State College in Black and White
One Way
September 20, 2022
South Allen Street and West Calder Way
Ricoh GR II
Framed from Burrowes
September 20, 2022
From the Burrowes Building, facing the library mall
Ricoh GR II
Thank You State College
January 5, 2022
Saint's Cafe
Canon 60D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4
Cloudy Sky
September 22, 2022
From atop one of the downtown parking garages.
Ricoh GR II
Door
October 10, 2022
Canon 60D, Sigma 30mm f/1.4
Click here for all photos in this project thus far.
Allen Street
Sackett Building
I was on campus mid-afternoon today to run some errands and get a look at the classroom that I’ll be teaching in starting next week. I was struck by the long shadows cast by the buildings and the trees. After a week of mostly dreary weather, it was refreshing to see such sharply defined areas of sunlight and shadow.
The following were all taken on an iPhone 12 Mini and edited in Apple Photos.
January 3, 2022, 2:49 p.m.
Penn State, University Park
January 3, 2022, 2:53 p.m.
Penn State, University Park
January 3, 2022, 2:55 p.m.
Penn State, University Park
January 3, 2022, 2:57 p.m.
Penn State, University Park.
January 3, 2022, 2:18 p.m.
Penn State, University Park
January 3, 2022, 2:59 p.m.
Penn State, University Park
Haircut day equals street photography day, so here are a bunch from Friday morning.
My original goal with this project had been to shoot on the street downtown and largely avoid the campus itself. I was interested most in seeing what I could photograph in a city much smaller than the one I’d moved from years ago. While I do think downtown could use a bit more attention as a city all its own, though, I realized more recently that to cut the campus out entirely from a project that’s about documenting downtown is to ignore much of what makes downtown what it is, at times for better or worse. So, though I’ll try to maintain my focus on the areas outside the gates, I do think it makes sense to shoot on campus now and then.
Friday was the day before Penn State’s ”White Out” game against Auburn, so there was a bit more activity on and around campus than usual, including the setup and supporting vehicles for Saturday’s ESPN Game Day broadcast on the lawn in front of the iconic Old Main administration building.
The following are from inside a classroom building in the middle of a class period. As with any college campus, there’s an ebb and flow of pedestrian traffic depending on the time of day. Below is a quiet scene, but when classes are changing, it’s just seas of humans moving everywhere between and within buildings, as if it were the world’s biggest game of musical chairs.
The following doesn’t fit into any particular category, except, perhaps, that it exhibits the type of shot more easily done with a phone than with a standalone camera. Though I am occasionally happy with the close in street shots I sometimes get, I do feel like I aesthetically gravitate more towards wider compositions that more purposefully place the subject in relation to the surrounding area, such as the shot of the persons crossing in front of the bus above.
The time I can spend on my State College in Black and White photo project has, for the most part, been limited to when I’m already downtown and have just a bit of time to kill. So, if anything, these are basically photo records of “Days When Rob Went and Got a Haircut.” As has been the case with (I think) all of the photos in this project thus far, I took these on my Ricoh GR II, a small and discreet camera ideal for street photography (that is, if you can nowadays use a camera that’s not a phone and still consider that discreet).
Next time I’m shooting downtown, I’ll see what I can do with just my iPhone. I very much enjoy using a dedicated camera, but I know from past experience that there are shots I can get with my phone that I wouldn’t be able to get with a larger, standalone camera.
Until now, I've never really thought of my photography in terms of projects—that is, in terms of long term choices of subject and/or style that might add up to some sort of larger whole. Series of daily posts or single blog posts about a topic or event were the largest sized chunks that I'd think about.
But in the past few weeks, as I've gone down a rabbit hole of listening to photography podcast after photography podcast, I've grown more aware of photographers talking about their projects—these ongoing works intended towards some eventual, curated whole, but whose end form isn't often very well defined in advance. While examples are many, the ones I have in mind are things like Kyle McDougall's project on the American southwest, discussed occasionally in his podcast The Contact Sheet, Neil Kramer's Quarantine in Queens, and Angela Douglas's Slowly Drowning. Work like this appeals to me because of its blend of top-down and bottom-up structure—while some intention drives the activity of going out and taking these photos (or, in Kramer's case, taking these photos while compelled to stay in), it is regular practice and the passage of time that give the photographer the perspective that enables them to say when it is done and what photos comprise the end product.
I'm hoping to turn the practice I started during my break—doing street photography in downtown State College—into one such project of my own. Though I'm a drive away from downtown, I'm there or pass through there often enough that I can do it somewhat regularly. And, as I am in year four of a six year graduate program, there is probably going to be a de facto end to the project in the future, which should provide just enough of a framework to keep me focused on getting out and taking photos as consistently as I can.
This is a bit more intentional than street photography I'd done in New York, in which I'd mostly take photos on the way to and from work. But I hope this intentionality helps me pay more attention and think more about not just getting a shot, but getting a good one. So I'm hoping to dig in, spend some time, and get a better sense of how light, shadow, and the flow of traffic and persons behave in this particular place at various times of day throughout the year.
That was the idea behind these photos, taken this past Thursday between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. with a Ricoh GR II (shooting in JPG using the high-contrast black and white effect). I tried to keep an eye out for good light and interesting compositions, and also to start taking some mental notes on where to go and what to try and shoot if I'm downtown early on a weekday. Here's a bit of what I found.
There's a stereotypical street photography shot that often comes up on Instagram in which someone is walking into or out of a hard shadow cast against a wall. In one episode of The Contact Sheet, Sean Tucker joked about how this move isn't really all that hard to do. So I decided to make it a goal to try and do it that morning, and while this isn't a perfect example of it, surely enough, there's a spot on Fraser Street where a shadow casts a hard line against the wall at this time of day, with an added bonus of this happening against this tiled wall. As Tucker said, not all that difficult to find, but probably requires just a bit more patience and time to take the shot at just the right time with just the right subject crossing that line.
Since one of my goals for the day was finding interesting light and shadow, I did find College Avenue to be a bit of a dud, in that the sidewalk opposite campus, where the shops and restaurants are, is largely in shadow at that point. There was, though, this tableau across the street, with Penn State's iconic Old Main in the background. Only during editing did I notice the reflection on the roof of the car in the foreground.
I feel like the physical infrastructure of State College is very much on display. Maybe it's just because I was going through alleys to get from spot to spot, but looking back through the photos I shot, there are plenty of power lines and, on the sides of buildings, wiring and air conditioner tubing. It's enough that that infrastructure could probably be a sub-project in itself.
Its presence in some places and absence in others in a way marks the passage of time, as blocks of irregular buildings with their wires and tubes become replaced by large high rises.
