For those expecting another in a long series of weird images, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Some of you may think this banal, that I’ve lost the creative spark, and need to change vocations. Perhaps he should be dishwasher at a diner, some of you are likely saying.
However, there are two subtle things going on here. Well, three actually.
The first is that for the last six weeks I’ve pretty much been home. Karen and I go hiking once or twice a week, and I went to the store once, but other than that, here I is.
The second is that I find virtually everything interesting, and several images in the Social Distancing series came about because I was just walking through my house and the light was right and some ordinary thing struck me as beautiful somehow. (I have to be careful with this kind of inspiration, otherwise most of these photos would be of Karen.) And it was the same with this simple shot from our bathroom. I walked in either looking for something (coffee creamer, perhaps) or to put something away (a crescent wrench), and suddenly I saw my soap dish as if it were the first time. It was just the soft light and the simple composition that did it for me. I’m often blown away by quiet simplicity, and here we go again. I just love this little scene. Domestic, yet bucolic, with pleasant earthy tones.
The third thing was lighting, and this may be the subtlest of all—because none of you noticed it. And that is one of the great axioms of photography: “If you have to add light, don’t let anyone see you doing it.” Here’s the rub: I wanted to shoot at f/6.3, which would render the soap and the window sill reasonably sharp, but leave the scene out the window pleasantly soft. With that f-stop, my camera told me it needed 1/8th of a second to get the interior exposed correctly. But, at that same desired f/6.3 aperture, for the scene outside, the camera was telling me I needed to use 1/125th of a second. This leaves us with a four-stop discrepancy, which would be really hard to deal with in post-processing: at the lower shutter speed the background would be blown out, and at the higher shutter speed the interior would be so underexposed as to look like the inside of a shoe. (Could I have done exposure bracketing? Sure, but come on, it’s a soap dish.) Now, one fascinating thing is that without referring to the camera, I wouldn’t have known this. Our brains are wonderfully designed to interpret imagery, and for any of us walking into the bathroom, we would have interpretted, without even thinking about it, that the light levels in the entire scene were pretty much the same. The soap looks fine, and the bush outside looks fine. But our cameras, as sophisticated as they may be, are no match for our grey matter. The solution was remarkably simple: expose for the outdoor scene, and add light for the interior. I had to fuss a bit with the remote flash, but finally found the correct angle and output to bounce it off the ceiling such that it exposed the room correctly, but left the impression of natural light.
So, not as simple a shot after all, right? There will be a quiz next week…
Here is the big Flickr version.
Meta: Pentax K-3, Sigma 18–35mm f/1.8 lens @ f/6.3, ISO 100, 1/125th of a second, flash bounced off ceiling, one tripod leg in bathtub
