Why and How to Use Reflections in Your Storytelling/Photography

Using reflections in urban photography is one of my preferred ‘spices’ to add to the mix. However playing with reflections is not that easy and can take up all of your frame, the first way to start to play with reflections is by using a circular polarizer.

How to control Reflections :

1) A circular polarizer is a variable filter that allows you to choose how much reflection you can see through a reflective surface in your frame. I usually play with it and see how much of it i want in or not.

Why Use Reflections?

a) Adding depth to the image.
In my case, I enjoy a busy frame and have found that I am more of an urban photographer than a street one. The lines are thin but I like to portray life in a city more than the people in the city.

To achieve that, I try to include more of the ‘urbanscape’ in the shot and add a sign of human life in it to have a sort of guide and reference of how it feels or even to imagine yourself in that scene.

By using reflections in an image you can have get a more complex composition and have more elements to add to your story in order to achieve that result (emotion).

b) With reflections you can achieve more intricate visual patterns.

Reflections allow you to find more symmetry and visual patterns and thus allows you to use those elements to tell your story.

For example, if you want to portray a character that’s in deep thoughts, adding an echo of his environment can be used to achieve that emotion.

Reflections steps in to spice it all up, in my experience and opinion, I find that it makes the viewer slow down quite a lot more and try to understand what is actually going on.

c) Artistic choice.

I personally find that reflections are a huge feature to add to your photography. It adds texture, symmetry depth and also some sort of emotion to your image that leans more towards art than a ‘‘correct’’ image.
I wanted to add that last part to mention that all this is art and it’s subjective. We all have a different takes on it and I don’t believe that what I do is right or wrong nor is yours.

Here are some examples from this week.