Chelsea had a lot of art and photography exhibits going on but I chose this Robert Adams exhibit to go to. As you can see from these photos, it's in pretty much a plain white room. Yet because of the nature of his photography, the room actually accents his work by.
For this exhibit, Adams took photographs during evening and night hours. It's actually really interesting to see this at work. I noticed however that my photos of his work in frames with glass covering it doesn't do his work justice. Luckily I was told that a lot of his photos were online which I tracked down. You really need to see these photos in a crisp and clear environment or be at the show itself to get the full effect.There are absolutely no people in any of his shots and there's very little else other than the structures and objects Adams looks at. They're also shots from very unpopulated areas so there's a sense of loneliness in each picture. These images also focused on capturing light in the deep darkness of a suburban neighborhood where that light can accent certain features such as lamp posts or brickwork. It creates such a high contrast between the objects shown that your focus shifts immediately to what he wants you to see. The light is not always the focus of each shot, sometimes it's the shapes in the shadows or the textures that they create that are highlighted in his photos.
Night time photography is a tricky skill. Knowing your camera is important because there's so little light to work with. Also, using flash was out of the question because a flash will create a light source that's directly from your point of view. This light source basically wipes away all the interesting detail you were trying to capture in the first place. Adams' photos were all done without a flash to accentuate those points of light better. My camera however is a point and shoot camera. The largest F-Stop I can use is 3.5 so already I have a problem, so the aperture can't open as large as I want. ISO range goes up to 800 but there's too much grain at 800 so I settled for 400 in this case. At this point though, any picture I take would come out pitch black so I ended up breaking some rules. I set the shutter speed in some cases to 1/5th. This is BAD, but wrestling with a point and shoot can't be helped. I also didn't have my tripod on me so what I ended up doing was setting the camera to shoot multiple shots as long as I held down the button. I also leaned or placed the camera on top of whatever I could find to try and stabilize it and hoped for the best. The end result is a hundred blurry shots but eventually if I stayed long enough I got 1 or 2 visible, here they are:
The phot on the lower right is of the back alley of a building in my neighborhood. I love this one because of the mood of the shot. Also the clothes being blown by the wind on a rainy night with just one lamp illuminating it. There's a lot of mystery here and if you look at the lower left, is that a person? An animal? I really don't know and it actually scared the heck out of me.
The image on the top middle was an attempt at composition. It was taken near the first image on the same night, I thought the way the light shined with the rain drops on the car added a real textured feel to that portion. I also wanted to place that light right on a point of interest in the frame as a draw for the eyes.
The photo on the top right was taken the night before from a second floor window, again of a building in my neighborhood. In this one, I noticed the way the lights on the left and the light on the right side create this triangular shape, pointing you to look to the right.
The last image on the lower left was taken on Sunday morning...at 1:20AM in the train station. I was on my way home and the lack of people there was perfectly in line with the type of photograph Robert Adams has in his photos. I tried to divide the image into a top portion and a low portion which would be divided by darkness and light.
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