To take this photo I needed to sneak my camera into the art gallery and surreptitiously take a few shots. If I'd been caught, I would have been sternly told not to do it again. Considering that I was using the non-small Canon SX20, that meant that I needed to wear my fluffy down parka for the two hours that I was wandering around. My audio recorder was in my other pocket, partly because there were no rules against it, but also because it helped the balance.
When I was looking for a destination for my first photographic day trip, the National Gallery having a Rothko was one of the deciding factors. To some extent, I've picked this as one of my best for its greater significance rather than its own merit. Mark Rothko is one of my favourite visual artists, and I plan on doing a couple of photo trips a year from now on. It all comes together here as a proof-of-concept.
I would have loved to be able to use my standard compliment of gear in the gallery; the little compact camera can't capture the subtle colours and has far too much noise. It also has the same sort of complex wide-angle distortion that makes my Olympus 12-60 such a challenge to use indoors. I learned a few tricks in the process of refining this image, and the final product owes as much to Adobe as it does to Canon.
This is the most recent of my best photos from 2009, and was posted in a slightly different form on December 5.
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