Headphones

I took this photo at an exhibition in the Quai Branly museum in Paris.

The line of headphones is what attracted me when I was walking from piece to piece in the exhibition (Hoda Afshar). They have nothing to do with the exhibition itself, they’re probably there in general, but when I saw them I knew I wanted to photograph them somehow.

As the headphones were lined up, I decided to place them on a diagonal so that they could all be seen. I only took 2 version of that photo, the other one has headphones overlapping too much. It felt messy.

Then I had to decide what to do with the curtains on the left. There was no way I could frame the headphones and not have the curtains in my photo. The angles just didn’t work. So I decided to make them a bit less than half the photo and treat them as negative space to focus the eye on the headphones: my idea was that it’s all dark on the left, all bright on the right, with the headphones in the middle.

On the other side, I couldn’t control the window and the large print, so I ignored them and let them be.

I also liked the brushed concrete floor, so I included a lot of it instead of getting on my knees to exclude it as much as possible. Obviously, the texture only visible on a large image.

What I don’t like about the photo is that the focus isn’t right on the first set of headphones. I took the photo with my phone, and I don’t have any control over the depth of field and it’s difficult to control the focus point. It was also pretty dark and I didn’t look at the image closely enough to notice. Rookie mistake.

I also don’t like the fact that there were two curtains and it creates a weird angle. the curtain closest to the camera is properly vertical, but the second one creates some kind of messy line. I couldn’t control that, unfortunately.

Overall, I’d say I like the image, but it’s not one of my favourites.

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