Photoessay: Lines and Patterns Study with a Mobile Phone

yzhensiang
Jan 2
2 min read

Layers of lines forming an illusion of a fallen bear at the bottom. — Fallen Bear

Welcoming a brand new year with a photoessay. Some may have already noticed this, towards the end of last year, I was honoured to be given the opportunity to test out the latest foldable smartphone by Huawei, the Mate X7. For those of you who are interested, you can read the full review that I wrote over at Fstoppers here, where I go in depth on how the camera holds up and responds to daily usage.

Long story short, I was pretty impressed by how it held up itself especially in such a thin physical body. Despite having a few comments here and there, generally, it is pretty good. And such an accessible camera with me that is capable of producing images with good tonality and decent image quality actually encouraged me to be curious again. Mainly because I can skip a lot of editing work—tonality on the images looked flawless right out of the camera.

Having aggressively tested and pushed its envelope, putting it into various scenarios, creating somewhere north of a thousand images in a span of days. Which is pretty surprising, considering how I have not been impressed or inspired by a gear for quite some time, let alone shoot so much with it. To put it simply, I really did enjoy the photographic experience. On the flip side, the amount of images produced + not having to edit them, meant not enough time spent with the images. Not a good thing, as I barely remember anything that I shot after a week.

Having some spare time to kill this few days during the New Year's Eve, I revisited those collections and after spending some time curating and deleting, this set stood out to me, as they have a distinct common theme among them—almost seem like a study of repetitive lines and patterns found in everyday spaces, probably due to my recent obsession with abstract style images.

These images are not meant to be perfect or impressive; if anything, they are the furthest end of what I produced for my commercial work. They are the result of the selection coming from paying attention to the subconscious, which obviously only comes after giving the images some sitting time to mature.