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.