Re: ... windowshopping
Thank you's to Terry, Diane and Devon for commenting!
Oh I like this.
A lot more creepy and surreal than your usual work.
I'm wondering how it would work with the baby in focus and the lights blurred... I think your way is probably better but did you try both?
It's an interesting question and one I've been thinking about lately. It asks more about the process of vision to capture than about technical specifics ...
In a more generalized form, it comes to: "When you see something that suggests a photograph, how many different ways of capturing it should you try to ensure that you
'get it'?" The answer depends on many things, most of them dynamic and of the moment at hand ... is the subject static or in motion? does the light last or not? does your vision see opportunity for several framings, or is one particular thing about what you see all you're interested in? are there opportunities for alternative DoF, alternative focus placement, etc, that need to be exploited?
What the question boils down to in many cases is "how well formed is the intent of your making an exposure?" ... or "how much are you paying attention to the scene at hand?"
This is a static subject. While the light was changing fairly rapidly, I had only some minor interference from passing headlights to work around for the four or five minutes I was in the locale shooting. I could have made many exposures trying different things.
But I knew upon seeing this scene what it was I was after. I made four exposures, two each at different apertures to slightly influence the DoF. I knew that, for me, blurry foreground objects were not going to work so my focus point was the same for all of them: on the stars. I made two exposures at each f/stop (f/2 and f/4.5) to try to ensure that I'd have at least one sharp one ... 1/30 second with a 20mm lens on FourThirds is right on the line for hand-holding, notice how the ISO has gotten pushed up by Auto ISO to 160.
When I looked at them afterwards in Lightroom, the f/4.5 shots had too much DoF for my druthers (and the better of the two was only just acceptably crisp on the foreground detail due to camera motion, I blew the other one). I wanted this softness in the background. I've also rendered this one to both color and B&W versions ... they have what is to me a very different feel.
I see the photograph as unsettling but more dreamy than creepy. I like the depth of it, and there are a ton of emotional connections that can be made symbolically between the baby, the threads of stars, the suggestions of toys, etc etc. I have to study it more myself ... something emerges here that I like very much but don't fully understand yet. ;-)