The experiment with the reflexes from the glowing colored street lights led me to the droplets on the glass. In this multiverse, I had already noticed the droplets a couple of years ago, and I decided to try again.
The images that emerge are interesting, and at times even slightly frightening.
It’s as if many eyes are looking at me...
Overall, you can experiment with such plots, but I wouldn’t say it’s as captivating as a colorful ice surface.
That’s because I’ve already seen drops of water in some form or another, and they don’t look as otherworldly as ice or reflections in puddles.
To fully immerse yourself and extract the maximum amount of content from the scenes, you need a portable glass that can be secured in front of the camera.
But I’m not ready to do staged, almost studio‑like shooting outdoors.
Even here, you can see my journalistic approach: I take what I see with my eyes out of space and transfer it onto a matrix plane, and then onto the monitor screen.
This doesn’t reflect a reportage‑style approach; it demonstrates my approach to photography as a response to the space and an immediate reaction.
Based on this, we can state that there is a large branch in photography called non‑staged photography. And from it, genres and subgenres emerge.
A long postscript — a quote from my message to one of the photographers:
" – Studio photography is also photography. All photography is divided into staged and non‑staged. But staging does not negate the photographic nature of the image — the light, even if it’s set, fell on the sensor through the lens. We captured reality. The studio is reality, the street is reality, the office, the house, work, animals, insects... everything that surrounds us is reality. And a camera is a means of recording it. A phone with a 3‑megapixel camera is also a means of recording reality. But when we alter the recorded result using tools that weren’t present in that reality (Photoshop), that’s already a substitution, a deception. And yet, this will also be a part of reality. That’s already philosophy. AI‑generated images can also be considered a document of their time and a reflection of the era, just like filters, HDR (which was popular in the mid‑2000s), film, pinhole, fisheye, and all the other means of capturing and distorting reality. But. If we’re talking about real, unstaged photography that’s considered part of the elite — the Magnum agency, AFP, Reuters, the World Press Photo contest, and others… then the key criterion for capturing reality — the reliability of the event — remains. Otherwise, what kind of news and documentary agencies are they if they distort reality? But there’s a catch there too: bias on the part of the author, their political beliefs, experience, attitude towards what’s happening, etc., will be considered a distortion. To achieve this, they use creative techniques and composition to control attention through various symbols and hidden meanings. Based on all of this, a photographer who shoots a studio production also creates a document of time and space, of an era, just like an street photographer. However, if they have applied processing that has altered reality (for example, repainting the studio walls, changing the background or the color of the light), then it will be a digital image, as it will contradict the true, literal definition of photography — the art of capturing light...