Photograph Stories
The first time I seriously picked up a camera was during the summer of 2018 in California. I had always wanted to practice photography, so I figured that since I was a bit more comfortable in terms of $$$, the best way to start is to just dive in with a camera! From then, I learned as much as I could through practice and through learning from many Youtube photographers.
Now, It’s been almost 2 years, and a few days ago a friend asked me to share some of the pictures I had on my wall. As I was taking the pictures, I realized that most of the pictures I had on my walls took me to back in the past around the time I took them. You see, I have been struggling with what kind of pictures I enjoy taking, and even today, I don’t think I’ve solved that problem. However, I realized when I was looking at them that it may not be about what kind of picture I want to take but about what kind of experience I want to have while taking pictures. The pictures that I enjoy looking at the most come from those during which I had a challenging and rewarding experience taking. I’m going to share some of them below in no particular order.
The MIT Squirrel
Fall 2019
You’ll never believe how difficult it is to get close to squirrels.
Around last fall, MIT Technique was having a competition for which the theme was “scale”. When I saw the word “scale”, I immediately thought “BIG”. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that “scale” could also mean “ENLARGED small”, and what first jumped to me with this new idea were the squirrels on Killian court! They are always there, they are small, and if I could just get really close to them, it’d make an exceptional photo! However, this turned out to be much harder than I thought, I ended up spending over 2 hours each day for about 4 days in Killian trying various techniques.
First, I tried luring them with nuts, then I could just wait at a close distance and snap my shot whenever they start eating it. However, I quickly realized that squirrels, at least to me, seemed to behave in what looked like a random walk. If I pick one spot in the entire Killian courts, it would be almost impossible for a randomly moving squirrel to reach that spot.
After that, I tried strategy number 2: get closer to the squirrels. This would be much easier—I thought— because I could just follow them. However, it was completely impossible to get more than 12 feet close—no matter how slow I moved. I wanted to get about 2–3 feet close. After a few desperate attempts, I quickly abandoned this strategy.
Now, here comes strategy number 3, which is what I ended up using and which almost worked—I say almost because as you can tell the picture I took is blurry. The key observation I made, after spending hours watching these squirrels and trying to understand them, is that when they run away, the climb up trees! (You: duh! Don’t tell me this took you 3 days…) Using that, I could just place my camera near the foot of a tree, set the focus distance to a distance where I’d expect (or hope) the squirrel to be, and then try to scare the squirrel into climbing the tree with my camera. The catch: I must scare them so they climb towards where I place the camera, my camera would be taking pictures every 1–2 seconds or so, and the squirrel must get there before I run out of storage (I use a 64GB storage, but each picture I take is about ~100mb on my current camera). Doing exactly that, I managed to get the shot above. While this is not what I wanted since the squirrel was out of focus, it’s clear that the blurriness adds an artistic touch to the photo, and, I love how it seamlessly blends with the MIT dome on the background.
MIT Dome Morning-to-Night Transition
December 2018
Apple had just released the macOS Mojave upgrade in which you could have a desktop background that changes based on the time of the day. My friend Noah told me he was writing a program that could allow you to create your own time changing background from a set of photos with a given time of the day in each photo. He asked me if I would be down to help with a few pictures, and I say YES! I’m not sure who came up with the final idea of doing the MIT Dome, but that’s what I decided to tackle.
Before actually going outside, I thought to myself that the only challenge of this project would be figuring out how to place my camera in some location on Killian and then being able to remove and place it in that same exact location again and again multiple times throughout the day. That is, I couldn’t just leave my camera outside all day; I’m too paranoid for that. Fortunately, most tripod have a locking feature where you could lock it into a specific position, so all I needed was to figure out a way to mark where I’d place the legs of my tripod. Hmm… I could just use pins! Easy.
