Christmas (1)

I have chosen to include these photographs as they are from when I went to Estonia for a weekend over the Christmas holidays. I thought they would look interesting as it shows a different aspect to traditional Christmas photos of presents, lights and a Christmas dinner. Furthermore, I think within this group they show a contrast, for example the coolness and plainness of the colours of the buildings contrasts with the bright and bold colours of the flowers that I have also decided to include. What I like most about all these photographs are their clarity and particularly for the images of the buildings, how you can begin to see the detail of the architecture.

Light and Dark (final photos)

For my final photos I wanted to look at artificial lighting, I explored this by doing primary research as well as secondary research as I explored this aspect of light and dark using my camera. My secondary research included researching different photographers who photograph artificial light, I decided to focus mainly on the work by Rut Blees Luxemburg and the images labelled 'Caliban Towers', a German photographer whose technique is to take images at night, mostly exploring the urban landscape. What I liked most about her work is the simplicity of the photos and also the hue/saturation of them as they have a slight orange/yellow tint to them which I think creates quite a warm feel. Figures 1 and 2 show some of Blees Luxemburg's work.

Figure 2

Figure 1

I explored Blees Luxemburg's style of these towers but I then continued to further my experiments by taking pictures of other objects within this light and dark topic. My photographs in the style of Rut Blees Luxemburg can be found below along with some others as I continued to develop my idea further.

I really like the three images here as although they are of a similar concept, they look different (especially the third one). I enjoyed taking these photos as I felt it helped me learn new camera skills as I haven't done a photo shoot in the dark before so it allowed me to experiment with finding the right shutter speed, aperture and ISO in order to capture a clear final outcome.





















































All these photographs show exterior lighting in an urban landscape, I also furthered this to explore interior lighting. I have chosen my favourite image to show here and also an edit I competed using Photoshop where I manipulated the same image four times and changed the hue/saturation to create different coloured effects. I used these tools to overcome a challenge faced with my original idea as at first I wanted to use different coloured light bulbs, however I was unable to get them.

Original Photo:

Photoshop Edit:

 

Aquarium/London Photos

Figure 1

The photographs that you see here are ones that I have taken when I went up to London and to the aquarium. I also tried to relate them to the topic of light and dark as this is what I was thinking of when I took them.


My favourite photo is Figure 1, with the starfish attached to a ball, what I like most about this image is the colours and how around the framing/edge of the photo is dark so all your focus is on the brightest area of the picture (the starfish). I think the colours look very warm as they are mainly orange, therefore this contrasts with the darkness of the edge of the image.





 

This image of the 'merry go round' is another of my favourite photographs, I like it because of the colours and how the brightness and boldness of them contrasts with the darkness of the sky and its surroundings. I also like how I have captured it clearly as it was moving which was one of the struggles I had when trying to take photos of it.

Overall, I like this selection of images as I think they each show something different for example some show a use of a shallow depth of field whereas other show a wide depth of field, I think I could improve my photos by exploring a wider variety of different angles and perspectives.

Light and Dark

When being able to choose what topic we wanted to focus on for two weeks before Christmas, I chose 'Light and Dark'. I found this topic enjoyable and felt that I learnt new aspects of photography as I experimented with natural light, artificial light and using reflectors and how each reflector changed how the photo looked, for example a gold reflector made the model look brighter and warmer whereas a silver reflector created more of a cool light on the model's face and balances the light. As part of this topic, I also enjoyed being able to work with new equipment that I have not used before, such as flash connected to a camera that triggers a light, using a spot metre to get incident light readings.

Figures 1 and 2 show pages from my sketchbook showing the readings we collected as a class and how we used light to create shadows and also to get rid of them.

Figure 1

Figure 2

These next images show how we experimented with natural and artificial light as well as using reflectors.

Reflectors:

These images show our experiments with the reflectors, the one on the left shows how the face looks brighter as the gold reflector shines the light on the face and gives it a warm look. The second image shows the effect of a silver reflector which has got rid of any shadows that were created and has made the face look paler in colour.

Natural Light:

This photograph was taken using only natural light and experimenting with the different settings on the camera, to take this the white balance was set on daylight and the ISO, shutter speed and aperture were also adjusted to create the right amount of light and dark.

Artificial Light:



These images were taken using a lamp and moving it around the model to see the effect that the different positions of it would have o  her face, it shows you how important the lighting is to create the right amount of shadows and also darkness which contrasts with the lighter areas of the pictures.