Behind closed doors

I visited Leinster House, the Irish seat of government, during the open day last June, and was able to avail of a tour of the building.  At one stage the tour guide took us along the corridor that runs between the two houses of the Oireachtais – the Dáil and the Seanad – and although he didn’t have much to say about the corridor, the name plates on the different doors caught my attention as we walked along, and I stopped to take a photograph of the one that was most recognisable.

For those that don’t know, the Ceann Comhairle is the chairman of the Dáil (the lower house of parliament) – equivalent I suppose to the speaker in other countries.  That position is held by John O’Donoghue, who, to his credit, introduced the concept of the open day when he took up the position in 2007.

As well as maintaining order in the Dáil, the Ceann Comhairle directs the preparation of an Order Paper which governs each sitting of the House, a task presumably undertaken in the office behind this door.

[Update: my first version of this post stated that one of the Ceann Comhairle's functions "is to draw up the order of business for each sitting of the Dáil" but I received an anonymous message through my website informing me that "the determination for the order of business in Dáil Éireann is the perogative of the Taoiseach - the Ceann Comhairle has no role in the matter.  You can verify this at the Oireachtas website or by ringing the Government Chief Whip's Office".  I can't verify who sent this message, but in case it is from official sources, I am happy to clarify this, and for the record, I have used the Ceann Comhairle's own website to determine his role as now described above.  Anyway, back to the photography...]

As I passed the door I noticed how polished and clean the brass plate was – as you might expect I suppose – and coupled with the the rich colour of the door’s wood, it suggested, even to those on the tour who were unaware of who the Ceann Comhairle was,  that this was the door to the office of an important person.

In my photograph of the door I wanted the name plate in particular to stand out.  Of course one problem with it was that it was quite reflective, so I had to stand to one side to keep both me and the camera out of the frame.  I took a shot, but the name plate wasn’t photographing well, as it was reflecting the wall on the other side of the corridor, which was poorly lit.

Remembering some of the theory of lighting a reflective surface, I knew that you needed to use a light source big enough to fill the entire area being reflected, and so I decided to turn the wall that was being reflected into a light source by putting my SB-800 flash to its widest spread, and lowest power, and firing it at the wall, with it mounted in the camera’s hot shoe but turned to fire over my right shoulder.

The painted wall diffused the light as it hit it from my flash, making it mimic a large softbox, and the entire reflection in the name plate was lit with a nice soft light.  This gave me something I could work with in post processing, so I put my SB-800 back in the camera bag and caught up with the rest of the tour as they entered the Seanad.

The final image you see here has undergone some post processing in Aperture.  I needed in particular to adjust the contrast and the mid-tones to get the look I was after.  If you look at the shot as it was straight out of the camera (see the image on the right), you’ll see that the image was quite flat – this was a side effect of the flash-lit wall, which bounced light onto the wood as well as the name plate, and took some of the contrast away.  To light a surface like the door, you generally want side lighting rather than frontal lighting (like you want for the name plate), and so I needed to recover some of the existing side light from the ceiling lights in the corridor, which I exposed for by opening up the shutter.  Knowing the information was in my RAW file, by playing with the shadows and mid-point levels in Aperture I was able to recover the detail, increasing the contrast, and bringing some texture back into the wood.

The key thing to getting the shot I wanted was quickly recognising what was wrong with my first attempt, identifying a solution that I could implement using the equipment I had in the time I had available, knowing what I would be able to do later in post processing, and most importantly, being familiar enough with all my equipment to put that solution into action quickly.  In total I was stopped at the door for less than a minute, and in that time I took a test shot, set up my (admittedly simple) bounced lighting solution, and took the final shot.  A few minutes back at the laptop processing the image, and I was done.