The Set - Mustard Hallway

When I tire of the India Room’s purple wall, I head for the Mustard Hallway.


When I bought the house, all the walls were plain white. I wanted to paint the hall a warm, golden color (as in the inspiration photo to the left), but my first attempt came out as pumpkin puke:


The wall décor was also a disaster. I loved the idea of a “mask gallery,” but the passage simply isn’t wide enough to accommodate the bulky masks and a grown adult. The masks were constantly knocked askew.


I tried tried again with Golden Cricket paint and polished silver platters and I’m quite pleased with the new décor.


The mustard yellow wall is a great contrast to my outfits, but all that reflected yellow light is a challenge. While it gives my skin a golden glow, it also skews the colors of my clothing. The yellow aura bothered one reader so much that she wrote to tell me so. I stubbornly continued to pose here, but soon learned to set the white balance to incandescent +3 to correct for all that yellow. (Photoshop “auto levels” also helps….if there is some true white and true black in the image.)

When I take my photo against the yellow wall, I position my camera and tripod in the bathroom. Glamorous, right?


To light the photos, I turn on all the fixtures in the bathroom, the hallway light, the dining room light, and the light in the India Room. Still, I have to pump up the exposure compensation because the camera takes its light read from the white woodwork in the bathroom, not the darker subject in the doorway. I set the exposure compensation between +.3 and +1.0 and use an ISO of 800. (The camera is in "P" or Program mode.)

The Mustard Hallway, through the blog years...

Here’s the pumpkin puke:

I used the flash back in the pumpkin days.
After painting the hallway Golden Cricket, and discontinuing use of the flash, I often looked a little jaundiced:


Taking a digital photography class through Communiversity changed my life…and my photos:


Hello, white balance!
Finally, I stopped cropping my photos to odd sizes and adopted a standard 2 x 3 ratio. As a result, you now see the bathroom woodwork at the edges of my photos, but I don’t care:


Next month: The Sunroom!