This photo comes from a personal project named “Inside View,” a 30-day period where I confined myself to only take photos from inside a structure looking out. I didn’t adhere to the rule while doing commercial and portrait work, just my personal work.
The confinement of shooting where I had to be very aware of subject layering, object framing, and storytelling in a single, interesting frame became a great challenge and a refreshing method to explore seeing my world from a different perspective.
Military and police officers are trained in situational awareness where they are always conscious of their surrounding, the flow of people around them, the patterns in ordinary actions and an awareness of how their actions will impact their life.
Photographers must also have situational awareness as they approach photographing a subject especially when the subject’s environment and actions is directly related to the success of the photo.
Narrowing my perspective during the project actually expanded how I witnessed my environment. It made me more keenly aware of how best to frame a distant object in relation to a foreground object.
I also was tested trying to match interior and exterior lighting intensity and color in a simgle frame.
This frame was from a visit to a Catholic artifact museum during a tour by a group of home schooled children. It wasn’t an assignment. I was interested in the items in the museum. Where I would normally take a point and shoot camera this day I carried a digital SLR, an SB800 and a small softbox on a monopod.
The corpus lying in repose adjacent to the window would have been near impossible to shoot without the strobe and less effective it it had not been softened with the softbox.
Used Nikon Creative Lighting System to fire the strobe and help set the exposure.
Details: D200, ISO 400, 1/500, 12-24mm f2.8 @ 12mm f9, aperture priority, RAW.
