Workshops

 

Week 1

This was the image i shot during the Images in the Wild task where we had to appropriate an image. This was my favourite image out of the bunch i took. The poster was seen inside M&S which is a girl holding a flower, but the main purpose of the poster was to advertise clothes. The reason this was my favourite shot is because of the lighting. The light is blocking the centre of the image itself. The light was right above the poster and even though to the human eye the poster is well lit and clearly visible, the brightness obstructs the image for the camera making it harder for the camera to focus onto the image with that kind of light.

 

This was another students image in the wild. This caught my attention because of the reflection in the background. The structure of the building that the window is reflecting looks like a temple. The image is of a poster of the movie Gandhi ad the texture and patterns from the building would make you think that is part of the poster itself.

 

Week 2

In this workshop week we were introduced to the camera.  We got given a list of shots to get whilst in the workshop. I didn’t manage to accomplish all of the shots asked on the list, however, this shot is the best one out of the bunch i shot. This shot was part of the An image at the closest focus distance possible, I was using the standard lens which is the 18-55mm lens. You can see the focus is sharp on the ‘or’ part of the sign.

 

Week 4

There wasn’t anything for week 3 because the workshop was cancelled. In this workshop we spent time taking shots of still life.

This image was one pf my best shots of the session. Although we had to use the tripods given to us, i did my shots hand held because the tripods were all taken and i had my own camera with me (Canon D1300). This image was hot using the 60mm macro lens. With the help of the lights and lens you can see the texture of the card much clearly. The cards are leaning on a plastic dog’s head that has sunglasses on it. The wider picture of this image is that we found a bunch of playing cards, we threw them in the air and let them land and where it landed we would take photos of to add to the random theme we had going on this still life image.

 

Found Objects

The objects i found were in a charity shop on the High Street near the Steep Hill. The charity shop sold a lot of olden day cutlery as well as furniture, books and ornaments. When i saw the cutlery i thought about the fork photo from Ian Knagg where he interlinked two forks into each other. I had an idea to create a arch using the forks and using the techniques that Knaggs did and having the plate on the centre and have a spoon hold another object, i found this fake, plastic garlic and thought about how it can be linked up together as ‘things you can find in a kitchen.’

One of the things i was concerned about was the plates structure, from the first picture i took it so that we were focusing more on the garlic, i felt the plate would look flat and the positioning of the camera wouldn’t capture the curves of the plate, but i was wrong. In fact the plate is fine, it’s the spoon. The spoon cannot be seen unless you really look hard for it. Even with the camera positioned differently in the other two pictures, the spoon can’t hard;y be seen as the back of the spoon is in a much darker place and with the garlic showing that part of the spoon makes it hard to see especially with the background being black.

I used the flash from my camera because the set was very dark through the lens, despite the room itself being highly lit from the natural light coming from outside. The first attempts with the flash made it look over exposed, so i backed away from the objects and zoomed in and used the flash, this made a massive change in the images and helped crop out most of the stuff from the background that would disrupt the image. The third picture is my favourite one because the light worked well with the white plate and makes the design from the plate stand out much more and the reflection of the light isn’t bouncing off of the cutlery too much, where as the first two pictures you can see the flash bounce off from the background.

Research

Andrew Vernon

 

Andrew Vernon is a landscape and still life photographer. These two images are his most famous images and they are visually satisfying to look at. The image on the right is known as The Wave.  The image looks surreal because of how well timed he captured the moment before the liquid was in the glass and settled. The black and white of the image adds mystery to the image and the red being present to make it stand out and also question the person, is it wine or simply blackcurrant juice? The reflection of the glass and drink is visually pleasing because it is symmetrical and looks smooth.

