In this project, I wanted to play around with my medium-format camera and just happen to shoot at night. My friends and I were going around taking some photos of cars, and I saw this setting behind me. It was a single light post shining down on the street. The ambience of the setting combined with this lamppost made for a really calming setting. I took a photo and wanted to try out the bulb shutter speed with 30 seconds and an aperture of 23. I wanted everything to be in focus since I had a tripod, so I allowed myself to set the shutter speed to pretty long. I took that image, thinking it was going to be a clean and sharp image. I didn’t have a shutter cable, so there was a chance of shaking, and I accepted that there were parts of it out of my control. But to my surprise, the image came out better than I expected. I think for this piece, the concept I wanted to explore was letting go of control and just letting the camera absorb the light. There were a few reasons that helped influence the output of this image: the tripod, the shutter speed, and the environment.
I tried recreating these shots on my balcony in my Toronto apartment, but the Toronto view has too many lights for the ambience I was looking for, but it still had the abstract aspect that I liked. They feel like stark opposites, but they both still share the same negative space. I think with these two different shoots together, it plays into this countryside vs. city view kind of idea. The thought of how the light can represent people and how the light takes up the same amount of space in each photo but is coming from different kinds and amounts of lighting reflecting the number of people living in the area and environment. It’s so soothing and quiet that it's almost eerie. I’ve been trying to explore photography more during the night because it limits my ability to get results that I don’t usually expect. For me, the most difficult aspect of photography is lighting and how to compensate for a lack of light.
