In the Studio

Last month I was asked to take some photos for Jasper Sloan Yip. He’s a musician in Vancouver and I’ve been playing in his band for over 10 years. We were scheduled to record at Afterlife Studios in November and Jasper asked me to also take some photos. He offered to pay me a little bit of money to do it. I had never been offered money for anything to do with photography before and thought it would be fun.

There were a couple of reasons I was excited about doing this. For one, the idea of not having to be discreet or have subjects that knew they were being photographed would be an interesting change from my usual street photography. Second, I’ve only ever shot what’s interested me and in an aesthetic that speaks to me. I thought that having to consider someone else in the work would be interesting. Would they like the style of photos or maybe it would lead to a different look that I hadn’t thought of before.

Leading up to the shoot, I asked Jasper what he was looking for. He said he really liked the black and white photos I was taking and just wanted something like that. My original thinking that I would have to change my style, or what I shot was proving to be unfounded.

Within the first few minutes, I noticed that I’d have to use some street photography techniques with the band. Things like turning off the physical shutter, not bringing the camera to my eye and looking the other direction while taking a photo helped just as much in the studio as on the street.

I found myself tucking into corners of the studio, using the various isolation booths, doors and equipment to frame subject. The light was pretty minimal and there were a few lamps here and there. Jasper was kind enough to rent an extra lens for me which was a huge help. It was a lens I’d never take out on the street because it’s too big, but worked great in the low light of the studio.

I was so worried that the photos wouldn’t be what the band was after, but as I continued to work throughout the weekend, I realised that Jasper asked me to take photos because he liked my work and wasn’t interested in me changing my style. Once that clicked, I leaned into the things I really enjoy about photography: using natural geometry/framing, playing with contrast and shadows and blending in to the environment.

All in all, it was really fun and I’d love to do it again. In fact, Jasper posted some photos on Instagram and another musician reached out to me to take some photos. Here’s hoping more of these opportunities come!

Changes

I shoot most of my street photos while on break at work. I work downtown Vancouver and for the past year, it’s been a great location to take street photos on my break. There are so many reasons this works for me, and I’ve covered them in previous posts, but simply put, looking through a camera and framing what’s happening is fun.

Last month, my work started doing renovations at our office, and while construction is happening, they’ve sent everyone home to work. I understand how lucky this may seem to some folks, and working from home has been great. I get to see my family more, am able to wake up later and be home earlier, and I’ve even saved some money on commuting and coffee.

One thing that has been more difficult since we were all sent home has been taking photos, or maybe I should say taking the same photos I used to. I live in a pretty quiet suburb of Vancouver. It’s a different landscape to what I usually look for and there is definitely a lack of human subjects.

I found I’ve lost the habit of taking my camera with me every day, all the time but there have been moments where I’ve remembered. Below is a photo taken just outside of Granville Island.

One of the nice aspects of taking photos every day at work was the consistency and volume. Being able to go to the same places day in, day out and notice the change in light, people and reflections was a great way to get better at photography and be more observant.

Now that I'm working from home, I’m not going to the same place every day. I’m not taking as many photos and am definitely not posting as many online now. This has been a bit of a surprise and I don’t think I realised how many photos I took. I’m having to tell myself that it’s ok not to post a few times a week.

In the Bin

One of the things I don’t see that often on photography sites are all the photos that don’t make it. I think out of 20 or 30 shots I take there’s one that I think is worth editing and sharing. If you’re a photographer reading this, I’d love to hear your experience with this (you can leave a comment below if you like).

There are some days where nothing really works and that’s ok. I take my camera with me almost all the time and you never know when a picture will present itself. Below are some pictures I took on my lunch break. I was walking with a co-worker and we stumbled across this strike march.

I saw professional photographers following them around and taking shots and I guess I picked up my camera because I didn’t want to miss out. To be honest, there wasn’t really a shot that spoke to me and as you can see, these are pretty uninteresting photos. The protesters blend into the background and there’s not really a subject to draw your attention into the photo.

Realising I needed a subject in the foreground, I tried to reframe and wait for anyone who wasn’t in the march to walk into frame. This person above in the vest blends into the background and I think it still too far away. Same with the photo below.

