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.

You’ll never believe how difficult it is to get close to squirrels.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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