reflection

I see this image - or something like it - almost every morning from where I sit as we have our breakfast. The picture within a picture always makes me think of Vermeer.

I've tried to capture it a few times, without much success.  Today was a lot better.

As many of us are now in some sort of isolation, I thought I'd spend half an hour or so explaining how I arrived at the final image.  This is a much for my benefit as anything else.  Stop reading now if you'd rather watch re-runs of Man about the House on catch-up TV.

What I've ended up with is not how the scene actually looks, but what I'd like it to look like.

Facing me is a row of dark grey kitchen cupboard doors. If the sun is shining - as it was this morning - there's a very dim reflection of the scene behind me - a view into our living room.

This particular image is the result of a happy accident. I put the original into Nik Color Efx to see if I could make anything of it and just played around. 

As I scrolled down the various options I came across 'film effects'.  This particular film effect is Kodakchrome 200.  When I exported it back into Aperture, I thought it might look better with a border round it. 

Back into Nik it went - and instead of clicking on the border option I accidentally hit 'film effects' again.  So this is the result of putting the original through Kodakchrome 200  twice before adding the border.

Of course it's very grainy and would fail any kind of sharpness threshold.  But I've seen a Vermeer and that wasn't very sharp either.