I definitely felt removed from the scene and I think part of the reason was because I feel obliged to take some photos. When I walk around this area of Vancouver, there are usually a lot of tourists taking photos. If there’s more than one person taking a photo of the same thing, it usually draws a crowd and everyone starts pointing their phones and cameras at whatever it is. This definitely happened with the march. Seeing photographers taking photos made me think I ‘should’ take photos of this, when honestly, I wouldn’t have found this sort of thing interesting on my own.

The last photo of the march I was trying to be clever with the sign pointing one way and the crowd walking the other way. There was also an arrow on the ground but I didn’t really compose this image in a way that tied them together. Also, there’s someone on the right walking into the frame. If I had waited a bit, I think I could have gotten them between the two arrows. Maybe that would have made a slightly more interesting photos? Again, I think everything here is just sort of washed into the background. I could have stepped closer to the sign and framed it differently, but I can tell looking back at these photos, I just wasn't that interested in taking photos of this.

Mostly out of frustration and annoyance that none of the shots of the crowd worked, I tried to take a photo of someone’s reflection in a moving bus. What I didn’t realise at the time was that the windows on the other side of the bus were very light and the person’s reflection gets lost. You can kind of see their legs below the red box.

And then there are always a handful of these shots every time I shoot. Looking at these, I often think to myself “What was I thinking?”. I probably saw some interesting light or something but didn’t turn out.

It was at this point I realised I was just shooting anything and tried to step back a bit. The last set of photos I took were of this stretch of puddle water along an overpass. I don’t think I got the image I wanted on the day, but it was interesting enough to me to go back the next day and take some more time.

Looking back, I didn’t get a shot I was happy with, but ultimately I learned something. Just because someone tells you something is interesting doesn’t mean you need to find it interesting!

Perspective

When I’m out taking photos, I like to frame a scene while shooting. I’ll crop in once in a while or adjust the horizon while editing but try to get it right in camera as much as possible. I’ve given myself a guideline to not spend more than a few minutes editing any photo, so the closer I can get the shot in-camera, the better. Aside from a few basic adjustments, I really don’t edit my photos very much.

One thing I have been playing around with is rotating photos to change perspective. Here is a photo I took a month ago. It had just rained and I was playing around with using a big puddle as a reflective surface. There were these repeating lines in the building in the background that I thought would look interesting if I could get them to extend into the puddle.

The shot above was fine I thought, but was missing something. I found myself looking at the puddle area of the photo much more because it had a bit more distortion and ripples. So I flipped it upside down and here is the result below. I like it much better, mainly because the focus is more on the reflection area. Also it sort of muddies some of the subjects in the photo. For example, the building in the background looks less like a building from this perspective.

Another photo I tried flipping was this one I took recently of a cyclist on a bike path. The shot below is how I originally took it. What I like about this photo are the 3 elements that move your eye left to right. The white painted bicycle, the cyclist and then the shadow. I also like how the path and the lines narrow slightly and help draw your eye to the right of the frame.

Below, I tried to rotate the image so the cyclist is riding up through the frame. I like how the shadow stands out a bit more but it feels like everything is squished and crowded in the frame. Maybe this is because the lines start wide at the bottom and narrow as it leads up to the top of the frame. I also think there is something to be said for guiding our eyes left to right, mirroring how we read a number of languages.

This last shot is the full frame. When I shoot, I set my camera to crop a certain size automatically, so there is always a little bit extra on the sides. Sometimes it allows me to pull in an element that I originally left out, but usually I’ll stick with what I’ve shot. In this example, there are some extra elements including some additional street lines and a traffic sign. You could make an argument that they reinforce the narrowing towards the right, but I found them to be distracting. Also, with the extra space on the left and right of the frame, the 3 elements look crowded or bunched together, like they’re not spaced apart nicely.

Sometimes playing around with perspective works and it’s worth a look sometimes to see if it helps but this is why I try to make almost all of my decisions when shooting in the camera. You could spend hours just playing around with cropping and rotating an image!