The image on the left is called Flaming Martini. Simple name because it is exactly that, a flaming martini. This could say a bit about the photographer,  he seems to like hos alcohol since both of these images have alcoholic beverages in them. The flame on the martini happens in a flash, so he needed to get it right whilst also considering the black background and the brightness of the flame, for this image he used a mixture of strobes and a dragged shutter. He used a reflector to get behind and below the glass so that the white outline would appear and to get the reflection from the table. This image is also visually pleasing to look at because of the lighting that has made the image very soft and you can see the flame not start at the top of the drink, but in fact the flame is also in the liquid. This image is still as challenging as The Wave despite it looking quite basic to other people who may not know too much about photography

 

 Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg is a British sculptor, he makes visually pleasing sculptures using objects and items and creating something out of them that speaks to the audience. A lot of his work is surreal and mind bending such as the first example, it looks like a black rose with all the layers of black overlapping each other until it gets small at the bottom. In the second picture he used glass bottles and stuck them on to a metal rod that would swirl around, this image to me looks like a Christmas tree because of the use of colour, the green resembles Christmas and the positioning of the bottles and the fact that they are a lot more bottles starting from the bottom and seeing least bottles at the top, relates to me that it’s a Christmas tree. The third image is simply a cube using books and folders, he has to build it every time he goes to an art convention around the world, so he has to take a photograph of it and memorise the positioning of each book to be able to recreate the perfect cube shape.

His first work was sculpturing images on walls of things that people can relate to in everyday life, but to see how different peoples experience and approach is towards the art on the wall. He always pushes the limits in his work to find new relations between his work and the audience, to find different emotional responses to his work by taking familiar objects and using it to make something look unfamiliar which opens up the talk from the audience of what the objects and images mean to them.

 

Studio Workshop/Portraiture

In this session we got the chance to work within the photography studios taking portraits of our classmates. This gave us experience of the equipment in the studio such as different types of lighting, lenses, backgrounds and techniques. The techniques used in this workshop were high key lighting and low key lighting to get us used to positioning lights and knowing the difference between the two.

 

The pictures that had the blue background was the high key lighting section and the red background was the low key lighting. At the start of the session we had many difficulties getting the lighting for the high key lighting perfect because the lights either made the subject completely black and would just look like a shadow, other times the light would give extreme exposure to the right hand side of her face,it seemed hard to level the lighting from either side of her head equally to light her up correctly, but also levelling it up with the crane light right above her. The photos were shot by me and Martin, i shot all of the high key lighting section whilst Martin shot most of the low key lighting section using a Canon 6D and using the lighting remote that attaches on the camera so that the lights go off when the camera goes off.

Since a lot of the photos were either highly exposed, blurry or just none professional in the sense that the equipment can be seen in the frame, these are the photos that i like the most from the collection of photos taken that day. The main reason why most of the images i have picked and are my favourite has two subjects instead of one is because of the chemistry they bring to the frame. Once they both have a theme they can both mirror each other and adapt to the theme, such as the last image. it looks like a poster for a girl action movie with the seriousness in their faces whereas the 6th picture that see’s themselves embrace each other. You also have a mysterious and eerie family photo looking shot in the 4th image.

The low key lighting was used with only one light which was a spotlight so you can see their shadows in some of the images at the back, especially in the 4th image which adds the element of mystery to them, the theme of the image looks like a murderous family with the colour of red/burgundy to help support the idea.

 

Location Lighting

In this session we explored the possibilities we have when taking photos out in the open with nothing but natural light to light up your subjects. The location we used was the university campus since we couldn’t go too far out.

We caught the weather on a good day, it was overcast so it was very bright when it came to shooting the photos. A lot of things is happening in the background of most of them so it takes the viewer away from the image because there is so much going  on. That’s why the 1st image and last one is good because nothing is in the way of the foreground and the viewer and see clearly the subject. The colour blue in the background of the last image works really well with the expression on the subjects face, it helps the viewer get the feeling of the subject with help with the colour.

 What went really well with this subject is the fact the light really worked well with the colour of her hair. This was my favourite image of her because the stance and the help of the wind to make her hair swerve the way it did, makes her looks like the main character from the animated film Brave.