Ok, enough curi­os­it­ies, let’s go back to some­thing more visu­ally inter­est­ing.

The gentle ready may have already seen that we are now look­ing at a dirty, rusty, old lock on an old door with fad­ing paint. I spot­ted it on our walk around the inner city of Cork, near the docks — gen­er­ally a great place to keep an eye open for grungy shots.

What I find par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing here is that this is no play on the col­ours, at all. This pic­ture is pro­cessed with the cor­rect white bal­ance, and noth­ing but a tad more con­trast and an increased black level (it, as always, was a grey day). In other words, no select­ive desat­ur­a­tion, as some might have sus­pec­ted. The paint was really fad­ing in col­our…

When I took the shot, I stopped down the lens quite a bit so that the depth of field would be large enough to cover the lock, and also to get max­imum sharp­ness. My stand­ard walk-​around lens (the Carl Zeiss Vario-​Sonnar 24 – 70 ƒ/2.8 SSM) unfor­tu­nately tends to be a bit soft at the long end).