Behind the photo #2 - Up or down the stairs? Fibonacci would be proud...hopefully

In this feature I get into a little background on a photo and tell you exactly how and why I got making it.

I took these photos on a special day. My mother, who is a teacher of Dutch language, received her higher degree meaning she can now teach higher level students. There was a nice ceremony and apart from me being there to be part of this, of course I made a lot of photos. For example, this one of my mother signing her new diploma:

The location

One thing I always say is: get a good location. You can have the best techniques and understanding of how to use your camera, but as long as your location is weak, the subject won't be interesting. At the same time an interesting subject can get wasted by someone not knowing how to document it properly. In this case, since it was a graduation, the ceremony was being held on one of the highest floors (I think the 9th) of the faculty. Because Amsterdam isn't a very tall city, this gave me a very decent view over the city. Sadly, the weather wasn't so good that day so those photos were a bit disappointing. 

Surely you must have gotten something good?

Yes I did, don't worry. Like I said I did make lots of photos. There was one photo however, that was my absolute favorite one. Not only did I find the composition very strong here, also the lines in the photo make it look like an actual example of the Fibonacci spiral.

Fibo...nacci?

Yes, Fibonacci. A famous Italian mathematician who lived over 800 years ago. He was the founder of the Fibonacci sequence where you could get a new number by adding up the two previous numbers... This would be the beginning of the sequence:  0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 etc. Okay, I have to admit something here. I am not claiming to understand even the slightest of advanced math. Some of you might say this doesn't even come close to being advanced math, but to me...this is almost abracadabra. I get the sequence, but I tried to get some nice background info especially for you, but my mind broke down trying to figure out the meaning of it all.

The Fibonacci sequence in art

What I do understand however, is how to use it for your composition. The same as with the Golden Ratio, it's a method to figure out the most important part of your photo, or painting for that matter. You could compare it with the Rule of Thirds, but that one is considered to be less accurate. I will dedicate a post to this later on, trying to explain it all a little better. If you make an image of the Fibonacci sequence as I just described it, this would be it:

The gear and settings

So I used my loyal Nikon D7200 and the lens I just got at that time, the Sigma 17-70. Man, I love that lens! Such a great replacement of the standard kit lens. It's longer (meaning a longer zoomrange), sharper and faster (meaning a lower aperture value). Because of the immense difference in depth in the photo (from ground level to the highest floor) I was virtually, and maybe really, impossible to get everything in focus. Besides, I had no desire to try that because I wanted to illustrate the effect of distance. Because it was quite dark inside the stairwell, I had to adjust my settings a little and ended up with this:

iso 640

1/40 sec

f/3.2

17 mm

I always want to have my iso as low as possible to avoid artificial loss of quality, but in this case I had to, because I couldn't possibly go any lower with my shutterspeed. As mentioned in a previous article, 1/40 seconds is my maximum to use without the help of a tripod. 

The results

This is the result, the photo I was most happy about that day. Do you see the similarities to the Fibonacci sequence?



To give you an idea of what it looked like from the other side, here is the exact stairwell, shot from the other side. This time I chose a slight different angle. Also because the 'end' of the photo wasn't just light as in the above one, I could clearly see the other side which is the floor from where the first photo was taken. To change it up a little, I edited this in Black & White. 



I hope you enjoyed and found this useful, let me know which of the two shots is your favorite in the comments!



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