PHOTO-GRAPHIC-BLUES.
Is it possible to photograph emotion with the absence of people?
Mall Through The Windshield, 2022
Without people, we lose facial expressions. The most recognizable signifier for it. So what then? What else could be relied on to capture something that is intangible? Well, despite a small number of people not being able to see what it looks like, I’d say color is one of the best ways to capture emotion.
Because color is emotion.
when girls take over, 2021
I thought back to my graphic design days when my professors would get us to think about our color choices for logos, documents, and posters, and wondered how I could apply it to photography. I wanted my audience to feel what I felt towards The Esplanade Mall’s downfall.
S A D N E S S. J O Y. F E A R.
To successfully capture those feelings my first thought was to make the photographs blue.
In my eyes, it was the only way to show bittersweet sentiment for a time long gone, and document the ongoing terror of Covid-19 and slow degradation of The Esplanade Mall from negligent ownership. Hurricane Ida finished it far sooner.
But first, I had to figure out how to do it. I filed through my memories and landed in the winter of 2018 when I took a filmmaking class.
Two weeks into being educated on the medium, we mostly focused on the basic functions of a DSLR. One thing that stuck out to me (especially since it was something I struggled with) was white balance. To get the color of what the camera viewed as close to reality as possible required its white balance to be at the correct setting.
Daylight for when the sun’s out. Cloudy for when the sky is covered. Incandescent for lighting emitted by heating the filament in the bulb. Fluorescent for lighting emitted by electrical discharges through ionized gas.
My professor had to tell me a couple of times that my white balance was “wrong”. My videos were too cold; everything had a bluish tone from shooting in tungsten/incandescent. I didn’t take the criticism hard at all though. At the time, my point of view was that white balances were like film stocks. And honestly, I still see it that way today.
I’ve shot on the Incandescent WB setting for quite some time and here are the key takeaways I learned:
When it’s cloudy outside, blues are much more prevalent.
Boxes of Bottles and Cans, 2022
When it’s sunny outside, blues take on a “bleached” appearance.
Esplanade Canopy, 2022
By lowering the exposure, blues are darker, deeper blues.
Target Baskets, 2022
Greens become much more vibrant when shooting outside.
Hidden Paradise, 2022
It was an immediate mood shift when I visited The Esplanade Mall. Past and present egos meshed together in search of nostalgia after I’d equip Incandescent WB. I never cared if I was shooting “wrong”. It was my priority to see the kinds of photographs Incandescent WB would return in “less ideal” conditions. And as it turned out, the photographs were haunting, surreal, melancholic…from then on, I knew that this way of shooting would come in handy.
Shooting the “right” white balance wouldn’t have helped in seeing at all.
