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Photographing Air

I was working recently on a visual identity project for a business in which strength and expertise were expressed via the concept of the four elements.

Earth, water and fire are pretty easy to photograph and provide powerful images, but air, given its abstract nature, well, that is a whole different story. Air is non tangible when it comes to photography, so what do you do when air is the thing you want to take pictures of? You turn to Schlieren photography.

August Toepler invented the process in 1864 to study supersonic motion, and it soon became a mainstay in aeronautics, where the study of airflow is crucial. The idea is remarkably clever. Collimated light (light in which the rays are parallel and thus, do not disperse with distance), is shined onto the subject. Any airflow will cause density gradients that in turn cause variations in the refractive index (the ratio of the speed of light in a vacuum vs that medium and a measure of how much that medium bends light). These variations then cause the previously collimated light to diverge, and as it spreads apart, it shines with differing intensities on different spots, depending on how spread apart it is.

Thanks to the School of Aeronautics I had the privilege to take these surreal shots:

The Perfect Shadow

Photography is known as the art of capturing light. However the counterpart of light, the shadow, also plays an important role in the creation of an image. We all know what a shadow is, that stalker that keeps following us on bright sunny days or well-lit places at night. Shadow is more than that though, it is also the darkest area of a scene as opposed to the highlights which illuminate the brightest. The challenge in shooting a scene that contains both highlights and shadows in it is to record the details without washing out the highlights or turning the shadows into unrecognisable black areas.

Shadow is simply a figure formed behind an object when it is illuminated by light at an angle. In photography, an image without a shadow is often two-dimensional in shape. But with the addition of a third component, the shadow, this shape is transformed into a form. This transformation gives the shape a noticeable depth because of the shadow created by the light falling on the subject, resulting in a three-dimensional image. Since a photo is viewed in a two-dimensional medium, showing the image in its three-dimensional form makes it more realistic and visually appealing to the audience.

Architecture Photography - Always in Search of the Perfect Form

I have always been fascinated by the aesthetics of constructions and the details of their shapes. Every building has its own architectural language with a totally individual vocabulary. In all of these languages I look for the most beautiful letters and words. I abstract urban shapes and underline their clear forms and structures.

By breaking the essence of a city down to the substance, I aim to free buildings from their spatial context and known surroundings. In the end, I hope to model a new uniqueness of shapes with the pictures I take .