Stairwell with a Difference

[Don Ellis]

The difference is that it's mine (sorry, I'm in advertising, where a good headline is often as far as we get).

I thought I would take a shot of the new stairwell in the new flat before the old moving men remove the paint as they haul things up to the second floor.

I also thought the photo would complement Pekka's background nicely.

http://www.kleptography.com/images-angles/stairwell/crw_0162-1024ps80.jpg

[gandini]

Yes, Don, another wonderful image from your creative eye! This shot compares well with the one I posted a couple of months back from Harvard. Yours is rich wood, but very modern with squares and angles and the metal hand rail--very different to the red carpet and wooden curving hand rails of Harvard! I love this photo, and rank it high up on the list of my favorites of yours.

Thanks, and good luck with the move! ha ha.

cheers,

[Don Ellis]

I almost subtitiled this one: "An obvious attempt to get Philip to come out and play." But I figured it would work better with a bit more subtlety.

Nice to hear from you again... thanks for your comments. As for the move, you're supposed to live closer so I can call you. :)

[Vitali]

Looks very good.
Colours, forms and textures are very well balanced in the space of the picture and yet very dynamic image.

Regards,
Vitali
P.S Hope the moving was smooth enough.

[gandini]

A technical question, Don:
As most know, you use a G2 (or blow the dust off your G1, but I suspect this is G2). These cameras are notorious for their massive depth of focus, but I note some softness caused by out of focus at the left of the image, at the "lower" stairs. The upper stairs at the right are very crisp. Approximately how much distance is covered in your image, and do you think you could have gotten it all in focus?
An alternative would be selective sharpening in PS, (which I admit to doing on occasion.)

Yes, you did tempt me out of my seclusion. I have been lurking, but just not so motivated to participate these days, with so much else going on in my little life!

Cheers,

[Don Ellis]

Hi Philip,

I very definitely could have gotten everything in focus with a tripod. (This was a G2 photo, as you guessed; the G1 is pretty much a dedicated infrared camera now.)

It's 12 feet to the bottom step from where the camera was. I was just walking by, looked down, liked the photo, rested my camera on the railing and shot using P mode -- 1/20th second at f2.0.

Despite the look of the picture, there was hardly any light. A good f4.0 (even less) would have captured it all. I only took the one shot. Sometimes you shoot 60 pictures to get one and other days you shoot one and that's all you need.

Having said that, if the movers don't damage things too much, and I don't get too busy, I might try again with a tripod in Av mode.

As for sharpening, I usually torque everything down tight with a socket wrench, but I was getting a bit of halo around the the outside edge of the molding, so I backed off to 80%, 0.4 radius and 0 threshold, rather than my usual 120%. Actually, it looked even better when I used UltraSharpen at 200%, 1.0, 0, duplicated the layer, and then used Photoshop's Unsharp Mask at 120%, 0.4, 0 and set the opacity of that layer to 30%.

But, as I said, the halo was bugging me. I couldn't understand why I was getting it. So I walked over to the new house, checked out the molding and, sure enough, it was paint overlay from a not-too-perfect job of cutting in around the molding. The point being that heavier sharpening would have worked very well, except for the painter.

Cheers,