One of the first classes I had at New England Tech was a photography class and the cornerstone project was to shoot a photo essay. Having no idea what to shoot, I spent a night or two walking around Providence, RI to try and pull inspiration from anything I could. Coincidentally, night time was the only time of day I had to take photos between school and work and I’m more than okay with that. Aesthetically, the setting of the colonial East Side of Providence became suddenly eerie after the sun went down and that became something I really liked and wanted to pursue with the photo essay. Below are some of the shots I got that I thought were worth submitting into the complete project.
However, the more I went through the photos, the more ideas I had. I brought them back into Photoshop and made more edits, playing with the color balance, levels, and saturation.
After settling on the images, between the content and the Photoshop edits, it came time to narrow down what I had so that it wasn’t a photo essay of the same image 10 times. What was difficult about this was coming to terms with the fact that some my favorite pictures may not fit in with the rest of the content. For example, the photo of the sculptures from the Brown University campus does not fit in with the rest of colonial Providence. Additionally, while the AVON photo may be a little closer thematically (architecture) than the sculptures, that doesn’t mean that it fits with the colonial East Side and helps the essay to flow from image to image. That became the next challenge; putting the photos in an order that made sense and could tell a story. Even with this challenge came another, which was making the edits more cohesive. This would make the story-telling process easier. In attempt to do so, the photos resulted in looking like this:
Finally, the story turned out to look like this: