About "Expanding Mind"

The Weekly Assignments are a journey we are taking to learn and
increase our skills and experience. This door represents the start of
that path, which we begin with Assignment 1. The light represents the
world of photography that awaits us, in two ways. First the classic
'we can't see what lies beyond until we go there'. Second, photography
is all about finding, manipulating, and recording light.


Lighting and Setup

I started by taking a shot of the doorway with existing light to get a
starting exposure. I discovered a really bad highlight on the wall
from an overhead light and poor floor lighting, so I brought a 300W
el-cheapo Home Depot floodlight out to tame the wall and fix the floor.
That brought my exposure to 1/50s and f/4 after I threw a white T-Shirt
on the flood to soften it - though this meant I could only use that
light in short bursts, as it gets hot quick and could scorch the shirt.

I set up two flashes inside the room. One on a small tripod near the
floor, one on a big tripod just under chest height, both oriented for
maximum vertical light. The lower flash fired via optical slave, the
upper one was on the radio trigger. I threw a white sheet across the
open door and pinned it to the wall to get the diffuse light.

I made a mistake there as my white sheet has a thin blue edge on one
side, and it ended up at the top of the door. I should have hung the
sheet upside-down. I had to clone the blue bit out later.

It took another couple of test shots to get the flash power dialed in.

You can still see a tiny bit of the nasty highlight from the ceiling
light near the light switch. Just up from the switch and close to the
door frame.


Exposure Details

I don't know why the EXIF data didn't make it; I thought I stuck it
properly on the file I uploaded. Oh well, here it is:

Shutter: 1/50s
Aperture: f/4
ISO: 100
Focal length: 11mm


Darkroom

First I corrected perspective, making the horizontal and vertical lines
truly rectilinear. Perspective work was done in Hugin, the rest in The
Gimp.

I converted to black and white using Channel Mixer.

I used the Clone tool to get rid of the blue trim on my white sheet
that I shouldn't have put across the top of the doorway. That part of
the sheet actually cast a bit of a shadow on the door, which I (mostly)
corrected by selecting the area with a big feathering radius and
working it with Curves.

Aside from that little area, no Curves on the rest of the image. Added
a little sharpening as this came from RAW.


Lessons, Things I Should've Tried

Starting off by checking existing light and then building on it worked
well this time.

I should have tried lighting the room from behind the door with one
flash, so I could use the other in place of the 300W light. I'm not
sure that would have worked, though. Looking at this image, the bottom
part (below the handle) appears slightly brighter than the top - this
is the difference between flash's power. The area affected indicates
to me that one single flash wouldn't have lit the whole thing
uniformly.