First shoot

For my first shoot, I wanted to try and capture soft lighting and the way that I think would be an effective image. For me this would be trying to capture a silhouette of an object or objects when the sun is setting and the colours are all different ranges of oranges and pinks. I like the way that silhouettes create the mystery and warmth in the image because to a photograph, you want to make the viewer seem more interested in your images and make them want to know more. With having the orange and pink colors it really makes the silhouette or silhouettes stand out against the soft lighted background. To make a soft lighting image I had to keep adjusting my settings of my camera every time I took an image until I found the perfect settings. So really for a soft lighting image you would really need a big aperture so that less light can enter through the lens like F 13 and preferably a very quick shutter speed like 1/125 or quicker and 100 ISO.

When I went out taking images for my first shoot, I wanted to capture a simple scene but from the way that I am going to photograph it, it will look more pleasant and not boring. So I chose to capture a simple road, because from the way that the sunlight angle hits the road, it makes the road look more extended and longer than it really is. When I was looking for the perfect road to shoot along I also had to think about the objects or object that I wanted to make silhouetted. So when I came along the road that had great composition and had a couple of objects that could be silhouetted, I was over the moon. The road that I stumbled upon was a simple boring road but it had two great evergreen trees either side about a quarter of the way down the road and this was when I knew that this was the road that I would use for my first final image.

When I started to take my images, I was learning knowledge and discovering new things when each individual image was captured because I knew that from every picture I could improve and get the perfect image. For my first image I took, the shutter speed was 1/80 and my aperture was F 9. I knew that from the output, it was going to be too bright so from then I knew that I had to change my aperture to make the image more darker and make the objects more silhouetted.

Here is my contact sheet for all of my first photo shoot images:

 Through my shoot, I was concentrating on getting the composition right in the frame so that it would feel like you was looking square on down the road. I wanted to do this because I had determination to get the best shot that I could possibly create. So when I was taking my images through the amount of time I was shooting, which was about 10-15 minutes because that was how long the sunset stayed at it's most beautiful point, there was many people, cars and cyclists travelling through my location that I was wanting to shoot. With this there was the thought of which prop looked better in the frame than others, so I shot all of the objects that were scanning back and forth in my frame and the best outcome was a traditional London taxi that was coming face on with me and which was turning at the road to go another way. I created a sequence with this taxi because I wanted to try and capture as many images so I could choose my best one from a variety.

Test Shot 5

Test Shot 1

Here are a variety of my test shots :

Test Shot 14

 My best image and final image that I had chosen for one my final images, was of the London taxi because from looking at it, the silhouetted trees are very strong and at the right exposure and where about the taxi is right in the middle of the frame makes the image more unique and gives the image a feeling of movement. The way I mean by that is one, the sun is still setting quite fast and the speed of the car moving to the line of the road was relatively fast, so from this moving objects are normally shot in hard lighting, but really they can be shot in soft lighting as well. The settings for my final image are the shutter speed was 1/80t, I left the same, and the aperture F13 .From this I have learnt that by having the shutter speed at the same, it doesn't makes a difference to your image its all about the aperture, and the aperture at F13 it can create the difference between a great picture and a not great image for this I will know for the future how to create unique silhouetted images and that I know which settings to use straight away instead of experimenting with them first.

Final Image

Overall my first shoot has been very successful, because all my test shots are very well compromised in the frames and all of them are coherent. I have also tried to give a great variety of images to choose from for my first photo shoot because I think that I will be able to show my progression through how to capture a soft lighting photograph.

Reflectors

 Using Reflectors For Portraits

When using a reflector in portraits, the reflector will bounce the light from the reflector onto the model and this will give you an instant result every single time you take an image, unlike a flash or external flash. Reflectors are used when there is complete shadow on any of the models main features that is being focused on, and this is mainly their eyes, nose and chin, so when the light hits the reflector and hits the model, the shadows will then open up  and allow light to shine onto the models face and make the image more eye-catching.

Using reflectors are an advantage in photography because it creates a flash like effect but not as harsh and bright towards the object or objects that are being photographed. They are also a great tool for making your object or model, more eye-catching in the most natural way possible because the image will give off a very soft and warm feeling effect. Different reflectors give off different effects, such as the silver reflector gives of a more harsh and brighter effect, whereas a white reflector will give off a natural effect and not as bright.

For my class exercise we got put into groups of five and I was put with Natalie, Neil, Faye and Charlie and we had to find somewhere that would give a great location for examples when using reflectors. We had a set up of two of us had to hold the reflector to hold it steady, two of us photographing our model and one of us being the model. When it was my turn to photograph the examples, Natalie was my model and I had her standing in the same composition, so that all my examples would show the effect of the reflectors that I am am trying to show.

