A Scenic World

(Note: my laptop bit the dust for real yesterday, only two weeks after we managed to bring it back to life. Until I get a new computer, I’ll be at the mercy of whatever I can get my hands on…so there might not be regular updates this week)

I had an idea for a photo in a location I’d been to several months ago. There was a room with a mirror, and I wanted to do a shot of my reflection in that mirror (I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t inspired by Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” a song that really struck a chord with me back in my college days).

On the way up to the 8th floor where this room with the mirror was, I caught sight of the way the light was hitting the stairs. Needless to say, I never made it past the 6th story, where this photo was taken.

The set-up was tricky. I’d brought the tripod and remote, luckily, but even with the tripod perched precariously on the edge of the steps and with my widest rectilinear lens attached to the K200D, the composition wasn’t quite how I wanted it. What I needed was to actually tilt the camera down more…in other words, I needed to lean the camera out over a six-story abyss, with nothing but a concrete floor below to break a fall.

I’m scared of heights. Not a lot of people know it, and I like to pretend I’m tough, so I routinely do things that terrify me just to save face. But here I was alone, completely alone, so I _could_ have chickened out and no one would have been the wiser.

Instead, I ignored the long drop down and very carefully took out my neckstrap on one side. Then I wound it three times around the handrail. Then I carefully put it back in, leaning way over the railing to be able to see the tiny places the strap had to be wound through. Where the camera was placed was almost completely dark, so I had to do a lot of this with only touch. The temperature was probably easily 100°F inside this stairwell. Sweat was dripping off my nose, and I just had to make myself not look down.

After about 10 minutes, I finally had the camera attached securely to the rail and could lean it over without worrying about the fall. Then it was just a simple matter of putting it in the ´3-second remote mode, running down the stairs to this point, getting into position, and pressing the remote.

I post-processed this in about five minutes, exported the file to my external hard drive, and uploaded. Less than ten minutes later, my laptop died.

I feel truly bereft without my online world to keep me company.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Photo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.