Phone Home at Dusk

Twitter Photo Challenge again... this week's excercise is "gatelangs" a word I don't know the exact english word for, but I guess "on the street" or rather "[walking] on streets" cover much of it.

As with last weeks challenge, I think this simple words is a lot more abstract than it initially sounds. So I snapped this photo tonight, just to get my thoughts started -- and to try out some lighting techniques.

I'd been to the cinema with a friend (we saw Angels & Demons which was surprisingly good if you take into consideration how surprisingly lame The Da Vinci Code was), and convinced him to assist me a little afterwards.

I took this photo mostly for testing a technique and the limitations of the wireless functions of my flashes.

The nerdy tech stuff:

Manual exposure 1/10 seconds at f/1.4. Norwegian summer nights are pretty bright, so this is a deliberate under exposure to saturate the sky and the street scene a little bit.

The camera is set to tungsten white balance to remove most of the orange color cast from the street lamps. A CTO gelled flash is placed inside the phone booth to create the illusion that I'm illuminated by the faint lights in the phone booth itself. (In Adobe Camera Raw I actually nudged the white balance a little back towards daylight again, to warm up the photo a bit)

The flash is set to TTL and set to two stops under exposure. The flash was also zoomed a little so that just my face and hand would be lit (as you can see my stomach is as black as can be).

"Conclusion"

Hopefully a better "on the street" idea will pop up during the week, but I at least got to try out a few techniques here. And of course: It was fun to do this together with my "assistant", I felt a lot less like a fool than I normally would when he was there :-)

Another thing: I guess this photo will become historic in a very short time. With the cell phone penetration we have here in Norway now -- they say there are more cell phone numbers active now than inhabitants in the country -- I can't imagine that these phone booths will be used by anyone anymore in the near future.

BTW, this made a good background picture on my iPhone. Now it's suddenly distinguishable from all the other iPhones at work.