I took this while looking for perspective III entries.
This is my office building (lucky me!). There are two grand spiral staircases in it that are 7 stories high.
I learned a lot while taking and prepping this shot, so I'll explain all of this in more detail than you want in hopes it helps some other newbie learn. :)
I started by looking for ideas from the previous two perspective challenges. I thought of my building immediately when I saw the spiral staircase red ribbon winner in the second one.
I originally tried to get the whole spiral into the photo, but there's a chandelier going right through the middle of it. Since I was shooting near the end of the day, and I have no lights, that meant I couldn't get the shadows to show up without blowing out the chandelier's lights. Lesson one from DPC. :) So I cut them out of several shots.
As I started editing this, I realized I had these great secondary curves formed by the friction striping that keeps people from slipping. That clinched it for me to choose one of these.
The main light is a series of windows that go down one side. Avoiding them in the background was lesson two from comments I've received and seen on DPC.
Since I was holding the camera, I had a conflict between low light and noisy ISO. On many of my shots, I went with 100 and deliberately underexposed a stop. On this one, it turned out okay even handheld at 1/15 because I was bracing against the handrail (my level on the staircase is out of the frame).
My editing resulted from more lessons from DPC:
Noise reduction (community version of Noiseware)
USM before doing anything else (thanks to the great tutorials on how to prep a file and on how to use USM: //www.dpchallenge.com/tutorial.php?TUTORIAL_ID=26 and //www.dpchallenge.com/tutorial.php?TUTORIAL_ID=4)
Cropping to remove a distractingly visible wall
Using curves to brighten it up while keeping the detail in the highlights (the railing is too bright, but it came out of the camera that way) //www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/command_primer.shtml (I deliberately kept the color warmer than it really appeared to emphasize the brass in the railing)
Resizing and USM again, but less this time
Exporting to JPG
I reshot this for the Shapes III challenge and won my first ribbon:
I've taken several other images of the same staircase. This one is my favorite, but here they are:
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