Vacant

As the lock suggests, this toilet was indeed vacant.

That’s a good job considering the door is open…and the fact it was taken in an abandoned hospital!

If the status of this had been ‘locked’ or ‘occupied’ I think I would have been out of there before I was able to take a shot.

One of my problems when it comes to photography is that I can be pretty lazy at times. Sure, I can stand in the street and wait an hour for a clear spot to suddenly arrive in order to shoot it without people, or for the right light to arrive onto a scene – but when it comes to the simple things such as changing a lens to take a shot I’m pretty bad at it. I carry several lenses with me on each trip, adding to the weight in my bag, but rarely bother to change them – my 10-20mm is on there 90% of the time.

As such, when it came to take this shot I didn’t bother switching lenses, I just zoomed on in to the 20mm mark and pulled the camera up pretty close to the door. It’s something I often find myself doing…and sometimes it does just work.

I guess nowadays it’s pretty easy to add a little blur to your image in order to give it a nice focal point, so shooting a scene where it’s all in focus and then selectively blurring it has great advantages. It’s much more difficult to shoot a scene that already has a shallow depth of field and then find you want to try and make the blurred parts pretty sharp.