This is the last picture I took in this hunt, and it is my favorite. I had a previous idea which had to do with some window reflection, and the concept was there, but the image was just not satisfying – so once I got my last shot out of the way to get the set of 10, I went back to the drawing board to get a proper mirror.

Mirrors are highly non trivial to shoot – especially if you don’t really want to be in the picture ! Playing with angles can be fun, but can also be very frustrating when you realize that what you want to do will Just Not Work – because Physics Said So.

I first remembered that we had a few old hard drive platters that make very decent mirrors; after looking for them for a little while, I found them in the cellar in a bag full of steampunky paraphernalia (which we got a few years ago to attend the steampunk-themed wedding of friends of ours). At that point, I hadn’t connected these dots yet – I started playing with the mirrors on the floor, trying to get interesting reflections of the board games shelves, that sort of things. It was not BAD, but it was somewhat underwhelming.

And then I started setting up the whole “let’s have mirrors reflecting the steampunky stuff – on top of that the mirrors are round, I have a lot of circular stuff in there, this may actually be interesting. It took a little while to arrive at a convincing setup of the whole thing – essentially it ended up looking like this, from another angle:

A lot of holding, and clamps, and chains – but these actually work with the theme, somehow, so that’s great! While working with the setup, there was also the question of being able to take a picture of it while not being on the picture myself. I ended up getting the telephoto lens – had a pretty hard time managing to focus it with the low-ish distance I was able to put between the setup scene and the wall, but it eventually worked out. This is the original picture, with only minor RAW development operations:

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 Macro
Focal length	190mm
F-Number	F/25
Exposure time	1/15 s
ISO	1600

The processing was slightly more heavy-handed than usual on the color side – I thought that the browner hue fitted fairly well with the subject of the image.

For more interpretations of the theme, see the Mirror Scavenger album!