Square

One of the things about trying to shake the feeling that I'm an imposter as the Photo Synthesis art exhibit drew near (it's on now) is that I keep looking for photos that I feel are better than what I've submitted to the show. Not so that I can replace my submissions but so that I can learn for next time.

Assuming that there ever is a 'next time.'

One photo that sprang to mind was one that I took in August of 2012, during a summer photo walk that I led through Centretown. The group met on the Mackenzie King Bridge, outside the Rideau Centre, and from there we walked to Sparks Street, headed down O'Connor Street to Sommerset, over to Bank, up past the Confederation Building, and down the stairs that take you below Parliament Hill.

From there, we walked to Mill Street Brew Pub, where we enjoyed a well-deserved beverage and something to eat.

While we were on O'Connor Street, my eyes not only scanned for what was on the road but what was above, as well. I was on the western side of the road, near the Dominion-Chalmers United Church, looking northward, when I saw contrasting patterns between two buildings on the east side of O'Connor.

When I brought my camera up to my eye and zoomed in, the patterns were made even clearer, so I took the shot.

It was the balconies of the Imperial Apartments building with the steely office towers of 151 Laurier Avenue that gave such texture to the photo. I thought it was very cool and the photo ended up being one of my favourite shots of the photo walk.

Being 2012, I was still new to RAW photo formats and I kept my editing skills pretty simple. I didn't do much to improve the photo and I certainly was a few years away from being able to enhance the photo. The final photo isn't much different from the original capture.

Fast-forward nearly 11 years later and I find myself looking at that image, telling myself that perhaps I should have included it in the Photo Synthesis exhibit. Only, as always, I wasn't completely happy with the shot.

Very recently, I've started thinking about photos of mine that might look better in a square format. I don't know if it's because I've recently started looking at my old Instagram posts, when a square shot was the only format available, or if it's because I found some unused, square picture frames in our basement and started thinking of photos that would fill them.

Either way, I've started looking at photos and re-imagining them with a 1:1 ratio.

The Photo Friday post from two weeks ago was another example of an image that I've imagined as a square.

Enter my photo from 2012.

I actually looked it up on Wednesday, as I was sitting in a hospital, awaiting the results of my CT scan. I had nothing else to do and it actually took my mind off my pain.

The first thing I did was to straighten the lines of the steel and glass from the office tower so that they were as vertical as possible. I then added more sharpness to the image so that the iron barriers on the apartment balconies popped a bit.

Rather than applying a black-and-white filter to the image, I took the colour saturation levels to –100 before increasing the contrast. A bit of play with the ambience and I had something that I thought looked pretty good.

I shared it on Mastodon as one of my daily photos (though I have to now admit, it wasn't particularly 'random').

Because I wasn't working with the original file and was editing with Snapseed, on my phone, I had my doubts about how good the image actually was if it were to be enlarged and printed, so last night I looked up the original photo in my hard-drive database and made similar edits in PaintShop Pro.

(For this post, the photo was resized so that it can only be enlarged so much.)

I like the square format for this image. It gives a better division between the apartment building and the office tower. I see more texture in the image and the pattern is more defined.

Thoughts?

I'm going to search for more photos that I can re-edit and make square, and over this summer, I'm going to start taking more photos, keeping the 1:1 ratio in mind.

Photo Synthesis runs now through to July 30. Join me and three other photographers, tomorrow, from 1 to 3 at the Arbor Gallery, in Vankleek Hill.

Happy Friday!