Lens: Voigtlander color-skopar 35mm f2.5
Camera: NEX-7, ISO1600, f3.5, 1/25, raw
Elevators are good. Lighting condition in elevators is always interesting, and it usually falls-out pretty quickly and dramatically if you step out a bit. So, if you are at someone’s place and you can’t find any interesting spot for a shot, just call the elevator and try with it. This is 80% guaranteed to work (the remaining 20% depend on your ability to select the correct exposure, aperture, and point of view).
The other thing with elevators is that they are non-places, very prone to slip into surreality (if you well remember, we had a similar discussion on non-residential toilets on the post for the 8th of March). An elevator is supposed to bring you from one storey to another one, and that can already be misleading when the two floors look exactly the same, so the final act seems more like entering in a parallel universe than moving simply upward/downward. But when reality really turns unexpectedly around is when the elevator “brings” you something, or someone. I don’t know if this is a common feeling, especially out of Europe, where buildings over 20 storeys are common and so it is to share your elevator-trip with people coming from one of the other parallel universes co-existing in the apartment building. But here in the Old Continent, elevators are not meeting spots, you are not supposed to interact with others, the machine simply stops where you call it and brings you where you wish, end of story. Hence, whenever the doors opens revealing that there is something or someone in it, you immediately feel the uncomfortable fear of not being really awake.
So, what’s the point? The point is, elevators are great surrealistic environments, so just fill them with any subject other than people getting in or out, and you immediately have a strong message: this was not supposed to happen, this is bad, this is a daydream.