The other day when I posted the “rainbow” light slanting through my office’s Venetian blinds, I mentioned that usually the light coming through is white and casts interesting shadows. Here’s an example of what I mean.

I take a lot of pictures, probably way more than I should mention. Most of them get trashed. I like the photo above. It took a while to get there, though. So I thought I’d share all the “fails” with you, in case you’d find it interesting to walk through my picture-making process.

First, I walked into my office either before or after my 1:00 class and noticed that the sunlight had cast its current pattern of blind stripes on my ceiling. The stripes show up in different locations all over my office walls and ceiling depending on the time of day or year.

Something about this pattern caught my eye. So, second, I snapped several photos with my phone.

Of all these, I decided I liked the last one best because of the diagonals.

Then, having chosen it as my favorite, I started thinking about the composition of all the various lines and how they might best fit inside a “frame.” In other words, should I crop the photo? And if so, how?

I wanted to merge the patterns of lines into a coherent “whole” as much as possible, so that the ceiling tiles and Venetian blind stripes could be viewed as one single unit instead of two separate overlapping patterns. So yes, cropping would be necessary to create that illusion.

In the end I decided to shave a little bit off the top of the photo and then crop the sides and bottom enough to create a “frame” that would put the edges right at the outermost points of the pattern created by the Venetian blind stripes.

Below are the “before” (left) and “after” (right) versions.

So, that’s today’s blog post. Not especially “deep” but sort of different and hopefully interesting, too 🙂