06/03/18

Sometimes when I start these blogs I know exactly what I'm going to write about, I just have to figure out how I'm going to put it on paper. Today I have a faint idea of the subject, but I couldn't be more unsure about how I want to write it down.

It's quite amusing how photography can evoke a similar feeling.

An idea for an image can pop into your mind; the only thing left is to recreate the image you have in your head, which is often enough of a struggle as it is.

In most cases I find myself in situations where I haven't really been able to invent the image beforehand.

For this blog I've chose 3 images I've taken in the past couple of weeks. One of them was taken during a crappy rainy night driving home, the other two taken in Ghent while it was ice cold.

In the resulting images one can easily find some similarities. But the manner in which these photos came to be couldn't be more different.

The photo taken on the highway was created in less than a second. 

As soon as the idea popped up I took my camera and tried to capture the image that I'd imagined.

A different story belongs to the other two images. I knew the night before that I was going to go out the next day to try and capture the cold weather. But I didn't think anything through. No location in mind, no subjects, no concept, no nothing.

This meant that I had a pretty hard time working on compositions and ideas to display what was going on. 

The cold was omnipresent, which meant two things: A frozen river and not a single soul on the street.

No people on the street meant that it was hard to find a subject or a foreground interest for my image.

Without one of those a picture often tends to lack appeal. Nonetheless, to make an image interesting for the eye there's more that can be done.

Using leading lines to draw the eye into the picture is one of the options.

Making sure there is enough visual contrast, whether it is in terms of colourtemperature, different colours or actual light.

This is where the "similarities" in all images come up:

Lines coming from the corners of the image drawing your attention to the center.

In the highway-shot the black vignette-like border on the bottom and the right-hand side (which is actually just the wiper and the edge of the window) strenghten this effect even more. If that wasn't enough the orange citylights naturally contrast the dark skies. 
That's one of the advantages of shooting at night, the available light tends to be more interesting. 

Sometimes you need some luck to get a good shot, but most of the time you've got to put a lot of effort into it.