Then, I went outside with 3 pins for the 3 legs of my tripod with the goal to take some test shots. However, it turns out that the pins were too small. So instead I had to roll papers and dig small holes and place the rolled papers in the holes instead. Then, I looked at Killian and noticed just how many tourists there were. You wanna know how many? Too many to take a shot with no tourist on the frame, almost any time of the day 😒. So, the only solution really was to take a bunch of pictures and try to use only the non-people parts from all parts. I did something like a combination of these two youtube videos: 1, 2 (I could have done just 2, but I didn’t know the technique at the time). While I could just do that, the tourists introduced another problem. I had to wait much longer outside, and this was December, in Massachusetts! It was actually super cold, so I had to layer up. At times, I had to wait outside over an hour just to get a shot without people (it was much easier to get a shot without people than to do the above techniques). Finally, taking pictures about 1–2 days before I fly out made this much more urgent—I had to act quickly. I did not have any morning photos. So, I had to wake up around 4am when it was completely dark, take the morning photos from 4 to 7 (because light transitions much faster in this time frame)—meaning staying outside for a REALLY long time in the cold, then take a few others at 9 and 11 a.m., then catch my flight around 3pm.
While that was painful, I loved the process! I was hard at work trying to get these shots knowing full well that the final result would be amazing, and it is! This is one of my favorite pictures because of the process it took to make and because it looks just like I had hoped it’d look. Things don’t always go your way, and this time it totally did for me!
As a bonus, here’s a photo of the dome at night. Getting this was fun because I had to take a long exposure photo so that the image doesn’t look grainy:
Stone Mountain Descent
January 2019
This is one of those photos where everything just lines up for you and all you have to do is press the shutter, but you gotta do it fast!
After the MIT Dome photo, I actually flew to Miami and then Georgia. In Georgia, I visited my friend Jeffrey who took me to visit the Stone Mountain. Jeffrey is my friend from high school, and back then we used to be very active and competitive with each other: trying to see who eats more, who runs fastest, and in this case, who hikes the fastest on the mountain. We didn’t actually leave each other too far behind, but it was still a friendly competition at times.
Now, what I loved about this event is that one could see this strip of no trees both at the top and at the bottom, but not in the middle. We saw it when we were still down there. However, to get up to this spot, we needed to turn left, move up, then back right, and then up again—so we couldn’t see the strip the entire time until we got high up enough and got to this spot. I turned around, and what a scene! On my way up there, I was taking a bunch of pictures already, but nothing beat that scene. Then, as soon as I saw this man wearing a jacket going down this part of the mountain—which is very slippery thus the metal bars, I immediately thought about how red and green are complementary colors (to nerd out a bit, they are complementary in the RYB space, not the RGB space, which actually threw me off the first time I realized this) and how they look great together. So, I just took a bunch of pictures as he was going down. This photo? One of the first few ones, but easily the best one. So, I only had a few seconds to spare! I was lucky that my camera was already powered, ready, and somehow all the settings were on point.
Later we continued up the mountain, and I took a few more pictures. We sat a few times and caught up with life and everything else. Overall, I had a wonderful day hiking up this mountain, and every time I look back at this picture, it just takes me back to that day as if I was actually there.
MIT Stata Arts Competition
October/November 2018
The MIT Stata center released a photography and arts competition for which the theme was “student life, learning, and research”. With that prompt, my rough idea was to photograph some students in their “natural habitat” while they’re doing their work—likely research. So I thought, who better to contact than my graduate student friends? So I reached out to Kayode, Emmanuel, and Kifle, who were all in the process of completing their masters of engineering. I got to interact with them more, learn more about what they were researching, and see what kind of environment they work in, and that was fun! Later, I submitted 4 photos for the competition, and the judges picked the one above. I really like that photo, but I didn’t realize that Kayode wearing his MIT ring on his index finger would generate controversies. 😲
Anyways, I wanted to present the my other submissions as well:
Anyways! Now that I’ve realized that experiences matter—maybe more than just what kind of picture it is, I know that I will tackle my future photography adventures with this in mind.
If you’d like to continue following my photography, you can follow me on instagram @robertvphotos. I haven’t posted in a while, but I know that it’s just a matter of time before I start posting more regularly.
