I had driven past these seemingly curvy towers while on the QEW/403 many many times, and pretty much on every occasion I thought - I need to get a picture of those some day. (I say seemingly curvy as they actually twist as they rise).
August of 2017 I ended up with some extra time and finally made my way over to the Absolute Towers, (implying in my imagination enormous vodka bottles, analogue perhaps to the largest ball of twine or other roadside attractions). Actually I went over on two different days - and at different times of the day - as the sun’s location really alters how the play of light and shadow renders the twists in the buildings. I also wanted to make sure I got some nice clouds in the background of the image. Both of the times I went I spent a couple of hours walking around the buildings and did a couple of test shots in an effort to find what I thought would be the best place to take what ended up being the extended exposure below. (The test shot above was a good angle for not only having both buildings appear to curve in different ways, but also each had the other reflected in it.)
While walking around the buildings, (and going up into other nearby buildings and the carpark across the street) trying to find a composition I was happy with, one of the main issues I discovered was that there are a lot of other structures nearby and I knew I didn’t want to include any of them in the image. This meant that I had to be much closer to the skyscrapers than I had initially intended - and even then I still had to aim the camera up above the first few floors of the buildings to crop the trees out.
You can virtually walk around the towers on google maps street view and see them from different vantage points.
The first time someone asked why I usually shoot in black and white I think I might have mumbled something about that’s what I first started to shoot on when I shot with film (and in b&w I liked that I could process the images myself), but after putting a bit more thought into it - I think that it’s because in monochrome the images are no longer such a literal representation of the real world - it sort of becomes my own (or probably more so - the camera’s) interpretation of the subject. And this is likely also why I enjoy shooting extended exposures - as it reveals something (abstract..ish) that we would not normally be able to see, by taking a 30 second or 20 minute chunk of time and compressing it into an instant. (Of course this compression of time only affects objects in motion such as clouds, water, and people - unless the camera itself is moving).
This way of shooting images also forces me to do so with more intent. I am not just lifting my camera up and snapping a photo - but putting at least some effort into figuring out the best vantage point (and time of day, weather, focal length, shutter speed, aperture, etc) and then going about setting up my tripod, camera, ND and/or other filters, along with possibly my tilt/shift adapter, or leveling plate to try and get an image I might be happy with. And even then after spending an hour finding that specific vantage point and setting up all the gear I will quite often move to another spot and set everything up again - and/or will experiment with different exposure times, or just hang out and wait for the sun to go back behind the clouds, or come out of the clouds and then try again. (And of course I’m doing all of this for the possibility of getting one picture - [insert WTF am i thinking emoji here].)
But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t in any way a tedious process. It’s meditative if anything.