Send Me A Postcard

Postcard Brainstorming:

After thinking more about whether to take the postcard photo from within a vehicle or from out I still couldn't make up my mind, so I decided to look on the web for more examples of such pictures that already existed to help me spark an idea about my own project.
The first photo I came across was this 1 above. Clearly taken at night, we can see the long stretch of light that is being caught in the shot. The windscreen is also blurred, but does not look like the effect rain has. This could show that maybe in the future, the drivers are taken over by the vehicles. humans are no longer required to drive, as technology and intelligence has greatly increased. Concepts like this will have a great influence in the making of my postcard.
I decided to chose New York's Times Square as a place to start comparing and generating ideas from becuase its certainly a busy street and is also widely recognized by people worldwide.

Here are some more example photos found online, showing the sort of results I was aiming to capture tonight:

Times Square, New York:

Traffic passing the camera causing a long stream of break lights to be left behind.

Times Square, New York:


Traffic that was heading towards the camera and passed leaving behind the trail of headlights.

These photos are perfect examples of the kind of images I had planned on capturing to produce my own postcard.
I also found a photo of Times Square that had blurred light, but was not created by the movement of traffic, but the camera had actually been moved, which gave the effect the the buildings were moving. This was an idea that I had not originally thought of, but definitely worked well in this photo, shown below:

Times Square, New York:

Getting More Specific:

Now that I have a clear idea of where I am going with this, I decided to search online for photos of Union Street that had been taken at night to see if there were any existing images already.
There wasn't an awful amount, in fact when 'Union Street Plymouth' is typed into Google images, the majority consists of the Dance Academy. Which again goes to show that this building was the highlight of this street once upon a time.
However, I did manage to find 1. This photo is very nearly a perfect way to show the kind of idea I had when I imagined creating a postcard picture of Union Street. This image was from high above the street, allowing the whole stretch of the street to be captured, as well as all the traffic below. It was also taken at night and in the distance the smudge and blurred blend of light due to traffic is visible.

The funny thing about this image, is the fact that it was actually taken from the roof of the Dance Academy looking down the street towards the city.

I now feel I have looked at enough examples and general ideas of images to be ready to take a mish down to Union Street and see what sort of pictures I can snap myself, it is now 23:00 hours which means it is plenty dark outside and should prove to be a good start in getting photos that display the desired effects.

... Some Time Later...

I have just got back from my trek down to Union Street to try and take photos that could be used for my postcard to Shaun. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to take the 'ideal' photo I was hoping for as what I had visioned in my head was a photo taken from a level that is higher than the traffic. This meant the snap would capture a long stream of the traffics lights all blended together. This would help me in editing the photo as there is a much broader view of the space around the traffic such as including the shops and clubs that stretch along the side of the street.

These are some of the photos I managed to capture this evening:

This photos was taken on the bench that I have previously discussed. I tried to involve the Dance Academy as it definitely does seem to be the focal point of the street, even though it is completely unused and has been for years. I tried to achieve this with the vision of the traffic moving quickly past by using the slow shutter speed to blend/blur the light and traveling vehicles. It also could show the fact that people travel past this building everyday, completely regardless of the potential this massive space has and is left behind.

Other trouble I had was the fact that I was forced to take pictures from ground level it meant that a lot of the pictures I took didn't give the desired effect I was after due the the photos being taken under the very many street lamps there are in the area. The large amount of light coming from the lamps and car lights meant the camera had sufficient light to take an image that was clearer and wasn't as blurred as I would have liked.

Now that I have done some research and gathered some of my own images, its time to make my postcard.