Post Office Tower

I know it's called the BT Tower, but I prefer the original name! This was taken last Saturday while on my way to meet a friend, and is made up of 3 bracketed shots. They were combined and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro, then levels and curve adjustments done in CS3.

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Geffreye Museum

I popped into the Geffreye Museum last Monday - haven't been since primary school. If you enjoy having a nose around other people's houses, it's well worth a visit!

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Horizontal Lines

Brief:
Produce four examples of horizontal lines and avoid repeating the way in which a line appears.

These are the steps of a local church and this is my first attempt at capturing horizontal lines:

This exercise is proving more difficult than expected as I'm looking for patterns in the form of lines rather than actual lines.

Vertical Lines

This is my third image featuring vertical lines:

I used a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D to give myself a bit of a challenge. I'm so used to zooming in and out at will, I wanted to see what it would be like using a prime lens. It felt a little strange at first, but the depth of field on this lens is amazing! I've chosen a focus point half-way up the line to take the eye right into the picture.

I looked around for some less obvious vertical lines, ie patterns rather than vertical structures, and found this:

I've included some of the grass at the base of the tree to give it context and I've darkened the background a little to make it less distracting. Now to find some horizonatal lines ....

The Photographer's Gallery

I took the opportunity to visit this gallery as it rained heavily and I was therefore prevented from taking any pictures. I wasn't terribly impressed by what I saw - nothing particularly inspiring and very repetitive!

"Points of View - Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs"

This exhibition at the British Library opened on 30 October 2009 'til 7 March 2010, and was on my list of things to do, so I thought I'd better do it!
It starts with the obvious - the invention of photography and the various methods developed for capturing images. There are a couple of videos showing how labour intensive this all was. It then moves on to show how photography was used throughout the 19th century:

• To record the growing interest in ancient civilisations, and there are some fantastic shots of Egypt, India and Burma
• Anthropology, to record medical specimens and compare ethnic groups for research and teaching
• Potraiture - this was primarily wealthier households who began to compile family albums
• Panoramic imagery - fairly crude but impressive nonetheless
• Muybridge sequences which were hailed as the precursor to the moving image
• War and its aftermath, eg the Crimean
• Urban renewal eg the construction of the Crystal Palace

The final section is callled 'photography for all' and illustrates the impact that Kodak had on making photography more accessible to the masses.

What have I learned?
I noticed that there were no examples of photography purely for art's sake, so I suppose that back in the 19th photography was more purposeful. Possibly due to the time and costs involved in producing each image?

Self-Portrait

I've been experimenting with infrared self-portraits, and after 3 days of trying, I got a shot that I'm reasonably happy with, although it's a bit softer than I'd like:

I've uploaded it to the profile page of my website, which will be launched tomorrow. I generally don't take portraits, so I wasn't terribly confident at processing this one. I applied some dodging to the whites of the eyes, added Nik's tonal contrast filter with the exclusion blending mode (after experimenting with a few others) and this is what I ended up with!

Elements of Design

Brief:

Produce four examples of vertical lines and avoid repeating the way in which a line appears.

I've finally made a start on part 2 of my photography course (5 parts in total). I went to Spitalfields Market and found 2 examples of vertical lines. The first shot I took was of some pillars:

The second image is a close-up of a wooden bench situated nearby:

I saw lots of examples of horizontal and vertical lines, but they were all buildings. Once again, I'm having to think way outside the box to avoid repetition. I have decided to shot this entire exercise in infrared to prevent colour from being the main focal point. I'm hoping that this approach will make the lines more evident.