I had a few candidates for my subject for this theme but ultimately chose an escalator. Out of the 5 themes, the concept for “height” was probably the simplest that I have done, however, taking it was quite tricky. Making sure that my subject is centered was the biggest challenge, along with ensuring that the people in the picture were minimal. I did that because I wanted the escalator to be shown as much as possible. Thankfully, there weren’t that many people inside the shopping mall that day.

For “Lift”, I cropped the raw picture to a 9:16 ratio because I felt that it emphasizes the subject more. I also chose a lower ISO of 50 because I wanted to make the simple subject a bit more interesting to look at. The outcome was a bit film-like with warmth that is thanks to the mall's interior.

For this theme, I had already planned to take a picture of any of these two items: bubble wrap or chocolates that I liked as a child. And yet, I ended up liking a spontaneous shot that I took of an interesting wall tile design that to me looked like frozen ice cubes. The subject is a part of a wall design for a restaurant that I happened to spot while resting on a nearby bench. What captivated me was how it looked so much like ice cubes in an ice tray, specifically because of the imperfect texture of the design.

Specifically for this picture, I chose a 9:21 ratio. Despite using a pretty low ISO of 160, I still ended up adjusting a little bit of the contrast of the picture to make the subject more defined. 

When I think of night time, I always think of the walks my mom and I take home. Whenever we go somewhere and come home during the night, I always like looking up at the night sky to see how many stars there are. This is why I took this picture just outside of our house. Instead of the stars, I featured a recently installed street light. 

Because our street can get pretty dark during night time, I used a high ISO of 1250 which made the raw picture a bit grainy, especially around the light’s halo. In order to fix that, I made small adjustments to the contrast of the picture. Additionally, I cropped the picture to make the street light centered.

When I think of flowers, the first thing that comes to mind is freshness. I think of the fresh summer breeze matched with the colorful tints of the flowers. Thus, I set this photo with the intention of making the flowers look as fresh as possible. I wanted the picture to give off a cool and fresh vibe which is why I submerged the flowers in water and to further emphasize it, I also used a subtle blue lighting. To add variety, I deliberately chose pink carnation flowers whose colors will pop in contrast to the background and lighting. At first, I wanted to take a picture of a spread of flowers submerged in water but upon experimenting, I found that taking a picture of a single flower inside a tall glass was more captivating.

For this picture I used a 1:1 ratio because I felt that it was the best option for the type of picture that I was going to take. While the raw picture was already pretty good because of the flower’s natural color as well as the texture of the glass, I chose to make small adjustments specifically to the picture’s vibrance and saturation. The end result is as if a flower was enclosed in a bubble. Furthermore, due to the glass, the background was able to look like a blurry painting.

“Over the City” was probably the hardest picture to take, especially as someone doing slow shutter speed photography for the first time. I took the picture while standing above an overpass bridge that we frequent because I thought that capturing the city highway above ground would give me a much more interesting output. This is especially since the angle allows me to capture more elements such as cars and building lights.

I took the picture using a shutter speed of 1/5 of a second to get a proper motion blur effect for the cars moving along the highway. I also cropped it to get rid of the bridge’s decoration that was captured in the corners. It took a long time to get the perfect shot at the perfect timing but the result is an overview shot of the city highway. It showcases the lights of the vehicles as well as blue and yellow halos that were due to the decorations attached to the bridge.