The Bathroom Experiment

When I first began studying photography, I remember an old challenge for photo students to shoot a roll of film in the smallest, least interesting room in the house - the bathroom. This was to help develop the photographer's eye to see interest in the most mundane.  It was a really quiet day for me, so I decided (after all these years) to finally try it. What the heck, I'm snowed in!!!

As I recall (haven't shot film in about 15 years), a roll of film had 36 exposures. I figured I would aim to get that number of images in my little bathroom. I began shooting away and when I downloaded the images to my computer, I was surprised to see that in only 25 minutes I had shot a total of 110 photos.  Of course, many were crap and several were repeats when I tried different settings.

But in keeping with my goal of 36  images, I pulled out those I considered the most intertesting, starting with my colorful shower curtain.....

I used a very shallow depth of field to get the top corner of the tissue in sharp focus and have the rest of the image out of focus (blurred).

I  found the monochromatic coloring and the intersecting lines of the blinds and curtains quite interesting. Of the following 3 images, the first had less exposure, the second had more exposure to make it lighter, and the last is taken at an angle to accent the "V" pattern.

The following 2 images are the same mirror and window, but with a shallow depth of field and the focus changing (first the window is in focus and in the second photo the mirror is in focus).  Same settings otherwise - simply changing what was in or out of focus produces quite different effects.

The two images below are of the same subject with just a change in the amount of exposure and the tilt of the camera.

Of course, this was a perfect time to try for a self-portrait.  Kinda hard to do when you can't look through the view finder! Used a few shots trying to get myself in the mirror!