The way that the white reflector effects Natalie is that it makes her face look more neutral and natural.
The way that the silver reflector effects Natalie is that it makes her stand out more to the viewer by how bold the glow of the reflector makes her.
The way that working without a reflector really shows Natalie's shadowed face and none of her features are bold and vibrant like you can see when I used the silver and white reflectors.

 Here are my three examples of reflectors. These images show examples of a silver and white reflector and without a reflector:

Silver Reflector

White Reflector

Without Reflector

Illuminance

This week I was given my second assignment since I have started college and it is called 'Illuminance'. At first I personally didn't understand what this word "illuminance' meant but as we went more in depth about the brief I got more understanding about what it meant and what this subject was about. For this project we had to experiment photographing with light and the way that other objects give off light to show another object and the way that I could be creative with light myself. We could either shoot in digital or film, but I personally chose digital, because I wanted to show off my skills with digital usage and experiment around with my Canon 1100D more and from my outcomes I will be able to know my strengths and weaknesses when photographing light.

In the final outcome of this project I will have to present on my blog three final photographs that show three different ways that I have experimented around with different lighting's. The way that I mean different lighting's, is that there are different categories when photographing with light, and if I didn't know about the categories, I wouldn't have such a professionally eye for my images and other images other photographers work that I have researched. I thought that it would be good to research different photographer's work because this would give me inspiration for my images that I would of been creating.

 In our first lesson that we had for our project, my tutor was explaining some techniques on how to do different lighting.Two of the lighting techniques that my tutor had taught me was Hard and Soft Lighting.

Hard Lighting

Hard lighting is a technique that makes the object that is being photographed more vibrant and more eye opening to when viewing the image. Hard lighting mainly produces fine-lined shadows from a single light source, which is mainly the sun in most cases, because of the natural brightness, but can also be used in the studio photographing department. When trying to take a hard photographed image, you have to make sure that there is a lot of depth of field in the image is very strong and that the only thing that catches your eye is the object that is being photographed.

Good examples of photography that mostly uses hard lighting is shooting portraiture and a photographer who I can proudly show his great hard lighting techniques is Martin Schoeller. Schoeller is a New York based photographer who's style is distinguished by similar treatments of all subjects, whether they are celebrities or not. His most recognisable portraits are just head shots of some well known celebrities, such as Barrack Obama, Jay Z and Daniel Radcliffe. His work is easy to recognise because the way that all of his images have the same lighting, backdrop and tone to really make his portraits individual and detectable that they are his work. The great thing about Schoeller's work is that all his images shows off every person's imperfections  so that they don't look whatsoever attractive, like they do on the television or in in magazines.

Here are a couple of examples of Martin Schoeller's portraits:

Jay Z

Brad Pitt

Paris Hilton

Soft Lighting

Soft lighting is a totally different style compared to hard lighting because instead of making the image look hard and crisp, like hard lighting does, it makes the image more warm and softer in colours and not so vibrant . The good things about soft lighting is that the warm soft light tends to curl comfortably around the object that is being positioned in front of the light and it seems to cast shadows with soft, not shark edges around the object. Another good thing is that the closer the light source is to the object, this is mainly in a studio room, the softer the light will be curling around that object. The last thing that is good about soft lighting is that soft light makes the object look more beautiful or younger. This makes the image look more pleasant to look at, due to the great skin texture and flawless tones on the object, and these sorts of images are good for modelling photographs a great picture to have in fashion magazines. Soft lighting can be as well taken outside for landscape photography, and all the light source is is the sun when the sun is setting and the warm colours of the sunset appear.

A great photographer who photographs soft light very well is Julia Margaret Cameron. Cameron is a British photographer who creates the most amazing soft lighting portraits that you would ever see. This is due to the amazing tone and texture that really shows up on the model's faces and bodies. She was most successful  by capturing portraits by Charles Darwin and Robert Browning, but her most distinctive portraits are the ones where the portraits are cropped closely around the subject's face. The good thing about Cameron's portraits is that when she was taking the soft lighting portraits, she made the soft lighting different so that there was a varied amounts of portraits that were beautiful but photographed differently with different styles. I mean by this by all her portraits have different amounts of shadowing, because if there was a lot of shadowing on the person's face, that meant that the light was very close to the subject, but if there was hardly any shadowing, this meant that the light source was far away.

