Assignment 1 - Response to Tutor Feedback

Straight

I went back to Clissold Park this morning to have another go at the image representing 'straight'. This time I decided to shoot in infrared since the image was going to be monochrome, and I thought that the grass might be more interesting than before. I have positioned the tree to the left, as advised by my tutor.

I think the revised image is much cleaner and less contrasty than my first attempt perhaps because the second image was taken early in the morning while the sun was still fairly low. I applied some tonal contrasting to the trunk of the tree to bring out more detail in the bark and cloned out the lower sections of 2 trees in the background, along with some debris on the path. This shot has also been uploaded to my website which is now ready to launch!

Curved

Russell referred to "no real border or focal point to frame the subject", so I returned to Hays Galleria to take the shot again. This time, I faced the opposite direction because the sky was not visible from my original viewpoint. I took 3 bracketed shots because of the tonal range between the roof and clouds. I think this shot is now less abstract and the use of leading lines and framing provide a clear focal point.

Assignment 1 - Tutor Feedback

Your approach to this assignment is excellent, demonstrating an enquiring mind and eye, and a positive and creative approach to technical exploration. As you say in your notes, this kind of assignment makes us look for images that we might not ordinarily look for, in addition to dealing with conceptual approaches to interpreting the subject/s.

Straight and Curved
The shot of the tree in Clissold Park for ‘Straight’ works very well, a visual pun, turning the world on its side. The monochrome filter enhances the composition, defining the form and texture of the subject, and also the diagonals in the mid-ground created by the white borders and strips of sunlight. I wonder if the composition might be stronger with the tree positioned to the left of the frame, with the broad diagonal strip of path running away down the right?

‘Curved’ is a strong image, and a tricky one to get right with no real border or focal point to frame the subject. Maybe just a detail (as in the shot of the Thames Barrier) would be a possibility, although this would not help realise the scale of the structure. The other option would be a fish-eye, which would capture more of the lower part of the building and provide extra context. Whichever, here you’ve captured the structure and silhouetted framework of the roof nicely.

Smooth and Rough
Getting the range of exposure right on highly reflective structures and surfaces is a real challenge, and I always like to try to get it right in the camera. As you say in you notes, the low, soft winter light can be a real bonus. The other option of course is to use multiple exposures (from a fixed image position) to combine to achieve a wide-ranging exposure (High Dynamic Range). This works well for smooth, with the seamless tiling and shadowless surface. There’s a nice seen which helps the sense of smooth, and also, the use of a longer lens which has reduced the definition in this detail.

Having mentioned HDR, the shot of Stonehenge looks like an example of that technique.
The detailed textures of stone and moss in the strong cross light, and the range of colour, bring out the shape and form the stones. I like the composition, a procession, enhanced by the long lens: It’s as though the stones have individual personalities.

Still and Moving
Using a high shutter speed to ‘freeze’ the fountain produces a good (photographic) interpretation the movement in “Still’. One of the great things about photography, enabling us to see the otherwise unseen. Here, against the clear blue sky, the details of the water frozen in time have been well captured.

With ‘Moving’, the opposite approach using extended exposure to facilitate motion blur, creates a range of possibilities. In this shot, the forward tunnel effect is very effective, with the trailing taillights, and the two panels of blue light to the right and left of frame.
The car’s dashboard gets in the way – it’s the kind of shot where maybe you have to leave composition to chance and shoot without looking through the viewfinder. Something to explore and experiment with in the future is ‘back curtain sync’ – Google some examples, if you haven’t come across it.

Opaque and Transparent
The OCA assignments (and exercises) present the perfect opportunity to experiment with different techniques and approaches to image capture, and this is a great example. In this shot of the church stained glass window, the glass is reduced to monochrome, revealing a level of detail not necessarily seen, while the stone has an unnatural sheen to it.

With ‘Transparent’, there’s a good range of exposure, with detail of the interior of the bridge, through to the nighttime city panorama. Interestingly, adding to the concept transparent, the skyscraper’s structure is (almost) invisible with only the lit widows defining the shape and form.

Black and White
What I like in particular about the image of the guitar in ‘Black’, is the way the shape appears to have been reduced to two-dimensions, flattened out, leaving the composition to be defined by the edges of the instrument, the circular inlay around the hole and the subtle organic folds of the background cloth. There’s something luxurious and rich about this image.

‘White’ is a beautiful shot. The infrared renders the image into a winter landscape, as though everything has been touched by frost, and furthermore, the bird looks like a sculpture – an improbable pose frozen in time. It reminds me of the way early illustrators might choose an exaggerated piece of behaviour when they painted creatures (sometimes to use the whole page for their composition).

Continuous and Intermittent
You take a different approach to these two images, and they work equally as well in representing contrasts. In ‘Continuous’, there’s a double meaning with the railings running away in a strong diagonal up and across the frame, and the notion of a race still in progress, with evidence of dumped clothing and discarded water bottles. I think the narrative element is helped by the choice of a foreground focal point, with the remainder of the image in soft focus, left to our imagination.

