Tea for one

I took a stroll into St. Stephen’s Green shopping centre last Thursday evening after work – partly in search of something to eat, partly to re-take a shot previously taken from the top level of the centre with my Nikon D300 and kit lens when it was just a few days old.  I wanted to see how my D700 and pro lens would compare if presented with the same shot.  As I walked towards the far end of the centre I moved to the first floor, allowing me to observe what was happening beneath as the centre, and indeed the city, wound down for the day.

I was essentially ‘people-watching’ as I walked along the length of the first floor of the shopping centre, and at the same time looking out for a possible photo.  Half way along, as I was above one of the centre’s coffee shops, I spotted this gathering of people and thought that a picture of them taken from above, unnoticed by them, might make for an interesting image.

I like how they are composed within the frame – the foursome creating two diagonal and parallel lines.  I like also how they are sitting close to each other, yet not interacting in any way – something that kind of sums up city life really.   Notice also how they pass the time.  Two are playing with their mobile phones, the other two appear to be just eating and drinking and staring into space – perhaps ‘people-watching’ like I was.

The girl at bottom left has most to keep her occupied – her schoolbag on the ground has been emptied of at least one text book visible on the table, and in the full size version of the photograph you can clearly see a copy book labeled “Una’s religion book” (see left – which, incidentally, is also a great example of the level of detail that the 24-70mm lens on the full frame sensor can capture).

The post-processing on this image is a little funky, as it is the first image that I’ve processed in Aperture 3, and so I (ab)used it to play around with way more sliders and settings than I usually would use in one image.  I’ll deal with Aperture 3 in a future post or two, but so far so good, apart from one really annoying bug which is making getting it fully up and running become a drawn out process.  The lighting for this shot, all ambient, was also a little funky – a mix of hard spot lights and soft reflected light from near and far giving lots of shadows and transitions from highlight to shadow in unusual places.

As it turns out, the title to this image – “Tea for one” – is slightly inaccurate. After taking the shot I went to capture a second image, as a sort of a back up, by which time the person whose legs you can see at the top left had sat down to share a cuppa with the person sitting closest to him.  And with that, the shot was gone.