Benchmark

This is a bit of a companion to last week’s picture of a rose in the early morning, in that it was taken at the same location, at roughly the same time of day, and bears some interesting characteristics that are not super common for my pictures. Basically, despite the familiar elements in this picture it was nonetheless a fun learning opportunity and a chance for me to try out something new or, perhaps more accurately, try taking a picture in lighting conditions that are quite unfamiliar to me.

One notable difference between this photo and many of my photos is that I didn’t set out to capture a specific subject in the traditional sense. Rather, my goal was to capture a mood, or an emotion, and convey it through an entire scene. If you look at this picture and feel something–a sense of calm, quiet, or peace, or maybe think about the early predawn hour and what it portends for the coming day, then I think I’ve done what I set out to do. If not, well, maybe I’ll try again another time :)

As I paused to consider this scene, I first thought about what I could include, and how to set my exposure, such that the viewer might feel what I was hoping to transmit through the still image. That might sound a bit cold and academic, but it’s necessary to think about these kinds of things if you want your images to come out right–or at least, come out how you want them. The light was so low that I had to shoot at f/2.8, 1/125 second, ISO 6400 in order to get anything usable at all. And f/2.8 meant I had to, then, be a little picky about what I would focus on. All of these small decisions led to one conclusion: it had to be the bench. It was the focal point of the image, the one thing to draw in viewers and help ground them in the scene.

The only trouble with this line of thinking, however, is that the bench is too dark to see. And in retrospect I think something else might have worked better: the light, perhaps. Or maybe the bright stairwell in the background. A shrubbery, perhaps? It’s not that focusing on the bench yielded some kind of unusable image, just that it didn’t really have the effect I hoped it would. And if you visit the original on Flickr and zoom in to 100% you’ll see that the bench is too big of a target to be in focus: the center is sharp, but the support legs in the foreground and background are not. If anything, the back legs are a bit sharper which isn’t really what I was going for at all. By sheer coincidence the light next to the bench ended up being in focus even though that was not my intent at all. (I did, however, shoot this at -1EV so I wouldn’t clip the highlights, and that approach actually did work out pretty well.)

I’m going to close this out by circling back to the beginning: I felt something when I walked past this scene, and used my camera to attempt to capture that feeling and, hopefully, impart it to you, the viewer. If that happened, great! If not, well, no worries. There’s always next time :)