Photo Challenge Week 10: Photographing Nothing

When I heard this week’s weekly challenge, I was a bit confused.  When someone photographs nothing, wouldn't that be something?  Then I started to think maybe Mr. Pinto just wants a photo of a pitch black room.  My mind was going all over the place.  Then I saw an example of photographing nothing.  It was a simple photo of an empty room with minimal lighting.  I thought this assignment was going to be easy, however by the end of my shooting I found photographing nothing is actually really difficult. 

I am so use to composing my photos with a subject in front of my camera and wanting light so you can see everything in my photo.  So, doing this assignment was definitely out of the box.

I wanted to shoot when it was dark outside so there was minimal light shining through the windows.  I decided to shoot after work which was at 4:00am.  This was a perfect time because everyone was in bed and I had the living room all to myself.  I turned on the porch light so there was some light.  It took me awhile to get a hang of shooting nothing. I tried different angles, exposures, lenses, and I was still unhappy.  Finally I used my standard lens, the 35mm, and shot real low and snapped the photo.  I loved it. At that point of time I realized what photographing nothing meant to me.  It was about the patterns of the shadows, the eerie feeling of wanting to know more.  Photographing nothing is about the emotion, not the subject.  That’s what I got from the experience and I believe I took a photo that best fits that description.