30-Minute Photography Challenge
Holiday Inn Orlando-Disney Springs® Area, an IHG Hotel | 1805 Hotel Plaza Blvd, Lake Buena Vista, FL 32830
What if you have only twenty to thirty minutes free, while staying at a mid-budget city hotel – not a scenic place in a traditional sense – and you wanted to make a few photographs? With your family getting ready for check out, what will you do? What can you do? Can we use the same concept of timed-writing-exercise and apply it to making photographs? Creating visual images using words and sentences, and creating images using visual language does have similarities.
We learnt about timed-writing exercises in my writing class. I wondered: what if I use the same exercise but apply to photography. David Duchemin (https://davidduchemin.com/) emphasizes the process of sketching. I would say: lets sketch and see if we can make something happen here.
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Yesterday, we – me, my wife and two sons – went to Orlando to visit friends. We stayed overnight and had to leave early in the morning, as I had a class to attend at noon. I had brought a Leica Q2 and a Leica Q2 Monochrom with me. My family likes the color images and I, black and white. As they started to get ready in the morning, I calculated that I had about twenty to thirty minutes free. I challenged myself to walk out of the room, start the timer, and stop taking photos in thirty-minutes. Goal was to return with some useful images – no priori limit on the subject matter. Let’s see how that turned out.
I set the timer; checked the camera battery, formatted the card, took a test shot to check that everything was in order and started my timed exercise. Just outside the fourth-floor hotel room, I could see an elevator going up and down; narrow hallways, an empty dining area below and directional sunlight filtering in and creating diffuse shadows of objects and people below.
I got down to first floor and saw an empty corridor. I liked the geometric designs and shapes and reflections in the mirror.
I then looked upwards….
With time limit in place, I had time for one more location: I could choose from the outside of the hotel, parking lot and covered patio, where interesting geometric shapes – arches, rectangles, squares, and circles – and light and well-defined shadows were present; or go the area between the wings of the hotel. I opted for latter; unbeknownst to me, that area contained a swimming pool around which hotel had set up a few seating arrangements.
I started to take sketching photos and asked myself some questions: what aperture/ISO/shutter speed combination would retain the details in the highlight? How wide is the dynamic range of the scene? Are there any compositional elements I need to include or exclude? Are there any leading lights? Where is the light coming from? Where is it landing? Where is it being reflected, by what and on whom? Are there any patterns? Any interesting details? Where can I find texture here? Any elements that I can use for scale, especially human figures?
The pool was empty still, but a pair of water feature was spraying water up in the air; this was backlit. Additionally, there were two or three areas of contrast around the pool. I decided to walk around the pool, looking at different points-of-view – an exercise like what you would do in a writing workshop where you would experiment with POV and examine a scene from different perspectives.
Area on the other side of the pool seemed promising. There were shadows on the wall and bright light was hitting a towel rack. It was reflecting some light into a maintenance closet in which a man was standing fixing something, I walked over to the other side.
The towel rack just in itself plenty photogenic.
Time was about to run out. I returned to room with five-minutes to spare. By then both my sons – Zuhair and Mahad were ready to go. I had them sit right next to a window and quickly took some photos to end the session.
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Wayne Gretzky’s admonition is applicable here. I would have missed all of these shots – albeit of different kind than what Gretzky had in mind – had I not explored the area for 30-minutes. I will remember this exercise and surely this can come handy especially when feeling creatively stuck.
