It’s a reasonably well-established fact that a good way to train your eye is to go out to take pictures with a specific goal in mind: select a subject, a set of constraints, some rules, and try to come up with a way to follow them and stay creative at the same time. So, yesterday, I asked K. for an assignment before taking the camera out for a walk. She told me to take pictures of shadows.
“Too easy,” I thought. It was night, after all, in a city centre, with plenty of light sources. Turns out I was wrong. A city at night is not really shadowy, at least this one wasn’t: it was simply dark. I spent a good thirty minutes walking around and feeling sillier and siller.
In the end, what I did find was fences. For some reason, empty parking lots around here are brightly lit at night. Here’s the first example I found:
But my favourite is the shot above. This was my third take in the same place, I think: I liked the vertical shadows against the horizontal stripes of the gate, but wasn’t sure how to frame them. Then, while the camera was taking the image, a car drove past, and its lights changed the colours completely, making the image look like it was photoshopped to death. Serendipity!
If you want to download the full-sized image, just follow this link and click “all sizes.”