Here are a couple of examples of Julia Margaret Cameron's images:

Charles Hay Cameron
(Husband)

Julia Prinsep Jackson
(Cameron's niece)

"Sadness"

 My tutor also taught us some different ways of how to make an image look good over and under exposed, and these are called High and Low key lighting.

High Key and Low Key Lighting

High Key lighting is a style of lighting that makes the whole image look very over-exposed, this means by making the image brighter than normal so that hardly any shadow was presence during the capturing of the image. When viewing an High Key image, they give across mainly happiness and a calm soft feeling as if there wasn't a bad thing in the world. The great way that High Key lighting can be great inside of a studio and outside of a studio, is amazing because if you wanted to create such a high lighted image outside you would have to over-expose it. From over-exposing the image, you would have to change you settings by increasing the aperture another two F stops to make the image the right setting.

Low Key lighting is a style of lighting that makes the whole image look very under-exposed. This lighting technique is the complete opposite to High Key lighting, but all you have to do is under-expose the image by decreasing the aperture by two F stops. By under-exposing, this means that there hasn't been enough light entering the lens to capture enough light onto the image when being taken. When you view a Low Key image, it makes the viewer feel as if there is some gloomy mystery behind the image and this is because the majority of the image is dark. I think that Low key lighting is great for doing mysterious night photography and mysterious portraits that have a very strong meaning behind them.


Here is an example of each High and Low Key lightings:

Low Key Lighting

High Key Lighting

My last style of lighting that I got taught was the way in between High and Low Key, there is a lighting style which combines the both together to make an even lighted image and this style is called Mid Key.

Mid Key

Mid Key is a lighting style that shows the in between stage of High and Low key. The way that I mean by that is by having the darkness and the brightness level and that makes the image more even. The best genre when taking pictures using a Mid Key lighting is by making sure that your image outcome is going to have a very strong meaning because there will be a lot of power in the image to back up the meaning. The feeling in a Mid Key image is that it will be in the middle of both High and Low key, so due to this the outcome will have to bring across a strong meaning that shows both sides. Mid Key can be used for both inside photography and outside photography because wherever you use it, it will always be suitable for absolutely any object.

Here is an example of  a Mid Key Lighting image:

















                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Brighton Museum

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery

For our first day of enrichment, we got given a sheet of information to go to Brighton Museum and Art Gallery which is based within the Royal Pavilion Gardens. At this gallery there were many different categories such as Mr Wiellett’s Popular Pottery, Art Galleries, Fashion and Style, but the one category of my trip was to look upon the Local History department.

This department was split into two different rooms, but both rooms had different layouts, this was good because when you had finished in one room you expected it to be similar but when you walk into the other room the layout brings a relief to yourself because of the new interests of different topics that is shown.

Here is a map of the ground floor and upper floor and within this map you will be able to see whereabouts I went around the exhibition.

The first room that I went in was number 8 on the ground floor and the main aspect was about the effects that happened to Brighton during the Second World War. Walking into the room, you immediately feel a huge atmosphere of devastation and lost tension due to the documentary images hung up on the wall in a shadowed room. The way the curator has cleverly placed the documenting images side by side shows you that he/she has thought about how the images would feel towards the viewer when they enter the room.

Inside the shadowed room there was an audio playing on a television screen and this really complimented the documentary images on the wall. In the audio it has someone commentating over the top of various film clips and images of times at war. This part of displaying photographs is very different but also a very creative and interesting way. There was also 2 big images as you pass to go view more of the exhibition and they really catch you eye to the shocking content that these images had in them. One of these images showed a man standing next to a lamppost wearing a gasmask and by him wearing the gasmask the conditions at the time the image was taken shows that they were unrealistic.

Gasmask man image

Throughout both rooms in the exhibition of Local History, there was many cabinets filled with artifacts from the Second World War and these made the feeling of tension shiver straight through your back bone. This was a great way of showing the exhibition off, but some ways of showing off the exhibition wasn’t very professional in my opinion in the way that the curator had blocked the mounted photographs partially, which didn’t give the full impact of the images that could have come out. A way that the curator could have improved his/her exhibition is by the way that none of the images were blocked and all the images were fully visible.

Example of blocked image

The way that the curator had mounted all the images up on the wall was on white foam. I thought that this looked very professional because if any of these images were mounted in frames the whole outlook on that part of the exhibition would look out of place and the history behind these images would be blocked out by the modernisation of the frames. The curator had added printed text onto the walls, and these texts were quotes that people had on them certain pictures and they were quotes from people during the 1900’s. This was good because this showed the emotion of people at the time of when the images were taken and it comes across really effective and the story of people’s lives during one of the worst wars that has been known to man.

