Ironically, the writing of my last post, about my cats exploring the outside world, was delayed a bit by Zelda wandering off and going missing for a few hours whilst I was trying to write it. Everything worked out in the end; Zelda came back with a haunted look on her face not wanting to talk about where she’d been, and I, whilst wandering around with my wife trying to find her, spotted an interesting shot right in my neighbourhood that I’d never noticed before.
It was dark when Zelda didn’t come back in for dinner as usual. After a while a bit of worry set in and we started seeing if there was any sign of her in the around our street. We last saw her disappearing into the warehouse by our flat, so that was where I was wondering when I noticed the arrangement of the things in the warehouse car park and the way they were lit looked interesting. I thought, as I often find myself doing, ‘that’s nice, I should photograph that at some point’. Then I remembered I rarely actually come back to take shots I’ve seen, so I decided to go inside to get my camera.
The fun challenge was attaching my camera to the fence. The struts of the fence were too close together to fit the nose of a lens through, so I ended up contriving a way of getting my GorillaPod to hold my camera so the front of the lens was right up against the fence. This is one thing a normal tripod wouldn’t be able to do (although on the front I have recently acquired a real tripod). Making use of a 10-20mm wide angle lens I’ve borrowed I was able to get the entire scene in shot. I’d managed to leave my phone inside so I don’t have any shots of the setup, but I’m not sure how much it would have been able to capture; it was so dark I couldn’t even make out the setting dial on the camera. Leaving my camera in aperture priority I used my remote trigger to fire off a few shots.
This is my favourite of the several variations I took. The settings I’ve used in Silver Efex Pro to monochrome the image has brought out a fair amount of the detail; you can see the top of Twickenham Stadium in the background and even a few stars. The other shot I took and liked (here, if you want to see it) was a shorter exposure and so darker although, perhaps, framed a little nicer.
I hadn’t always planned for the image to be monochrome, but it does seem to work best that way. Now I have a tripod I’m hoping to achieve a few more shots like this.
Creative Splurges 
