Getting into the christmas spirit

I’m a bit of a fan of Christmas, so when we decided at work this year to make a bit of an effort to decorate the office I was all for it.  Afterall we work in a lovely building on Fitzwilliam Square, and it has potential to be very tastefully decorated.  Then we decided to have a “christmas desk decorating competition”, and all talk of taste went out of my mind.  Thankfully though, at least one of my colleagues has retained her sense of taste and the decorations that adorn the stairs are all her doing.  Read on to see how these contrast with my christmas desk.

I photographed the stairs late on Friday evening after returning to the office from a post-work trip to a nearby pub so that I could pick up my camera bag.  I had the borrowed Nikon D700 with me, and a newly-borrowed Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens, the ultimate telephoto zoom for wedding photography, and I was planning on shooting chunks of Saturday’s wedding with both.  I had previously experimented with the D700 at high ISOs at night time, and wanted to  check the trade off between image quality and high ISO under indoor ambient light too.

I was fully expecting to shoot much of the wedding at f/2.8 (wide open), partly for aesthetic reasons – the large aperture blurs what can often be a busy background at weddings – and partly out of necessity, with a December wedding promising to be a low light affair.  So for my test shot I went to f/2.8 and ISO 3200 which I felt after the first test on the Luas would give me acceptable quality, and as high a shutter speed as possible.

With the zoom lens, VR would prove to be crucial – this stablises the lens when hand-held and means that you should get sharp shots at shutter speeds of, at best, four times what you normally would expect.  So at 200mm, normally you’d try to keep the shutter speed to 1/200s, but VR should allow you get a good success rate at 1/50s.

I used VR for this shot, but probably didn’t need to, with a shutter speed of 1/125s at 75mm.   I focused about a third of the way into the frame, and took a couple of frames with slightly different compositions, but all at the same settings.  This shot is my favourite of the ones I took, and the image quality is satisfactory.  It gave me the confidence to shoot much of the following days wedding at ISO 3200, which turned out to be absolutely necessary.

You can hopefully see what I mean from this shot about these decorations being tasteful, and complimenting the style of large old building that houses our office.  My entry in the christmas desk competition is somewhat in contrast to that style, as you can see from the photo on the left taken by another colleague of mine.  I’m confident that I’ve set a high standard in the tacky category, if there is one, in the competition, but not sure if class might outweigh tack when it comes to the final voting.  At least I limited myself to just two bits of tinsel – I can assure you that required great restraint.  Also, the fact that the train track doesn’t actually fit in a complete loop around the desk like I had hoped saves my colleagues from its ability to play music for 30 minutes at a time, with a 30 minute break in between.  It’s probably best for all concerned if I leave it without batteries – at least until judging day.