Example of artefacts 

In the other room of Local History, the room was filled with props that really stuck out at you and which drag your attention more towards them. There was a huge image of many different pictures put together and the way that the curator has done this is very clever because he/she has made the image’s characteristics blown so that no caption was needed to explain the photograph.

One of the outfit within the Fashion and Style room

Example of framed paintings within the At Gallery room

I also had a look around different parts of the gallery and museum and the different room that I also enjoyed was the Art Gallery and the Fashion and Style rooms.  The Art and Gallery room was very interesting because all the paintings were all mounted up in golden frames that made the paintings look older and special to look at .The Fashion and Style room was a very creative room because the curator had put descriptions next to all pieces of artwork shown, and the information was very interesting because many of the outfits had been worn by some very know celebrities at the time.

36 Hours !

The first assignment '36 Hours', was a big turnaround for me because the assignments that I have had in the past, I had only used a digital camera, whereas in this assignment we were only allowed to use a 35mm film camera. The film camera that I used for this assignment was a Praktica BMS and with that a Fuji NCN 400 asa black and white C-41process film and this was given to me by my tutor due to me having no knowledge on what I had to do. I had never captured images in film so this was a new experience for myself and I now look at the differences between a digital camera and a film camera. Now that I have experimented with a film camera, I want to carry on using film throughout this year on the course to achieve great outcomes of photographs and gain a great knowledge for this type of photography.

The assignment's brief was to take 36 images over the course of 36 hours over the weekend. This happened by taking a picture every hour, depending on how you split your hours up. I split my 36 hours into 12 hours each day throughout Friday, Saturday and Sunday, because otherwise I would have been confused on which frames went with which day. Also I had hours spreading into the evenings, due to having work during the day, but this brought on a great challenge because I didn't have a flash with my film camera and also I didn't have a separate one either.

Shot Number 1

On the Friday, which was the first day that I had ever used a film camera in my life, I experimented around with the aperture and the shutter speeds inside my house so that I would have a rough idea on what settings I have to use within the house and other inside spaces, which use tungsten light. Further on in the day throughout Friday, I had a varied amount of pictures, which were taken inside and outside. The images that I shot outside had the right settings set for the locations through the 12 hours, because my outcome pictures are not under-exposed or over-exposed. I am happy with my outcomes for my first day of the 36-hour assignment, due to the fact that I have never used a film camera before and that all my exposures are all perfect.

Shot Number 21

On the Saturday I had work from 6:30 - 2, so this meant that I had to take one photograph before I went into work and maybe a couple of images when I was on my breaks. This was hard for me because that meant that I had to catch up on a lot more hours of images, but because it was getting relatively dark early in the early evening, this meant I had to double the pictures an hour to catch up to my 12-hour regime. This brought a lot of stress among myself but I had now realised that if I was going to rush through my images the exposures and whole image would not look that professional. It was a very bright day around 3 o'clock and one of the most difficult things about taking a picture when it is very bright is when you have to think very carefully about the end result, because there was a very high chance that the image will look too exposed than it should be. From Saturday, I had some difficulties with camera shake during the day and exposure difficulties, but for the outcome of my images there are a variety of different exposures and focus and camera shake problems. This is a good in the way that I will be able to know what to do in them situations again, by either using a tripod to get rid of the camera shakes and focus. And as well for the too bright exposures, I can always know for the future what aperture it has got to be on so I do not over-expose the photograph that is being taken at the time.

Shot  Number 28

My last day, Sunday I had to work yet again but I was only able to take three images in between at work and on my breaks. This again meant that I had to catch up throughout the day by taking more images every half an hour. But all the outcome of images, they were all mostly different in the way that some are great photographs with perfect exposures and not camera shake,  whereas some had incredible camera shake and a couple were under exposed. I am very happy with my outcomes for this days images because I really now do have a vision and have knowledge of how to approach and have a great attitude towards film photography. 

My aim for this assignment includes all my other small aims within this project, but altogether gaining a new experience was the only aim that I wanted to achieve. I wanted to achieve this aim by experimenting with different apertures, various shutter speeds different locations with different lighting's and many different types of objects altogether that I could photograph. One of my small aims was to keep aware on what was going on around me and if I saw something happening in that special moment and capture it, even if the outcome came out blurry I had still persisted with my aim and gone for it. Another small aim was to take photographs of objects that are not that likely to be noticed without really thinking about. For example taking a picture of some old rusty door that people walk past every day and don't really stop and think if that door has history behind it or really how old is it. I liked this aim because I have tried to capture this within my pictures, because people these days take many things in life for granted and if they really stopped and looked and some smaller and less likely things to come to the eye they might actually appreciate the town that they live in.

