Light Switch

I always said to myself that you should be able to take an interesting photograph regardless of your location. Sure, you might not be able to get grand vistas of a landscape but there's always something else. When starting out, don't limit yourself to one style of photography.

So I was home one day and when I walked by this light switch, my mind told me "hey, I bet you could take a cool picture of that light switch". At first, I kind of ignored the idea but then after a while, I was up to the challenge. I wanted to prove that you can take something very plain and ordinary and make it interesting.

Here's my setup:

As they say in photography, light is everything. So really, the only way I could come up to make it interesting was to incorporate shadows. I did that by placing a laundry basket over my flash. This will take trial and error because the closer you move to your subject, the harsher the shadows will become. I was also trying to achieve a certain pattern.

This was shot with my Fujifilm X-T20 + Rokinon 50mm 1.2. This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Monochrome):

So there's not much done here beside the basics. Bumped the contrast, clarity, highlights and lowered the shadows. I also brushed the 2 main shadow lines to make them darker. There were many spots I had to remove as well.

50mm 1/160s F/9 ISO 200

Trying things out and experimenting is very important in photography. Sure the result from the experiment maybe won't be mind-blowing but what you learned from trying will be useful later. We can't always create award-winning pictures. We shoot for ourselves and to learn and this picture is proof of that.