Green car park

The second photograph I took on my short photowalk in Dundrum on Thursday night, having photographed the newest phase of the centre, was of part of the centre that is quite boring really, but brought to life at night when, to the camera at least, it is full of colour.  An entrance to the car park is about as functional as it gets, but how this particular one is lit, and how that light intersects with the ambient light, gives it some aesthetic appeal too.

I’ve discussed the colour of light here on a few occasions, and it is something that was important to this photograph because there are a number of different light sources, each a different colour temperature, lighting this scene.  When I took the photograph the camera made its own mind up as to what the “correct” colour temperature was, but because I took the shot in RAW I was able to override that (if I wished) in post-processing without degrading the image.

For this particular version (because I tried a number of different white balance settings) I decided to use a white balance that looked closest to what my eye saw on the night.  Whether this is the “correct” white balance for the scene is as arguable as whether I used the “correct” exposure.

The exposure I did use was determined by adding a stop of positive exposure compensation in an attempt to keep the brightness of the scene from confusing the camera into underexposing the shot.  I shot in aperture-priority mode, choosing f/8 to keep detail throughout most of the scene without closing the aperture so much that I’d need an excessive shutter speed.  I ended up with a shutter speed of just over a second, which was ideal.  My thinking in relation to the shutter speed was that I wanted to photograph the entrance without any cars in the scene.  There was too much traffic turning in and out of the entrance, and any cars travelling out of the car park towards the lens would have created very distracting (and large) blown out areas with their headlights, while cars waiting to turn into the car park would have been dominant in the middle of the frame if they were stopped for too long.  It was easier to keep the shutter speed short enough that I could find a window where there were no cars entering or exiting.

In post-processing I needed to straighten the shot, as I had rested the camera on an uneven wall to keep it steady (I didn’t have a tripod with me). I also cropped it to centre the composition, and one of the things I like about the resultant photograph is the symmetry of the railings on either side of the entrance and the signage above, broken up, due to the slope on which the building is built, by things not being as parallel as you might expect for an architectural shot.