Week 6: Well, this is a mess

So this is my desk, in all its maddening glory.  The general lighting is from the fluorescent tubes overhead, however the diagonal streaks along the bottom come from sunlight (BLINDING SUNLIGHT ARGH IT BURNS) sneaking through the vertical blinds.  Because of the camera used, the light in this case actually conceals more than it reveals, as that beam of sunlight is doing a very good job of cutting my gel book in half and masking what it really is.  Similarly, it reflecting off of the box and empty packaging next to the gel book try to conceal their true nature (empty package that my new mouse came in, Starcraft II game box).  Looking at this picture again, I'm wishing I had taken a few more similar pictures, moving the blinds around, to see what effect they had on the visibility and the camera.
Something else interesting I noticed is that the two statues atop my desk become almost featureless in the fluorescent light.  The figures are fairly dark normally (black plastic construction, bronze colored paint), but they are also extremely detailed (the paint) and that detail fades to blackness under the relatively weak fluorescent light.  This makes me think I should have tried them under sunlight as well, to see what that looked like.  Also looking up there, I notice the sunlight creeping around the side of the blinds and creating a reflection of the desk on the side wall of my (defunct) wifi router.  Reflections are interesting things, and actually not things I've gotten to work with enough.  I know that firing a high-intensity light at any sort of colored surface will cause that color to reflect on objects near the surface, and I know that those reflections are a real pain when image projection is in play, but I have yet to see them actually deliberately exploited in a show.  Have I just not been watching the right shows?  Or is it a trick we do not exploit much?  And if not, why not?
Because it is daytime, most things are sort of bathed in light, and so the shadows don't conceal much.  What does conceal is that I have so many random things splayed out across my desk.  The props offer as much concealment as darkness could provide.  Other than the two statues, however, everything in this picture that appears dark is actually flat black in color.

The most interesting thing I find in this picture is the thing that I really failed to exploit better, as I usually see it as an annoyance.  That was the sunlight.  On a low-end camera like this, sunlight overloads it so easily.  It completely wipes everything from where it lands, because it simply overloads the digital light sensors that much.  A secondary interesting thing I see is that my keyboard looks actually white in this picture.  My keyboard is a 15-20 year old dull (somewhat dirty) beige model.  It is not white, and yet it appears white.  Conversely, the sheets of paper in the background are actually white, but they appear grey and blue.  I really don't know where that blue is coming from; it could just be another camera chromatic aberration.

I've probably waffled enough about this now.  In other news though, adorable fuzzy plush anteater is adorable and fuzzy.