As a stay at home mom, I have always done my AAU work around my daughters schedule, and so I normally get to be my most productive at night. I think there are many more factors besides my daughters schedule that draw me to shoot at night, one of the main reasons is because I have always been drawn to it, the night. I love the stars, and the reduction in people traffic. I like the idea of being out in the night, I always have, I am not a club goer and beside photography I can easily forgo participating in the "night life". I just like being outside at night in almost any setting you can think of (some places are scary though.. so anywhere within reason, lol). I digress.
When I was first made aware of the fact that I had to come up with a body of work and that for the next 2 years I would have to work on it I was intimidated and also excited at the idea of having the potential to create something great. When I was told that my thesis would have to focus on a unifying theme I knew immediately that color and night would be the unifying factors, and so the decision was made that I would shoot at night. I did not know where necessarily and I did not know what I would shoot. Tamara suggested that I explore the night scenes I was most drawn to and shoot what I thought was visually interesting. She said that in giving myself freedom in shooting and then receiving feedback from my classmates and her that a subject matter might emerge. So searching for my thesis theme coupled with my new photoshop knowledge of HDR photography I made this image.
Of course it was taken in Harlem. Harlem is my muse and I go there often times to shoot when I am looking for something to click. no pun intended..
I knew immediately that I wanted to shoot night in the same fashion using hdr. When I asked my professors how to make night hdr imagery and when I googled it I realized that not many people knew how to do it. All that would turn up in the searches would be highly stylized images and people who could not figure out why bracketing at night did not yield the same results as bracketing during the day. I started to experiment with my exposures trying to get that perfect night exposure/edit while simultaneously I was constantly searching for my thesis topic. I shot this image one night and after reviewing the final product I knew that I wanted to piece my images together in triptychs.
I got great feedback on my Harlem and Manhattan night images from my professors and classmates:
but there was something missing from them that would make them a viable thesis series.
And then one night, feeling the crunch of four MFA classes I was exhausted. I did not feel like driving to the city to shoot, I just wanted to go to bed, but an assignment was due and I needed to shoot it. My boyfriend and I brainstormed where to go, and while I sat in indecision his dog needed to be walked. So we decided to walk the dog while I pondered, and as we walked I shot aimlessly up at the houses in his neighborhood and these were the images that came from that night:
Notice my bf and his dog in the second to last image. Anyway the reaction from Professor Hubbard and my classmates was so great, and the thought of all the gas I would save made my decision for me. The suburbs it was, at night, pieced together in triptychs. How ironic, the environment I grew up in and found the least interesting visually was going to be the visual subject matter that I concentrated on for the most important photography series I have ever done to this date.
The following summer semester of 2008 I presented my midpoint proposal to the thesis review panel and received a rare full pass. These were the images I presented:
I will post the link to my review video in another post.
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