WPC: What’s Your Angle?

For this week’s challenge, photograph a person, or a piece of fruit, or a toy — any stationary object — and experiment by photographing it from different angles…”
—WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge

“…Fits and stops and starts, waves and ripples and ramifications!…
Circle and line on the wall, and zeros and goddamn ones… and not
one damn minute to waste!” —John From Cincinnati, Episode 10

Last month I stayed in the Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Atlanta and I spent many hours in the lobby taking photos with my iPhone 5. The longer I looked up at the ceiling, and around at the walls, the more I realized the enormity of doing justice to the incredible Geometric Paradise before me. I started using the Provoke camera app to take black & white images, trying to express the graphic nature of the layers of angles, squares and circles everywhere.

I decided to work with the view straight up from the lobby floor. It provided the best angle to capture the graphic geometry that flooded through me. At this point the challenge was one of composition and contrast. I had to be aware of converging lines and their relation to the edges of the photo—can they be parallel, or should they intersect?

When I became happy with the viewing angles that I found in the hotel lobby I started to experiment with taking color photos. I discovered that by switching to color photography I could concentrate on details of individual design elements in the lobby. I felt free to step back and get a look at the layers of details that made up the Big Picture.

I would like to thank the staff of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Atlanta for allowing me to indulge in an activity that gives me so much pleasure. This was the first time in quite awhile that I had a block of time to indulge in taking photographs in the same location over a period of several days in a row. By the time my visit was over I had taken over 1,000 photos. My current challenge is to cull through them and select the best ones for public viewing. Stay tuned for more examples in the future.