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Christmas Tree Shadow
19 December 2023
It was a little after three in the morning. Since our graduate schools days when we worked as a campus security guard from midnight to 6 a.m., we're in the habit of walking the beat at least once in the middle of the night. And so we did.
Christmas Tree Shadow. iPhone 15 Pro Max back triple camera at 2x, f1.8, 1/15 second and ISO 10,000. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
We indulged in a glass of water. The heater had dried us out keeping the place toasty through the winter night. So we sat on the couch and looked across the darkened room.
The Christmas tree, its ornaments yet to be hung, stood next to the couch by the front window. The overbright streetlight took advantage of the situation to cast a shadow of the unadorned branches on the wall next to the upright piano.
We were charmed by that. On the coffee table our iPhone had fallen asleep, so we woke it up and took a photo.
The flash obliterated the scene and in the darkness it wasn't really clear how to turn the flash off but we took a stab at it and succeeded. The second shot is what you see above.
We were careful not to "optimize" the tonality of the image in the edits. It was dark, after all. So it's a dark photo.
We aren't used to editing night scenes shot at ISO 10,000. But we'll get used to it. We're up every night, after all.
While we didn't adjust the tonality, we did crop it significantly. And in the carousel thumbnail even more so. In fact, we prefer the smaller crop.
But, as we said, it was three in the morning and the appropriate thing to be doing at that time would be dreaming, not editing.
So we went back to bed.