Cycles of Yau Ma Tei

2022, Large Format Photography

I called the resulting photograph "Cycles of Yau Ma Tei" because of the circle effect obviously, but also because it is a metaphor for the everyday routine of the fruit market as the workers there unload fruit from the trucks and stock up the shop's storage. Also Yau Ma Tei is where I live and for me it is a similar routine of coming back there everyday and leaving again in the morining. The image is little disorienting and it is difficult to make out the detail, similarly as one remembers a certain neighborhood by habit and it is not a conscious precise action of passing through the same streets everyday.

I chose to shoot the fruit market in Yau Ma Tei at night, because it is and interesting subject with many details, movements, and lights. And yet, it is a different subject compared to the typical long exposure street photography of cars on a highway etc.
After setting up the camera and metering the light I set the aperture to 11. Then I exposed the image with a manual shutter for 1:50" and rotated the rear standard 360 degrees. In this way I have created a very interesting and great looking effect of turning all the lights in the scene into circular streaks.

Technical Documentation:

I am very passionate about experimenting with photography and to explore and go beyond the percieved limits of the medium. Using long exposures and moving the camera are the most obvious ways to do that, especially within the limits of digital cameras. Large format film cameras offer an extremely broad range of adjustments that can be used to manipulate the image. This flexibility can be exploited to have points of movement during a long exposure shot, in order to create interesting effects on the resulting photograph.

Another aspect of film cameras in general is that the recording medium can be manipulated in most of the steps of the photo taking process. Large format cameras in particular, due to the larger space, allow for the film to be of all shapes, sizes and materials.

For my project I decided to make use of the control that a large format camera provides and to create long exposure photographs, and to move the camera during the exposure. However, I also chose to not use the standard 4x5 sheet film and to insert three 135mm film stripes into the film holder instead. This was for one due to curiosity, to see if it is possible, and also to save money. As the film material is more or less the same no matter the format and still the material cost for 135 film is much cheaper than the 4x5 sheet, i reckoned, it would be a very cost effective solution to use 135 in a 4x5 camera.

After shooting I developed the flim negatives, scanned them and composed them into the full image in Photoshop and finally edited them in LightRoom Classic. The colored version of the photos is created by coloring the shadows blue, the midtones green and the highlights orange.