Sunday, August 26, 2012

Week 31: Utility

I've been lazy with this blog lately and have kind of abandoned themes and stuck with them for a week. This week is my attempt to at least half get back into that. I didn't exactly have a theme for this week, but I definitely knew what I wanted to take pictures of and I knew the general feel I wanted most of the photos to have.

There are some pretty interesting things in the basement of the place that I work. I've always been a little tentative to go into those places since I probably shouldn't be there, and there was always the potential that I could run into someone. Well, I had to go into work this weekend and figured it would be a good time to explore the bowels of my office. What follows is what I found.

This shot was taken in the air conditioning and furnace control room. I knew I wanted to do an HDR of this as soon as I saw it. Machinery and grease always make for good HDR subjects.


This is the motor that controls the ancient elevator in our office. I swear I'm going to die in that thing one of these days. I tried a lot of different shots of this before I got what I liked. I originally tried using just the available light with a long shutter speed, but the windows kept getting really washed out. So I picked a shutter speed that exposed the windows the way I liked them and then used my flash to fill in the motor. 


Just a couple of random electrical components sitting on a window sill. I really liked the light coming in through the glass block window. 


I couldn't really get a good shot that I liked of this. I think because the subject just isn't all that interesting. All of that said, I think I finally found a lighting technique that worked for what I was going for. I tried putting my flash in about 8 different configurations before wedging it between some pipes in the ceiling and firing it straight down. 

 


This one didn't work out quite how I would have liked. With the available light there, was a really nice tiny amount of light illuminating the railing and part of this boiler. Unfortunately I couldn't really get it exposed the way I wanted, so I decided to try and HDR shot. In general I like it, but it's not what I was hoping for.