Photo Features: Thomas Y. ’21 and Abdi O. ’21

Thomas Y. ’21 captures the reflections, refractions, and abstract nature of water’s ripples. (Yim)

Thomas. Y. ’21 

In a world where indoor interaction and activities have been taken away, nature and the outdoors remain safe, distanced environments for people to breathe, exercise, and destress. My favorite spot in nature is the lake, and during the summer, I spent hours fishing off the docks and swimming around the park. The water as it ripples off the rocks and the waves from the boats passing by create fascinating repeating patterns. That is what I hoped to capture in my photo. I knew it would be hard to photograph the water without lots of sunlight, so I waited for a sunny day to be able to use a high shutter speed. The abstract pattern is the bubbling of the water right after the wave crashes and spreads across the rocks. I wanted to capture the magnifying, curving, and blurring effect of the water that makes the rocks behind it almost look like scales.

Abdi O. ’21 takes a thoughful and unique approach to his portrait assignment. (Osman)

Abdi O. ’21

After my initial round of interviews, I did not know which subjects to exactly shoot. I had two ideas in mind: one was to shoot my brother and friend while at the soccer field because I spent some of my time at the field (since that was the only time I could do anything outside the realm of the house). The other choice was to shoot my family at home since I spend a lot of my time there during the lockdown. I eventually decided to shoot my siblings at home due to circumstances of the weather and air quality. I knew going into the shoot I did not want to just shoot still portrait, so I decided I’d experiment with light painting. 

Since I’ve never shot light painting the initial shots were bad, but after looking online for specific tips, I started to get the hang of it. Afterwards I decided to reshoot and use some of the tips like setting my ISO to 100 and F8 as well as using a manual shutter instead of the preset time.  After the shoot, I imported all the photos to Lightroom and started fixing and editing them. The reason the background is dark is sort of to encapsulate the aspect of the lockdown (being stuck inside the house). The lights represent family, so the time spent family is represented by all the lights.