’ve got a photo edited and ready to upload, so I’m going to make a quick blog about it. I’ll forego the weather and the thought process behind it all, because the weather didn’t matter, and there was very little thought that went into it. Here’s what happened….
I was down in the studio doing my morning stuff which I’ve gotten in the habit of doing with the ceiling lights off, using only a small desk lamp and a corner floor lamp to light the space. I’ve realized that running seven 4-tube fluorescent fixtures is overkill for my needs in a small portion of the space. This has been going on since the late Spring, so I’m not that slow on the uptake of this opportunity which I took advantage of this morning. I was on the phone with our heating and air folks to schedule the Fall service and happened to be looking across the studio at the wall on the other side of the stage. Nothing was really different, but a phenomenon that I have started to notice over the past month or two is a reflection on the wall. It took me a minute to really figure out what was happening with it after first seeing it.
What I determined was the lights were reflecting off of the polycarbonate sheet that I have stored on the stage near the wall. It created an interesting pattern that reminded me of light reflecting off of water. This stands to reason because that is kind of why I purchased the sheet in the first place. The wall reflection is usually blocked by the computer monitor so I don’t pay a lot of attention to it, but while I was on the phone, I found myself staring at it and seeing all the little details that it offered. The curves really grabbed me differently than they had before. When I got off the phone, I wondered what a photo would look like of this, or if it would even work at all.
This is what I was seeing take place. You can see the polycarbonate sheet on the other side of the V-Flats, and the reflection on the gray wall. There was a calming and recognizable shape to what I was seeing, but I knew that the pattern was totally random. I had never really given much thought to which light was causing it, but when I got up with my cellphone to see how the reflection would look as a photo, I saw my shadow on the wall. The source of the light was from my little gooseneck lamp at the desk. With the way that the lamp was aimed, the light source was so tiny it created these almost sharp reflections on the wall. I could have messed with the light to change things, but it was the way that it was looking right at the moment that had inspired me to create, so I left it alone.
I went out to the truck to get my tripod and positioned it about 10feet from the wall and dropped it down to about a foot and a half above the ground so that I would get the entire plane of the wall in focus without needing much depth of field. I knew that the light levels were low and I was going to want a wider aperture to keep the shutter speed within reason so that I wouldn’t get hot pixels during the exposure. With the poor light, I didn’t want to boost the ISO either. Keeping the image plane perpendicular to the camera would accomplish a lot to achieve these goals.
I pulled the camera out of the bag and fitted my telephoto lens because I was just wanting to capture a very small portion of the wall for the image. As it turned out, I had the lens zoomed to 200mm at the 10feet from the wall. That cropped the image right where the reflection ended top and bottom. I just picked a point from left to right that was the most interesting and fired off a test shot. After looking at how things were appearing, I shifted over to the right a bit more because I saw a better composition now that I had a better idea how this was going to look. Two more exposures with a slight change in exposure that resulted in 6 seconds at f/4 and ISO100 gave me what I needed.
I pulled out the memory card (you can see the open door on the camera) and uploaded the files to Lightroom. It was the last one that I used for the edit, and I just started to play around with it. Since the image was shot on a dark gray wall and the reflection was a lighter gray, I converted the image to black and white to start with. I then started to play with the contrasts to get the image to appear as close to what I had in mind as I could. I then started to pull texture out of the scene because you could see the wall texture way too easy. A little added clarity brought back some of the contrast that the texture reduction caused and I was feeling pretty good about it.
I did some work in the tone curves to fine tune the relationship between the reflection and the wall and felt that I had a good start to the image. I was still not happy with how the overall tones were looking, so I brought it into Photoshop where I added a Gaussian blur to the image which reduced the texture even more and softened the reflections. I then did another curves adjustment where I really pulled in the black and white points and added a steep contrast curve. That got me most of the way to where I wanted it, but it was still missing something. I pulled it back into Lightroom and went to the Color Grading tab. While I liked the black and white version, I felt that it needed some color to set a mood. The best way for this to happen was to bring out warmer tones in the highlights and midtones, while cooling the shadows. Essentially, I was doing a duo tone, or split toned image here. This helped out a lot, and I used this same tab to pull down the shadows a bit more for that final bit of punch.
There I was looking at an image that I was pretty happy with, just 30 minutes after deciding to set the camera up. I don’t know how this will be received from the audiences that it will have, but I really enjoy doing off the wall photography. In this case, it really was off the wall, as the photo is just a capture of a plain wall with a reflection on it. How you choose to see it is up to you. I’m enjoying looking at it and trying to make out other realities in what I am seeing. That is the fun with photography in many ways.
Let me know what you see here, and if you like this one, consider adding it to your collection in the form of a wall print. The conversations that this one would start could be very interesting indeed.
Thank you for joining me for this trek that took me about 10 feet from my editing chair. Not every photo requires travel, just a keen eye to see the possibilities.
Until next time….
