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Abdul R. Sharif
Statement of Intent
Final Portfolio “Like Night and Day”
11/11/09
Photo 475



Have you ever heard someone refer to the differences between two things as “night and day?” What if you were actually able to experience the differences between day and night within the blink of an eye? The intent of this photography project is to provide the viewer with an opportunity to see how the time of day can affect the mood and emotions emitted by a photograph. These photos also seek to give the viewers a sense of actually experiencing the shifting of day into night by capturing the same scenes at both the daytime and the nighttime. Hopefully, these images will give the viewer a first hand, aesthetically sound, experience of seeing time change within the blink of an eye.


One of the reasons why I wanted to photograph the same objects during the daytime and the nighttime was to document whether or not the time of day actually does change the mood and attractiveness of urban areas of downtown Louisville. Personally, I think the nighttime is the perfect time to photograph urban scenery. The darkness gives arise to the opportunity to turn streetlights that are normally bland and unlit during the daytime, into sparkling golden stars at nighttime. In addition, at nighttime, long exposures can turn the taillights of cars that are normally unattractive during the daytime, into long streaking bursts of red snakes at nighttime. This project will hopefully exhibit how transformative the power of light can be when composing a scene.

Technically, this project was executed similarly to my first attempt in project A. I again used a tripod and chalk to mark my locations during the day so that I was able to come back at night and compose the same shot. I think I did a better job this time at creating two symmetrical images of the same scenes during the different times of the day.

In respect to my proposal for this project; I think I achieved my major objective of giving the viewer a first hand experience of seeing time change within the blink of an eye. The only aspect of my proposal that I didn’t fully execute was using black and white in all of the day shots, as was suggested by a classmate. The black and white idea sounded great in theory, but when I actually tried it, only one image, (image 2), seemed to work with this concept. I wanted to keep the other day shots in a color format because I didn’t want to kill the beautiful colors of the fall season.

As far as challenges are concerned, I didn’t really encounter any major issues during this project; in fact, it was actually pretty fun and stress free. The only thing that is really a challenge, as far this concept goes, is having to wait several hours for the sun to go down.

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