Silent sleepers

Snail, originally uploaded by Siim.

It's always the photos that you just snapped quickly and then forgot about, that provide the most satisfaction. Maybe it's because you don't worry about them so much, don't check the aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, framing and so on. You just notice something interesting, point your camera at it, fire the shutter and move on.

This "snail" was shot in Budapest, Hungary last summer when I was visiting my girlfriend. She studied in Central European University that has absolutely fascinating old building there. From outside it looks like 4 (if my memory is correct) story old building, inside it's half old, half modern and has 10 floors altogether. So for big part you have these renovated floors and rooms, and then you step into a narrow coridor that ends in 50 cm wide swirling and supersteep stariway.

This is exactly where I took the photo. We had just reached the ground floor through this staircase when I took last look back and up and saw "the snail". I hurriedly snapped one photo barely making sure that shutter speed was fast enough to get at least some sharpness and then run after the others. Aperture was probably F1.4, shutter speed around 1/30-1/50 and metering was left to the camera.