The name of my project is “scraps of sky”, and the main concept is the relationship or the balance between celestial views/lights and artificial elements presented by high buildings.

The sky in a metropolitan city like Shanghai is often blocked by skyscrapers, but the ever shifting lights above us can still manage to seep through these walls of concrete by creating reflections or spots of light both inside and outside of human constructions, creating beauty even when we payed little attention to it.

The first picture captured rays of sunlight slanted through the windows of a big shopping mall and spilled on the floor. In here, what we see is the combination of celestial light and artificial objects. The grain of the marble floor and the neat pattern of the balustrade represents the the artificial elements in the project, and the vibrant colors on the floor created by morning light is a representation of the scattered beauty of morning sky.

The second picture is the reflection of sky on a glass-covered building. For this picture, I used “mask” to create the effect of lines colorful that are colors from pictures of the sky, integrating two layers of photos together.

The relationship between the two photos is that: 1) the shapes of the elements that represent the sky are modified by the buildings 2) and shown on the background of artificial constructions, 3) and they all ave very vibrant colors. In the first photo, the rectangular lights and curved shadows echos with the square buildings and colorful lines respectively, and like most of the pictures layered under the second picture, it was taken in the early morning, when the colors of the sky is most vibrant.

Before I had stated to edit my photos with Ps, I had planed to carve out several rectangular windows in the collage of tall buildings to reveal the college of photos of sky like the picture showed here. But then I realized it would look a bit weird since the rectangular widow would not align with the lines and silhouette of the buildings, so I eventually gave that idea up and started experimenting. And because when I was learning the tutorials on Ps I remember there was a useful tool “mask”, I just started playing with it and discovered that I can achieve a drawing like effect with it. So this is how my final photo diptych looks like and I was satisfied with how it turned out because it was better than my original plan for the project.

There was one problem during the process though, with is I had so many pretty pictures that I’ve taken before of the sceneries of sunsets and sunrise, but because I only had limited space so I could only pick a few. If I had more time to work on this project, I would probably make the lines in the second picture more clean and artistic, because I didn’t have a digital plate to draw on and could only use my mouse to draw those lines, they look rather rough up close. But I did my best by using what I have I liked the result. Here is a picture of my contact sheet and my final diptych look for reference.