Mirror, mirror
Rebecca uses reflections as a compositional tool for her dreamy portfolio
Iam a big lover of all aspects of photography, so it doesn’t take much for me to find an excuse to pick up my Canon camera and get shooting. I live in Liverpool, so when I heard there was going to be a River of Light festival along the river Mersey in November last year, I just felt compelled to go and shoot. However, I suffer from psoriatic arthritis, fibromyalgia, and ankylosing spondylitis, so getting out to take photos can be tough. I’m lucky to be surrounded by a supportive group of friends that help me get out. Over the course of several days, we went out and I was able to get images of the festival.
I knew I wanted to shoot the lights, but I also knew that every other photographer would be getting similar shots, so to make sure mine were different I set myself the challenge of incorporating reflections into my images.
I love how my image Portal came out, as to me it has a painterly quality, but taking it was horrible… me and my friend posing with the
umbrella got soaked in the rain! I used lots of lens cloths to wipe the rain off of the front of the lens and get the shot, though the rain did form this great slick sheen reflecting the arch of lights, creating a tunnel effect.
For Blue Hues I got down low to the ground and used the reflected light as a lead-in line to guide the eye in. I also used a slow shutter speed of one second to blur some of the people walking past.
I wanted to get a shot of my community cinema too. It’d rained earlier, so there was this puddle at the side of the road where it was safe to get a shot – I have an affinity for symmetry and lead-in lines, so when I saw this puddle, it all came together nicely.
On Sunday there was a fireworks display at the River of Light Festival and I wanted to photograph these too. The settings were a bit of guessing, and I know you can stack multiple firework pictures together, but for this picture I wanted it to be a single, in-camera, shot.
I’m grateful to have such a supportive group of people around me that help me fulfil my passion, taking pictures and I find Liverpool a fantastic location to photograph.