Circuit City Photography – Working with Scale

As a photographer working with scale has always fascinated me.

The idea of using electronic circuit boards, transistors and the suchlike as a metaphor for a city is hardly a new one. I wanted to attempt to capture this in an image but I wanted to focus on photographic atmospherics to push it away from the cold hard digital feel of the circuit board and more towards the ambiguity and less defined feel of a city. This image is not quite there but there is enough promise to make another attempt at some point in the future.  I feel that there is more mileage yet in my circuit city photography project.

Water

I used to live on the coast of Lake Michigan and could see the Chicago Skyline from the beach and that view has embedded itself into my soul as now I find it hard to envisage skylines that are not over water. Water has always been my natural element, I was born on the coast and am, or at least was, a fairly strong swimmer. Being in water has always felt like coming home, all I need to do is swim or just float on my back in a lake or a pool and both the worlds and my problems fade into the background.

Now to come back down to earth, here are the technical details:

Camera Nikon d40x

Lens the 50-200mm zoom(300mm efl) kit one that came with the camera

Extra optics – the lens unit of an ancient overhead projector – the type that runs hot but projects non transparent stuff i.e. if you wanted to project the pages of a book directly on the wall this is what you’d use. Basically I use this as a macro unit – gives around 1:2 magnification and means that I can work a lot closer than the 3ft minimum distance of the original kit lens. One day I will be able to treat my self to a top notch macro lens and that will really extend my working with scale projects.

Lighting daylight in my studio. I have great natural light for most of the day with the main window on the south and a smaller one on the west. I rarely work with more than fill lighting in the studio.

Surface is a plastic decorating table – great for spraying with water and has really nice blue undertones – this table also does great service for food photography.

Post Production was done, as always, In Adobe Lightroom. As far as I can recall I just did a small crop and removed a dust speck at this stage.

As always any comments, suggestions and stories are welcome. I would be especially interested to hear about any other photography or artistic endeavors around the whole subject of working with scale.