Some Background Ramblings Part 1
From a previous version of this blog
A bit of background.
I use a technique that I have tailored to meet my own ends. I'm certainly not the first to use it but I did mould it over time to achieve my own vision. The first piece I shot was actually meant to be the only one. When I was in photography school I rented this tiny place in downtown Vancouver. It was the size of a small hotel room... but I took it because I fell in love with the view and I knew that someday I would come up with a way to capture it. Over the course of a year that view of the Vancouver skyline was shot on every media with every lens I could lay my hands on.. Then one day I decided to shoot a joiner, showing the passage of a single day from sunrise to moonrise, encapsulated in the view from my balcony. It was a simple architectural piece... it looked... architectural and it went down very well. I had only expected to do this once but I never felt that I had done the scene justice. I re-shot it; this time with a longer lens and taking more pictures. Better but still messy I sat on it for a few months and realized that at the back of my mind I was assimilating and tossing around the various things I had done shooting the first two. Using varied focal lengths, speeds, apertures; thinking on how the individual photographs joined together? I devised a set of rules for myself and decided to try it again on a different scene. After some searching I found one. However it was obvious to me that the focal point of the composition was empty The answer was to put a person there. And here is where this project really kicked off, though I did not know it for some time. It was when I was building the image that I realized that the dramatic piece I had set out to make had become a narrative one. I had created a world around a character, and that idea intrigued me. Since then I have broadly categorized my pieces into architecturally or narratively driven ones. I think I may come into some criticism for not beginning this project from a fixed idea and proceeding to explore it. But it was largely born of experiment. Partly through my attempts to master and refine a technique but also perhaps through my search for something to say. I started shooting these pieces because I thought they looked interesting, simple as that. They had no inherent meaning that was obvious to me, not at first. I grew more and more intrigued by them however, which made me wonder?
A bit of background.
I use a technique that I have tailored to meet my own ends. I'm certainly not the first to use it but I did mould it over time to achieve my own vision. The first piece I shot was actually meant to be the only one. When I was in photography school I rented this tiny place in downtown Vancouver. It was the size of a small hotel room... but I took it because I fell in love with the view and I knew that someday I would come up with a way to capture it. Over the course of a year that view of the Vancouver skyline was shot on every media with every lens I could lay my hands on.. Then one day I decided to shoot a joiner, showing the passage of a single day from sunrise to moonrise, encapsulated in the view from my balcony. It was a simple architectural piece... it looked... architectural and it went down very well. I had only expected to do this once but I never felt that I had done the scene justice. I re-shot it; this time with a longer lens and taking more pictures. Better but still messy I sat on it for a few months and realized that at the back of my mind I was assimilating and tossing around the various things I had done shooting the first two. Using varied focal lengths, speeds, apertures; thinking on how the individual photographs joined together? I devised a set of rules for myself and decided to try it again on a different scene. After some searching I found one. However it was obvious to me that the focal point of the composition was empty The answer was to put a person there. And here is where this project really kicked off, though I did not know it for some time. It was when I was building the image that I realized that the dramatic piece I had set out to make had become a narrative one. I had created a world around a character, and that idea intrigued me. Since then I have broadly categorized my pieces into architecturally or narratively driven ones. I think I may come into some criticism for not beginning this project from a fixed idea and proceeding to explore it. But it was largely born of experiment. Partly through my attempts to master and refine a technique but also perhaps through my search for something to say. I started shooting these pieces because I thought they looked interesting, simple as that. They had no inherent meaning that was obvious to me, not at first. I grew more and more intrigued by them however, which made me wonder?
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