Shooting my F – Doors and Windows

I have already mentioned in an earlier post that I processed the doors separately from the interiors of the trains in my F panel images. This was mainly to deal with the lighting variations over the doors due to the different light arrangements on each station platform, as well as people on the platform casting faint shadows.

But in addition, some station lights caused severe reflections on the doors and windows; when it happened, it rendered the door part of the image unusable, even though the important part of the image inside the train might have been perfectly acceptable. The same applied to the windows. My solution was to use doors and windows from other trains taken at different stations where there were no harsh reflections. I saw the doors as a frames for the images. They needed not to draw attention to themselves.

The doors themselves were processed to align the windows to template guidelines so that they would line up exactly. The prints were presented just ¾ inch apart so it was essential that there was no mismatch. The close proximity of one print to the next also meant that any colour discrepancies from print to print in the red door hue or brightness, or the window appearance would be obvious, and possibly distracting, and so a lot of care was taken to harmonise these factors. The windows reflected the station wall colour to some extent which meant that sometimesthe windws had a colour cast while others a more grey colour; they all ended up grey.

The doors themselves all had their own “fingerprint” of grease stains and marks which I liked, and it was important to get a good mix of the different doors on the finished panel; there were even a few clean ones. I had plenty to choose from. I will say something about the number of images involved in this project in a later post.

This is the fourth post in the series on my F panel. You can read the first here. I will have more to say about taking the images in another post.

The examples below are images that were never contenders for the panel but show some of the different lighting conditions at different stations.