Exercise 1. Light/Duration

The first in class assignment was quite a good and refreshing start to a course. It allowed us to get out of the computer labs and explore. Initially, the main concept of our group was to get feet shots so no one would be profiled while individual characteristics would still stand out.  In the planning process, we wanted to take the pictures indoors in a small, short, narrow hallway so that even when standing at the furthest point, people’s faces would not be seen.  We didn’t stick with this though simply because it wasn’t relevant to the theme of light.  So we moved outside and decided to keep our theme of feet.  Eventually, we felt that the feet were becoming more of the background and shadows became our main objective since the sun was shining really brightly at just the right angle.

One thing we immediately noticed was that working without a tripod is the hardest thing ever.  We were limited to the angles and framing of the composition.  We pretty much just put the camera on the raised cement island surrounding a lamp post.  Even after securing the camera to the ground, it didn’t really help much because later on, we found out our camera moved despite our greatest efforts to not move it.

Going through the pictures, the continuous change we realized was the lamp post’s shadow moving throughout the series.  In general, the images came out okay but i wanted to explore  more photography showing time with light.  So I decided to reshoot pictures at night at an intersection, with buildings in the background.  I really enjoyed the night pictures I took at the intersection since the speed of any object passing the lens affected the blurriness of the object. I also enjoyed the fact that in the sequence, I kept discovering new things like lights being turned on and off in the background and so on. As well, this time i had images that were staged so that the sequence would have a more interesting turn and it wasn’t just blurry cars.

Here’s my sequence!!