Letter A, day 5/14, 5/365
All-night areas are easy to find in Korea, so I knew just what Simon Landry was saying when he suggested it.
Come to think of it, Seoul is an all-night area in its entirety. Go down any street, and you’ll find bars and restaurants bustling at all hours of the night.
My idea for this was to put Ting (an Asian-American) in the middle of one of Seoul’s busy spots for night life. We had a bar opening to attend in Apgujeong, so I thought that’d be perfect. I wanted lots of people streaming by so I could do a moderately long exposure, freezing Ting with a strobe through a handheld softbox.
I screwed it up. First of all, there were no people. I would have been saved by my friends, who were great sports and walked by Ting so I could take the picture… except for one problem: I’m a moron. I didn’t pump the flash’s power up enough to really keep Ting sharp. I kept having to dodge cars and make sure no one was stealing my bag, so I couldn’t muster up enough brain power to realize what the problem was. I just kept checking the screen, seeing a crappy shot, and trying it again, just the same way I’d done it before.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I am going to try this shot again another time, because I think it could look pretty decent. For now, here’s this one, in the spirit of keeping a true 365 project going. Besides, if one can’t learn from mistakes, one might as well give up learning.
In an effort to hide the awful quality of the photo, I heavily processed the colors in Lightroom, then threw it into Photoshop and applied a bit more radial blur to set off the (not much) sharper subject against the blurry background / foot traffic.
AZ365 