Orange Trim

Warning, this post is dry. If my motivation for this blog is to improve my photography overall it would be useful to get a little geeky about what specifically I'm doing right and wrong and how I could make the image better. I won't being doing this very often but it's something I'd like every now and then for my own benefit. 

Today's image is similar to yesterday's in that it is a picture of a house through a wet car window. I decided to photograph the house because the bright orange trim with the baby-blue Virgin Mary caught my eye. In general, composing a photo like this, with the subject in the middle would be a mistake. I think it worked in this case though because the edges of the field are white enough from the snow to give the house a pleasing frame. Including the saturated stop sign in the frame also keeps your eye moving around the picture. 

In addition to the framing, the visible water from the car window helped establish the appropriate atmosphere for the photograph. The water conveys that the day was cold, wet and generally crummy, and indeed it was. The water is too focused though and it detracts from the primary subject of the picture, the house. 

Concerning the subject, the house and the Virgin Mary are more underexposed than I intended. Much of the detail I would like to see is obscured in the shadows. If I exposed the house more though the snow-white edges of the picture would likely be overexposed. I think I intuited that during post processing when I applied a subtle white vignette to the photo. The vignette worked to brighten the snow and draw focus to the house, but it doesn't compensate for the lack of fine detail. Because the Virgin Mary was important for my composition I did try to correct that element of the frame by using the Photoshop sponge tool to saturate her blue robe. That helped, but it would have been better, obviously, to get the exposure right in the first place.  

Finally,  the overall picture is noisy. This with the underexposure of the house and the over-focused water on the car window make this photograph visually muddy.

Looking at my shooting parameters, the ISO, shutter speed and aperture for this photograph are 1000, 1/8 sec and f/25 respectively. Lowering the ISO to 800 or less would help control the digital noise in the photo but would also decrease the overall exposure. To compensate I would need to decrease shutter speed or open up the aperture. The 1/8 sec shutter speed is already slower than I want for a handheld photograph so I'd want to open up the aperture. The added bonus to opening the aperture is that I could put the focal plane more on the house, or the water, and blur the other. So if I were to try this photograph again I would probably try it from the same vantage point but I would set my camera to something like ISO 800, Shutter speed, 1/16, aperture f/13 or less.  I'd also play around with the shallower focal point, i.e. placing the sharp focus on the window or the house, to see which variation is more appealing.