Munich through a window

I thought I’d post another photograph from my trip to Munich last Autumn, this one taken in the city’s toy museum on All Saints’ Day as my travel companions and I found things to do to pass the time on what was to have been our shopping day, given that all the shops were closed.

The toy museum is located in Marienplatz in the center of the city and is a charming little building with a stone spiral staircase that takes visitors between the small rooms on three or four floors, each with a display of toys from times past.

There were opportunities for some detail shots of the various toys, and while I did take some pictures (perhaps to be featured here in the future), a macro lens would have opened up a world of possibilities.  Without one, I had turned my attention elsewhere to find a photograph.

Moving from room to room, I climbed the stone stairs between different floors and the windows caught my eye – and in particular the way in which the glass made the town square outside look almost like a watercolour painting.

This was one of those occasions where I had to nudge the camera in the right direction to get the shot I wanted.  If I had, for instance, taken the photograph in automatic mode, the camera would almost certainly have popped up the flash and fired it during the exposure to bring the dark stone around the window to a “nice” mid grey, not really worrying about the horrible reflection that would have bounced back from the glass.  Also, the camera’s auto-focus would have hunted like crazy trying to resolve detail in the scene outside the window.

Instead, I exposed manually, spot metering first for the blue sky, and then tweaking this slightly based on the image I saw on the LCD screen after the first shot.  I focused manually too, choosing to keep the edge of the window frame sharp, even though this also brought some speckles on the glass into focus too, which I’d have rather avoid.  Any other focus point further beyond this though just didn’t work as the image looked too out of focus (hence why the camera itself would have struggled).

The final image is actually a portrait orientation (as indicated by the position of my watermark which is always at bottom left), though the darkness of the window frame is hard to distinguish from the black of the empty space outside the photograph itself.

None of the windows in the toy museum seemed to open, so even if I had wanted to I don’t think I could have got a photograph of Marienplatz that wasn’t taken through the glass.   That’s ok though – I quite like the effect that shooting through glass had on the scene, and the final image.