This time last year I found myself in a creative rut after the best part of half a year. I’d go out with my camera and take photos to get my creativity flowing, but it just wasn’t happening for me - I felt disconnected from it and unable to rekindle the joy that photography usually gave me. It was the first time I’d experienced this and it was a strange feeling.
This began to change when an unexpected and welcomed form of photography kick-started my creativity back into gear.
A virtual photographic playground
The video game Spider-Man: Miles Morales was released on launch of the PlayStation 5 console, and once I started playing it I found myself gradually getting sucked in by the photo mode, so much so that I spent just as much time in this mode as playing the game itself!
Photo mode can be activated at any point when playing the game through a menu selection or press of a button. At this point the game-world freezes, and from here you can reposition the camera and adjust a variety of settings such as exposure, field-of-view, depth-of-field, filters and even the position of the sun!
What I particularly enjoyed is the feature to add up to three lights in a scene, where you can adjust their positioning, strength and colour - it’s not something I’d seen before in photo modes of other video games and it really got me thinking about manipulating light in a given scene. Check out this video to see the photo mode in action:
Once everything was ready and lined up, I’d use the console’s capture feature to take a screenshot. I enhanced my photos by transferring them to my PC and into Capture One (my main post-processing software).
I cropped most photos to a 3:2 ratio to match how I visualised them as it’s what I’m used to with a camera. By the end I'd have something like this:
What’s the game about?
Spider-Man: Miles Morales tells the story of Miles following on from the previous Spider-Man game. We join Miles shortly after he and his mother (Rio) have moved to Spanish Harlem during a snowy-winter in Manhattan.
Miles is now reasonably experienced, albeit with some rough edges, in being a “Spider-Man” under the experienced guidance of Peter Parker. However, when Peter briefly goes away he entrusts Miles to look after Manhattan as New York's only Spider-Man. So begins our hero’s journey in finding his feet as a ‘Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man’…
During Miles’s story we meet his family, friends and foe….
Rio Morales - Miles's mother, now running for a seat on the City Council.
Ganke - Miles's best friend from school.
Phin - Miles’s estranged friend from his previous school.
Hailey - as she is deaf (a rarity in video games) and Miles knows sign language, they are able to communicate and form a friendship as the story develops.
Gloria - a volunteer at the FEAST shelter for the homeless.
Rhino - a recurring threat throughout the story.
The Prowler - friend or foe?
So with the story and main characters in mind, here’s the rest of my selection:
Camila - saved from the boot/trunk of a car (above).
Teo and his cat ‘Spider-Man‘…
…who you can take along on adventures.
Tribute to Stan Lee, co-creator of Spider-Man, who passed away in 2018.
Thank you for looking at my photos in this post – I hope you enjoyed them!
Over the past year I’ve looked back on this time and realised that the rut I experienced was a necessary break, a bit like a mental reset, which helped in giving me a refreshed approach to my photography.
I’d like to thank Insomniac Games for this experience by featuring a well-designed photo mode within a great game. For that, this game will always get my Spidey-sense tingling!