An impossible situation

This is a stunning bronze work of art buried for 2200 years in the world’s largest tomb along with the terracotta soldiers in Xian, China. It is displayed in a museum adjacent to the tomb itself, and typical of the most populous country, there was a huge crowd around the glass-enclosed display. At first, a decent picture of this seemed hopeless. First, it was impossible to get near the glass because the crowd was about six people thick. Second, it was extremely dark. Third, brain-dead people were constantly doing selfies. Forth, reflections in the glass meant that the camera lens had to be up against the glass itself -- i.e. touching it. And fifth, an ISO of 10,000 was required to get a decent shutter speed. A tripod seemed out of the question.

So, how did I get this picture? I waited, patiently. As people in front of me moved away, I inched forward. Finally, I was in the center front. I noticed that there was a small ledge in front of me, and it dawned on me that a tripod was, in fact, possible. I kept two of the tripod legs short and rested them on the ledge, and I extended one leg to the floor and positioned it between my two legs to protect it from being bumped in the dense crowd. I had to work in a very narrow space simply because of the crush of the crowd. The tripod enabled me to use an ISO setting of only 200, and my settings for the picture were 1.3 seconds at f/4. I would have liked more depth of field (although the 28mm focal length -- done with a 24-105mm lens -- gave me a decent amount of DOF), but I didn’t want to push my luck. Due to the florescent lighting, I used auto white balance.