Assignment 4: Architecture

Sophia W: Upward Escape

I saw this fire escape in an alley on California Ave, and thought the metal frame would make a great photo from underneath. It was midday so the sun was bright and the sky was blue, creating an effect of climbing upwards into the sky. I like the effect, since fire escapes are for climbing down in an emergency. The strong vertical lines in the photo "get in the way," but I like how they create interesting intersections and give depth to the photo.

I used a focal length of 18mm so that the fire escape would fill the frame -- I of course couldn't move the fire escape, and it was close enough to me such that I needed a short focal length in order to get the full metal frame in the photo. I used a small aperture of f/13 and short shutter speed of 1/1250s, since I was shooting up into the bright sky. The only preprocessing I did afterwards was to crop the left and right edges of the photo to center the fire escape further. I used a Nikon D3100, and it fills requirement 1, vertical vanishing point.