City Shoot
The project required us to document Downtown Toronto; as I was living in Vancouver, I decided to record Downtown Vancouver. I started my project by selecting my theme. I was interested in documenting lights during the night photoshoot, but after my first photoshoot and discussing with the professor, capturing light in itself didn’t turn out quite well. My professor liked my idea of capturing lights during the night and suggested me to try light painting.
Like night photography, to avoid grainy photographs and show the movement of lights, the light painting used long shutter speed to brighten up the image and allow the lens to stay open for long intervals of time. To compensate for high exposure, I decided to reduce the ISO and go as low as possible. I then focused on a variety of lights and shook the device by clicking the photo. Shaking the device created a brush stroke-like effect hence creating a light painting.
Using a device was challenging as there were certain areas where even after pushing the device to its extreme didn’t produce the desired result. I decided to manually reduce the exposure from the Lightroom Photography App exposure meter, which helped the device’s lens capture various lights and textures. After capturing the photographs, I sorted/ called them on multiple levels using the rating method and made further collections. Once I reached my final five selections, I tried to make colour collections and replicate the colours I saw from naked and add in the photographs.
This project taught me how to recognize a variety of different artistic elements of design. Besides using long exposures and slow shutter speed, I also used aperture and ISO in my few photos capturing leading lines and one-point perspective. I look forward to more such projects.
