I spent the weekend just gone in Co. Clare for two stag nights. For Friday night and Saturday afternoon I was in the town of Ennis, although I didn’t take a single photograph there (which is a bit of a shame not only because it’s quite a picturesque town, but also because this weekend it was home to Fleadh Nua 2010 with Irish music and dancing on the streets). The rest of the weekend was spent in Lahinch, where I did take my camera for a walk near the beach on Sunday afternoon. But the first photo I took this weekend, late on Saturday night, was of a scene straight from the 1970s.
That’s the photograph up top, which is of the room in which I was staying on Saturday night. I had booked into the Atlantic Hotel in Lahinch for my Saturday night stay, getting a reasonable rate and (as it turned out) a particularly good breakfast on Sunday morning. When I saw the room on Saturday afternoon I had to laugh as it really did feel like I was stepping back about 40 years. Mainly, I suppose, due to the wallpaper and the bed spread, but also just the fixtures, fittings and furniture in the room – that lamp on the wall, the bed frame, the wardrobe off to the right of the camera.
I didn’t take a photograph of it then, but when I returned from the pub many hours later and turned on the wall light, I decided I really should capture it on camera.
The size of the room made photographing it – even at the 24mm end of my standard zoom lens – a little bit awkward, but I was saved to some extent by the bathroom door that opened off it, and allowed me to bring the front of the lens effectively flush with the wall of the room by taking a step back into the bathroom.
The mirror opposite the bathroom door was an obstacle to overcome if I didn’t want to see myself in the photograph, but by crouching a little I avoided that. In terms of the composition, that requirement to crouch actually helped because it put the camera at a more central position vertically, and allowed me to keep the vertical lines of the walls more or less parallel, and not converging at the top or the bottom as they would have done if I was looking up or down on the scene. That’s a good tip for architectural photography in general, actually: centre the camera in the scene as much as possible.
Had I brought a speedlight with me on the trip, I would most likely have exposed for the wall light, to keep a little bit of detail in that, and then bounced the speedlight off the ceiling to fill the rest of the room with light, adjusting the power on the speedlight to get a nicely balanced exposure.
However I didn’t have a speedlight so I got as good an exposure as possible by matrix metering the scene and settling for the 1/13s, f/2.8 exposure that resulted even with the ISO bumped to 3200.
Because of the room being lit by that tungsten wall lamp (and it looked like an old bulb at that, which was probably even more orange than a newer one might be), and because of the red/wine wallpaper and bedspread, the camera seemed to get thrown by what white balance it should apply.
By shooting in RAW I was able to fix this quickly in post-production, using the fact that I knew the door frame of the bathroom door (visible in the mirror) was white to get this correct. Having found the “correct” white balance, I warmed it up slightly. My motivation was to keep the image looking like my eye saw it: even with the dated decor the room felt cosy – I wanted the photograph of it to feel cosy too.
you made it look exactly as it must have felt. cosy homely seventies.