David Shiraki - Recipe Crit 1: B&W/Mystery

Although this wasn't voted my POW, I wanted my first recipe post to feature a photo with an interesting story behind it (plus people seemed interested in this one). This was one of my favorites from this assignment for a number of reasons. The general critique for my posts were to avoid graffiti and focus more on "urban decay". Forcing a story or scenario to make for a good photo is uninteresting to me so I focused more on what comes natural.

My friends run a skateboard magazine called Skate Jawn and this photo was taken inside of their warehouse (they also live here). If you are familiar with North Philly, this warehouse is located on 5th & Cecil B. Moore. There's tons of visually interesting things going on in that area. "$14 The Hard Way" is actually the title of a skate video that was premiered at the warehouse last winter (I wrote the title on the ceiling beam for the premier). There are ramps inside so its a good hang out spot. I figured most people would have no idea what they were looking at with this photo because of the graffiti, mattress, piping system, etc.

This photo was shot with an Apple iPhone 5 IOS 7.0.2. I shot this from ground level looking up while centering the title of the video. I thought if I framed this section of the warehouse people would definitely feel the mystery. I used VSCOcam for the black/white filter. The preset filters aren't bad but I didn't want it to look over processed so I reduced the levels on the filter before playing with the contrast, temperature, and exposure. First I turned the exposure up then I turned the contrast up. I didn't touch the temperature at all. I wasn't trying to do anything crazy with the photo since there was enough interesting things going on as is, so I just made sure the exposure was able to show the letters nice and clean. The contrast made for an interesting take on the mattress area on the right hand side.

I basically wanted an interesting photo that had more to do with what was actually being shot rather than the effects I could use. I played with the contrast and exposure with the other photos but I felt that this photo didn't need too much. I hope that after people read this they feel differently about the graffiti because its not just "found graffiti" that I stumbled upon on a walk to find good photos for this assignment. This means a little more to me and it also came more natural than going out and trying to force an interesting photo.