Assignment 7: Night

Rachel Pedreira: Night Architecture

This is a photo taken in the engineering quad. I took quite a few pictures of the building from different perspectives and different levels, and ended up liking this angle the best. I wanted to use a relatively small aperture in order to have a greater depth of field - given the darkness this meant that I had to use a pretty long exposure time in order to achieve enough illumination in the photo. One thing that I found especially difficult when I took this photo was ensuring that the image was in focus - because it was so dark I had to turn off the automatic focus (it wouldn't work) and had to focus by hand. Since it was so dark, I couldn't really tell if the image was in focus when looking through the viewfinder. This meant that essentially I had to guess and check each time I took a photo. I thought that this particular shot was focused the best, however I think it may still be a bit out of focus. One aspect of the photo that I really like is how the trees are blurred - it was pretty windy on the night that I took the shot and the long exposure time resulted in the movement of the leaves looking like a blur. Another thing that sticks out to me about this photo is the sense of depth created by the curves of the two sides of the building. I really like how they come together in the distance and create a sort of tunnel sensation.

In Photoshop, I ended up rotating the image so that the bridges between the two sides of the building were level. I also cropped out a railing that was in the foreground. In addition, I enhanced the contrast just a bit in order to make the lines in the building more exaggerated.