427 - Bosque Los Colomos
I’m gonna cut right to the chase. Our van is in a shop right now, because the power steering fluid is leaking like a dick. And we’re in the middle of Mexico.
Yep, you read that right. We found out the morning after the Fábrica La Rojeña and Cascada Los Azules shoots, when we filled up the empty container behind the hood and it drained right back out.
Fortunately, we’re in the second largest city in Mexico- Guadalajara. There’s no shortage of Mercedes Benz dealerships to fix er’ up, so we couldn’t have broken down in a better spot. We even had enough points saved up on our credit card to get a free hotel for the entire week.
The only real problem was that it was going to take a week to get fixed, and we needed to find places to shoot in the city for the next 5-7 days.
The horror... I actually have to face my fear of urban photography now. Well, scratch that. It’s not exactly a fear per say, more of a knowledge that I’m not as good at it as landscapes. It’s something I’ve been meaning to work on, but I’ve been putting off for far too long.
We decided to ease into it. Today’s shoot was at Bosque Los Colomos, which is essentially the “Central Park” of Guadalajara. They had everything from Japanese Gardens to Sculpture Gardens. I figured it would be the perfect way to transition from landscapes into a more street style.
Whenever I shoot big landscapes for too many days in a row, my mind is programmed to only look for “epic scenes,” and I get disappointed when I can’t find any. To combat this, I intentionally told myself several times that I was to focus on small, intimate scenes today. NO EPIC SCENES.
And I was right. It was a dope park, but there wasn’t anything big at all. The most epic thing I could find was a concrete water treatment plant in the middle of it all. I started by shooting some plants that I’d never seen before. I figured I could try and isolate them into darkness on Photoshop, because it was something I needed to practice.
I snagged a few, but nothing really worked out in the editing room. Until I found one beautiful vine with a purple leaf. This plant actually had a perfect subject- the purple leaf was the ONLY colorful spot about it. Check this out:
“Forgotten Fruit”
Taken on Sony a7rIII + Zeiss 24-70mm f/4
[ISO 1600 ~ 70mm ~ f/4 ~ 1/125s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
And with that, it quickly became the “theme” of the shoot. I started to look for another plant I could isolate that had only one colorful component to it, and found this baby:
“Quaint Delicacy”
Taken on Sony a7rIII + Zeiss 24-70mm f/4
[ISO 400 ~ 42mm ~ f/4 ~ 1/25s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
See, I was listening to Bruce Gilden speak about street photography the other day, and one thing that stuck out to me was “there’s power in numbers.” That is, if you can find multiple shots of a certain pattern, it can make a small series, which is more powerful than one shot on it’s own.
I was already doing this with my “mountain silhouette layers” series, and now I think I’m going to start this “green plants with one strange color” series. It’s a way of connecting all these shoots I’m doing, which is pretty cool. If I ever do a gallery in the future, I'll have a variety of different show styles to present.
That’s all I ended up with on this shoot. To get these types of shots, I essentially just looked for cool plants with darker backdrops, that I could easily dissipate in Photoshop. If the lighting or color is too similar to the actual subject you’re trying to isolate, it will become increasingly difficult to pull off this look in post. Keep that in mind.
And with that, we finished the shoot. It wasn’t exactly a “street photography” style session today, but it got me more in the mood of it coming up. We’ll see what this upcoming week of city vibes brings…
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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