Brightwells Yard

Morning Light

Several mornings in a row, the morning sunlight flooding into the bedroom and bouncing off a mirror, glowed radiantly into the hallway.

Shadow

Given the strong shadow against the building, I thought this might make a good black and white image. But it turns out I prefer the colour version.

There will be a fitness center under our flat. Here workmen noisily replace the hoardings with windows (de rigeur for gyms so you can see everyone sweating inside) right below our bedroom windows, early in the morning.

Rising Sea Levels?

Retail

Chair

Nothing much going on here. I was struck by the sharp shadows and the combination of modernist shapes and lines with the wood grain and plant shadows so, of course, I had to see what it would look like in a photograph.

Construction

I shot this looking out the window because I liked the geometry of it. The men were about to dig up a lot of the brick so they could lay some conduit along the base of the building, then cover it all up again. I thought of it as a black and white image at the time because of the strong shadows and the triangle formed by the two men and the circle of conduit in the lower left.

Modern Romance

I had an idea for a series of photos on insomnia. I thought of images of a woman lying in bed, in the dark, unable to sleep, eyes wide open, staring straight up. And I imagined another with a couple lying in bed, each on their own with no connection, both stuck in their own insomniac mental wanderings. Setting it up I would ideally have liked the camera looking straight down at the bed. The best I could manage was an awkwardly contrived tripod with one leg up at about an 80° angle, propped on a suitcase, with the other 2 legs pushed up against the bed. I left the room lights off but allowed street light in through the window behind the camera and room light through the door at the opposite side of the room. I used the Fuji’s base ISO of 160, resulting in exposures ranging between 2½ and 4 seconds, using a remote. Here are a couple more from the shoot, which in the end I decided was more about anomie than insomnia.

Lobby Lights

The lobby of my block of flats has these modernist lights suspended from the 1st floor (that’s the 2nd floor for Americans). I took a couple of pictures of them from the stairwell about halfway between. Both images are in colour but I’ve shifted the colour balance to make them match better.

Tree and Shadow

A most unremarkable photo. I was struck by the tree and it’s shadow on the plain green background of the grass. I tried it in B&W but that didn’t really work for me. I tried reducing the saturation and a variety of other treatments. In the end I left it alone but changed it from Fuji’s Provia, my standard base raw interpretation to Fuji’s Classic Negative, which is somewhat less saturated. This is less bright green than I remember the original scene but more like the image I was trying to capture.