Doors to imagination

The story of my most shared photo.

I enjoy photography, but I don't know a lot about it. I was lucky enough to have access to a reflex camera and wanted to use it. At one point —as I explored the web trying to grow into the hobby by exposure— I saw some photos I really liked on Flickr (I'm surprised to see that the site still exists). It was there that I got familiar with the concept of HDR. And furries.

In February 2017 I took a trip to a nearby coastal city with the intention to explore the city's street art scene. I thought that it might make a good theme for trying out what I had learned so far. During this exploration I got fascinated by a small alley where every door had artwork on them. Long line of doors with different things painted on them.

The photo wasn't easy to shoot. The limited space forced me to frame the shot quickly and move aside for people wanting to pass through. In a hurry, I set the exposure bracketing to get the three photos with different exposures needed to process into HDR later, and then took the shot.

A few days later, when I finally got down to processing them, I used Affinity Photo to create the HDR image. In reality, the colors were very dull and lacked vibrancy. With HDR, the colors really came to life, along with many small details.

Sidenote: I prefer Affinity over Photoshop because it's a very solid software with similar capabilites, and mainly because it has a one-time payment model instead of requiring a subscription.

I then uploaded it to Unsplash, a platform that offers free-to-use images. Over time, it gained some popularity: 100k+ downloads and 17M+ views. Although, I think the views number may be inflated due to photos being shown inside apps like Figma and Notion.

Having it available on Unsplash has led —over the past five years— to seeing it used for different projects like postcards, inspirational posters, and a lot of Instagram posts often accompanied by cheesy quotes.

To this day, I still like the result, although I might try a more exaggerated HDR effect, since at the time I was aiming for a more natural feel.