Splash of Colour in the Dull and Boring

Keeping in mind that I am really a photographer waiting for my big opportunity and am just doing IT work in the meantime so I can feed my family; for some time now I have had this idea in my head to take a picture of some location or setup that is basically, by and large, boring, dull, colourless, and completely walk-by dismissible. Except that something catches your eye. Something totally out of place. Something beautiful and erotic.

I won’t tell you my Plan A or my Plan B for constructing this scenario in case one day I actually get around to putting one or the other of them together. I want it to be a surprise. Also both ideas are kind of hard to explain without facial expressions and a useful amount of arm waving.

But in the meantime, sort of as practice, I had an idea along these lines that I could just whip up in my cluttered messy office. I don’t call it a study any more. It used to be a study. That was when it was in a smaller room in the house. But now I have relocated ‘the study’ into what the architect’s of this house labelled as the “games room” I feel it really deserves to be known as an office. And it sounds way cooler.

So the following four pictures, which are actually all just different crops of the same shot, illustrate what I am trying to explain. Something sexy and exciting buried in amongst the daily ‘boring and mundane’.

Way over there on another desk up against the back wall of the office ‘posing’ on my Acer EasyStore 4TB Windows Home Server is a high-heeled shoe. Totally out of place in the grey, dull, boring old office.

I have made everything in the picture except the shoe greyscale so the shoe really stands out. Also the contrast of everything but the shoe has been dropped down to –50 (minus 50) so it is much softer.

In this crop of the picture I have applied one of the rules of photography cropping that suggests putting strong single subjects with implied distance into one of the ‘corner 12ths’ or corner quarters—based on the picture being divided into 12ths by three vertical lines and two horizontal lines.

So in the above picture the eye-catching shoe is, more or less, in the top right corner 12th. This makes it look so far away. Way off over there.

Here the shoe is in the top centre 12th, but that is not a rule (that I am aware of anyway). Just something I thought I would try. If I were working at my desk looking down-ish, reading or writing, then this would sort of be the view of the sensual shoe that I would catch from time to time.

For the photographers checking this out notice that the word Microsoft on the keyboard in the bottom of the crop is not too badly out of focus. It is almost ‘in focus’. Yet the focal plane is obviously set on the sexy shoe—which is at least three metres away from the keyboard. Also only the shoe has been sharpened. None of the grey part of the picture was sharpened, in fact it was softened (in that the contrast was wound down massively). Also the camera is on a tri-pod barely a third of metre from the keyboard.

The reason that the word Microsoft is not that blurred is because I used f16 at 4 seconds for this exposure.

In this final crop I have tried to incorporate two things: (a) the approximate view I might get when I am working looking at the screen; and (b) make the shoe look a little bigger in the crop.