urban to rural

hello eye balls,

I recently took  trip back home and found that my stepmum was working on a paper about travel from rural to urban. I had recently made this journey and captured some images that reflected some of my thoughts on the matter. The image above has the most thematic continuity in this regard. The light from the sun competes with the light inside the train and even with my great efforts to neutralize the colour balance, you can still see where the sunlight hits the interior light, shifting the sky from blue to green. The reflected interior overhead lighting shooting out from the sun like a dashed, orange sunbeam. This is the dichotomy of rural and urban, the graceful overlap of sunlight and a tungsten bulb.

train to

I decided to sit on the side of the train I could see the lake, because I love the lake. The challenge was keeping the background in focus with such a wide aperture. Angling my lens to reduce window glare also proved to be key in obtaining the image I was going for as well. But the greatest feat was keeping my ISO as low as possible, while still getting the fast shutter speed I needed to get the shot. I wanted some of the reflection though, and the windows and row lighting in the sky were a conscious element that I wanted in the shot.

The way there it was very cloudy, flat lighting, but the fog encompassing certain features of the landscape made it more dramatic. I did have problems keeping the grimy windows out of focus.

rural life

We took a brisk walk around the quint rural village and I took the opportunity to document some of the high blue, dramatic daylight in different situations. The first image in this sequence is a home-made curling rink. I really just wanted to document the accomplishment but found the line of the path and the line of the creek framed the subject matter well.

The second image I really took advantage of the light to show off the texture of the church.

The third image is my favourite. It has all of the earth tones that I like to use in photos. I also just like the idea of a sensitive fish, sighing, swimming alone. The depth of field emphasises the lineal aspect of the creek as it creeps off into the distance. Thematically though I like images of nature within civilization. To see what human’s do to preserve natural spaces and coax them into the heavily structured municipal plans.

train from

The blue/green scale on this image goes back to my obsession with earth tones, but in this case blue and green are the ultimate representations of colours on earth. Where waters meet, the deep blue becomes more green. The figure of the bridge, a transition between urban and suburban. And again we see the reflection of the windows and lighting in the sky. The light blue of the reflected windows adds another shade of blue and makes the battle of white balance between daylight and tungsten that much more obvious.

thanks for looking