The great thing with a film camera is that you can’t see the pictures straight after you have shot them. This gives the experience of learning a lot more about patience when taking a photograph with a film camera and also having an eye for artistic values. I mean by artistic values is the way that I could take a picture of anything and the composition, angle and even the lighting would all match and look professional.  Another great thing about a film camera is that because you cannot see your final outcomes, you would be able to know how I could improve pictures if they have sudden camera shake or even if the exposing of the image is too low or too high. I have now grown a passion for film photography because I love seeing the outcomes of my images when I have had my film developed and I feel a great admiration for myself because I have managed to conquer something that spectacular to me that I wouldn't think I would be able to achieve.

Having my negatives back we then had to start making test sheets for a contact sheet that we would finally have all our overall experience of taking a picture every hour for 36 hours. 

•  First off, before we started to make the test strips for our contact sheet we had to cut our negatives into six frames at a time so that we could place them into negative sleeves so that they would not be damaged. Negative sleeves are one of the best ways to store negatives because there is a chemical inside them that one protects them and two, it stops the negative from fading.
• Secondly we had to go to an enlarger and grab a devise that we would put our photo paper and place our negatives down securely by the glass that was attached to the devise and locked it down so there would be no reflective lines or wonky lines on my final outcomes.
• Once grabbing the devise, we had to cut some strips of photo paper up and start to do test strips with 12 frames at a time on each test strip, to cover more ground. You conquer the test strip by having a wooden board and by how many seconds you hold over one place you move it over to the left/right and then the frame you have just done will have double the seconds than that one you will be doing.
• With the top line test strip I tested from left to right with 3 seconds each go. Altogether I had done 18 seconds and from right to left the number would be going from 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 seconds, and the result from left to right it was going from very under-exposed to very over-exposed. My bottom test strip was the same exact procedure as these 12 frames didn't have any over-exposures, they only had under-exposures.
• With the middle test strip, the procedure was a lot different compared to my other two test strips, this was because I had many over-exposed images, so this meant that they needed to have more time than the other test strips. I did exactly the same procedure with the wooden board and did 5 seconds each time and altogether I had 30 seconds overall. So from right to left the number of seconds were 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30.
•  After every test strip I had to place it into the developer chemical for 2 minutes and make sure that the chemical had covered all the paper. Next I had to move, with tongs, the paper into the stop chemical for 30 seconds. Then I had to move yet again the paper into the fixer chemical, again with tongs for another 2 minutes. Finally I had to move the paper into the wash to wash off any chemicals that were unwanted.
• Once that process was finished, I took my prints to the dryer so that I could examine how many seconds overall my final contact sheet would have to go under, to make all the exposures visible and appropriate.

Test Strip 1 ( Top two strips)
18 seconds - 3 seconds

Test Strip 2 ( Two middle strips)
30 seconds - 5 seconds

Test Strip 3 ( Two bottom strips)
18 seconds - 3 seconds

Once I had dried all of my test sheets and had examined all the different gradients on what time would be best and this time was 11 seconds for the whole print. For my final contact sheet, not all 6 film negative slides fitted onto one piece of paper, so I had to work out a solution for this obstacle. My outcome was to have 2 separate bits of contact sheets, that would include one sheet with the top slide and one sheet with the bottom slide. 

For my contact sheet I had to go through all that process of timing, however I didn't have to use the wooden board because I wanted the whole piece of paper 11 seconds. So I let the timer count down, then I placed the first sheet into the developer, but now for 5 minutes because I wanted this to be my final print and I wanted the entire contact sheet to be fully developed. Next I put my sheet into the stop chemical for 30 seconds and then after that into the fixer for another 5 minutes. To make sure that all the chemicals were off my final print I left my contact sheet in the wash for 5 minutes just to be double sure. I then did exactly the same process with my other sheet for my contact print.

Final Contact Sheet (Top Half)
11 Seconds

Final Contact Sheet (Bottom Half)
11 Seconds

Overall my final print came out how I thought that it would be, in the way that I knew that the pictures that were already over-exposed were going to be a little brighter than others and that some of the under-exposed pictures were going to be a little dark, but overall I was very happy with my efforts and achievement for making my final contact sheet and my ever first contact sheet that I have ever developed in the darkroom!