A hole in the glass provides the perfect frame for a building that is being destroyed. Canon 7D, EFS 50mm 1.4 at f18 1/80, ISO 3200A Perfect Photographic Morning Part 2
As I left the parking lot with the view of the blue window I walked around the block and came to the other side of the building that was being destroyed I really wanted to see what was inside but the bottom floor was all boarded up and I couldn’t see anything. There was, however, scaffolding over the sidewalk to protect the people who were walking by. This was a Sunday morning so there wasn’t any work going on but I still hesitated, a little unsure of myself, as I swung my camera over my neck and scrambled up the scaffolding. I thought to myself “no one is going to look up.” I was initially really disappointed as the second floor was all windows but they had been painted from the inside, really strange. But then I notice the hole, it wasn’t large, smaller than my fist but I could see inside and it looked like there was some real possibilities here. I loved the fact that hole in the window provided a frame for the image, I loved the fact that I could just barely see the window frame in the top left corner from my previous image, and I loved the way the planks on the floor lead your to that mysterious darkened doorway. I had to stop the exposure way down to f18 or the glass just became a blurry amorphous mass this pushed my ISO up to 3200 but luckily the 7D handles that pretty well. As I brought the doorway into focus something really interesting happened, I could see writing on the glass in the top right corner. At first I thought it was a sticker on the glass but I pulled my eye off the camera to look and I realized that I was looking at a reflection from a store on the other side of the street and even though the glass itself is out of focus the reflection is the same apparent distance from the glass as the doorway is, (remember your high school physics?), so it was in focus as well. I really liked how many layers I was playing with here and was really happy with the image. Afterwards I pulled it into Aperture and did the black and white conversion with Nik Silver EFex Pro and I darkened the image, and increased the grain to add some drama and mystery.
-Russell Berg
As I looked to the left, in the middle of the all the destruction was a circular life preserver. Irony, anyone? Canon 7D, EFS 50mm 1.4 at f8 1/60, ISO 1250