Books at the British Museum – London, England (2016)
Many people have a dream picture they would like to make. For me, my dream subject is books.
Anybody who knows me will likely laugh since I really don’t like to read books. The thought of all those pages and the words on the pages scares me. Nonetheless, I love to look at and touch books, especially the older books with leather or textured binding.
When I scheduled my 2017 European photography exhibition, I knew I had to find an interesting picture of some books since the exhibition space was in a library.
I looked for months prior to the exhibition trying to find interesting books, book stores or libraries to photograph. This was actually quite a bit more difficult than I initially thought. Sometimes I saw interesting books but they weren’t arranged in an interesting way. Or sometimes they were arranged nicely, but the books themselves weren’t interesting. I don’t like to rearrange still-life objects so if the books weren’t arranged in a way I wanted, I just don’t bother to photograph them.
The picture above was made at the British Museum in London. My wife found the books in one of the museum’s rooms. What drew me to the books was their extreme contrast; the fact that they were very old; and that two of them were written by Earl Gray. Earl Gray happens to be my favorite tea 🙂
After doing some additional research, I found out that the books were written by Henry Gray, the 3rd Earl Gray, and not by Charles Gray, the 2nd Earl Gray, and former Prime Minister of Great Britain. The Earl Gray tea is named after Charles Gray 🙁
Regardless of this historic tangent, I really liked the way the books were arranged. But this picture was quite difficult to make. For starters, all the books in the British Museum are behind highly reflective glass. This means you have to stand at a bad angle to minimize the reflections. This distorts the perspective of the books in the camera. Also, the lighting in the museum is very low, adding to the complexity of the shot.
I didn’t let these technical issues stop me. I knew how to use the photo processing tools I had at home. The image corrections weren’t trivial since I had to correct the perspective, eliminate the residual reflections, correct low light levels, and of course convert the image to black and white.
You see the end result above. Was the shot worth the trouble? Maybe the simplicity of the shot is not for everyone. Maybe the subject of the shot is too mundane for some. For me, I love the way the final image turned out. The books were definitely a rare find and worth the extra effort.
Equipment
Fujifilm XT-1
Fujinon 18-135mm (46.6mm)
Settings
1/30 sec, f/4.7, ISO 6400
Processing
Adobe Lightroom
Nik Silver Efex Pro 2