Fort Barrancas Hallway

Earlier this year I posted an image here on Weekly Fifty that was a bit of a foray into black-and-white photography, which is something I almost never do but am casually interested in exploring a bit more. Not in a serious manner, but being open making monochrome photographs when opportunities present themselves. That’s precisely the situation that led to this week’s image, which came about when my wife and I were touring Fort Barrancas with our kids on our road trip to Florida. We were walking through the brick halls, barracks, and fortifications of the old fort on a warm morning when not a lot of other tourists were around; upon rounding a corner we came upon a long window-lined hallway lined with the morning sunlight streaming through onto the centuries-old bricks. The contrast between light and dark, combined with the rich, detailed textures of the bricks, formed a scene that was ideal for a black-and-white picture. I put the X100F in Acros film simulation mode and got to work.

My wife went ahead with the kids while I stayed back for a few minutes to see if I could capture the scene with the little time and gear I had at my disposal. I didn’t have a tripod with me, which presented me with a few challenges that, looking back, I wish I didn’t have to deal with. Lesson learned: just bring the tripod next time. The X100F doesn’t have built-in image stabilization so I either had to set my camera down on a hard surface or use a shutter fast enough to minimize motion blur while shooting handheld. I tried first the former but, the only such surface being the concrete floor, was unsatisfied with the result. As such I had to resort to a technique I don’t generally prefer, but does tend to work more often than I care to admit: take a boat-load of pictures and hope one of them turns out.

Ideally, a small aperture would be best for an image like this in order to get a crisp, clean, detailed shot with as much fine detail as possible. Given the relatively dim light with which I was working, an aperture of f/8 or f/11 would have resulted in a shutter speed of…well, pretty slow. Much too slow to shoot handheld. I ended up settling on an exposure of f/4, ISO 6400, and 1/30 second shutter speed which, of course, is still too slow to get a great shot when shooting handheld at the 35mm equivalent focal length of a Fuji X100F. That’s when you (well, me) put the camera in continuous high-speed shooting, jam the shutter down, and hope for the best.

This is the result, and it’s not too bad if I do say so myself. I really like the interplay between light and shadow, the black vertical shadow on the right, the arches receding into the distance, and even the white light at the end–at the top of the stairs, no less. A smaller aperture would have been nice, but sometimes you have to just take what you can get and in this case I’m pretty pleased with what I got.