The Camera You've Got

Last weekend, DW and I drove down to Toronto to visit Kid 2. It had been a while since we've been to the GTA, and even though she comes to Ottawa each month for a 24-hour stay, while she has braces that need attention, it was good to see her in her own environment.

I told myself that I'd also take some time, on our 24-hour visit to Toronto, to take my D-SLR and capture some street photography. I packed my Nikon D750 with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens, and challenged myself to capture interesting images with this one, prime lens.

Things didn't go as planned.

Kid 2 had a huge amount of laundry that had piled up and she was stressed because she felt overwhelmed by the accumulation and she needed to get it done before she ran out of clothes. So when DW and I arrived, we gathered up her laundry and headed to a nearby laundromat.

We filled six washing machines.

When the wash cycle on the machines was finished, I encouraged DW and Kid 2 to take her wash-and-hang loads back to her apartment and hang them up. I would supervise the loads that were in the dryers and call when they were done.

Of course, when DW and Kid 2 drove away, I realized that my D-SLR was in the car with them.

I didn't want to leave the laundromat and several signs urged customers to not leave laundry unattended, so I came up with an idea to take photos of the laundromat while I waited. I wished that I had my Nikon with me but I did have my smartphone.

The best camera, they say, is the one you've got on you.

I took the images that you may have seen in this week's Wordless Wednesday post.

After I had taken my shots I reviewed them off my phone, deleting the ones that I thought were unusable. The first shot that I had captured, with the row of opened washing machines, was okay but I figured it would have been better if I had set of all of the doors to be open the same amount, rather than random.

I mean, random is natural and good, but I was looking for uniformity in a shot. Though, I didn't touch the handles for the doors. I preserved some randomness.

I went back to the machines, fixed the doors, changed the angle somewhat, and took the shot.

Samsung S10: ƒ/2.4; 1/60 sec; 6mm; ISO 100

Better.

Except, I didn't quite like the light and the reflection of colour from the painted walls on the chrome, circular doors. My solution was to change the image to black and white. Not by placing a filter over the image but by removing all colour saturation from it. When I use photo-editing software, I tend to either reduce the saturation or apply a greyscale filter, rather than going into the specific black-and-white settings to get the look I want.

Finally, because I wanted to focus on the doors and nothing else in the image, I chose to crop the photo to a square. Sure, I lost a couple of the doors but the focus is drawn to the remaining doors and nothing else.

I may not have had the camera that I planned to use but I'm glad that I had some sort of camera on me

Happy Friday!

Samsung S10: ƒ/2.4; 1/60 sec; 6mm; ISO 100