You take an interesting approach to the interpretation ‘intermittent’ converting to monochrome and using colour accent to create the scattered points of the orange balloons. Good to see the making of meaning in the ‘darkroom’.

Many and Few
A good contrasting pair, with pigeons in motion and at rest on the rooftop. There’s a good rhythm about this shot; the birds in the sky, and the solitary creature perched on the column at the bottom of the frame creating a circular motion around the picture.

With ‘Few’, again a strong composition, capturing a (comical) trio in various poses. The strong backlight, shadows, and the dark background, help define the birds.

Large and Small
The (Dutch) angle and sepia monochrome of ‘Large’ help exaggerate the long shadow. The image has a noir or ‘graphic novel’ feel to it, the shadow mysterious, the distant city across the bridge, otherworldly.

Using layers of blur is an alternative way of creating the world of miniatures, rather than using a tilt-shift lens. I really like this shot. Again, it has an otherworldly feel abut it, like a set-design still from a performance of Gormengast. Tate Modern is a perfect setting for creating this kind of image – here the black and white produces a monolithic feel to the building.

Hard/Soft
The contrasting pair is well illustrated in this single image (great definition considering you're shooting through a window). The three-quarter backlight defines the layers of cloud shape and texture, while the plane’s rigid wing structure is highly defined against the clear blue sky – works well.

You’ve produced some excellent images here.

What have I learned?
Many of the subjects in my images would previously have been dismissed as not particularly interesting, but I now believe that there is photographic potential in just about everything! I had to do alot of thinking and planning before reaching for my camera, but I think this paid off as I've ended up with a range of subjects, lighting, and post-processing techniques.
At this stage of my development, I think it's safe (and important) to experiment and take 'risks' in order to learn what works and what doesn't, together with the underlying reasons.

New Year's Day

I went for a walk in Clissold Park close, which is close to my home, and took this shot to represent 'straight':

I got this idea a few days ago - find something that is not straight, but shoot it at angle so it appears to be upright. So I was on the look out for wonky lamposts, buildings etc., and was very pleased to find this tree. This was the best angle because it showed the maximum incline, but the tree was in shade and there was sunlight in the background. I converted the image to black and white to prevent the bright green grass in the background from distracting from the drab soil in the foreground.

I went to Greenwich yesterday, primarily to take shots for my website, but I also decided to reattempt a shot of the Thames Flood Barrier that I'd struggled with in August. This picture has been cropped to show a section of one of the barriers, which is my interpretation of 'smooth':

The problem is that the shiny panels of the barrier are so highly reflective, I kept getting blown highlights. I remember reading about a professional photographer who wrote that Winter was his preferred time to take pictures because of the quality of light, and I discovered this for myself in the last few weeks as I haven't had problems with lens flare or hot spots which I had during the Summer.

For my final pair of contrasting images, I have chosen black/white. In infrared photography, anything that reflects infrared light shows up as white so I had quite a few possibilities. In the end, I opted for an image of a pelican that I took at London Zoo in July:

I was initially worried about not being able to show enough contrast in an image that is predominantly white, but there are several specks of black to prevent it from being totally washed out.

The image representing 'black' had me stumped until reading an article in February 2010's 'Practical Photography' magazine. In this article, the photographer took a picture in complete darkness, using a torch for illumination and the bulb setting for the shutter. I tried the same method using a black guitar propped up in front of some black satin material. I positioned the guitar, tripod and camera to reveal what it is, but hide the parts of it that are not black. I set the camera up with the light on, and then operated the shutter by remote control while 'painting' over the guitar with a torch. I had about 6 attempts at it, altering the aperture until I got an image that I was happy with, and this is it:

I have chosen this picture to show hard/soft:

This was taken in October 2009 on a flight to Egypt. I specifically chose a window seat that wasn't blocked out by the wing (this has happened to me before) and I was lucky that the sun wasn't too bright. I have imcreased the contrast to highlight the texture in the clouds and increased the saturation.

I made my Facebook Fan Page  public today!
I sent inbox messages to a few people who I thought were more likely to become fans. I'm aiming for about 40 in the first instance, and would like to see this number increase once the website has been launched.

What have I learned?
I have a better appreciation of the 'seasonal effects' on photography. The landscape has changed significantly - leaves falling off trees and low-lying plants killed by frost. Also, the light is less harsh and I personally find the sky more interesting (from an infrared point of view) because there are more clouds.
The contrast assignment has increased my range of subjects and techniques. It has also given me the opportunity to experiment and show familiar objects in new ways.

More contrasts

This is a shot of Stonehenge in Summer 2008. The original image was very flat, so I have enhanced it to show the rugged features of the stones, which I think is a good example of 'rough'.

This was taken at a demonstration in Central London so I took several pictures just trying to capture the atmosphere and record events. Just about everyone in the procession had a placard or banner, but there were only 3 people with balloons. This got my attention and I wanted a picture. It was only after I'd taken a few shots that it ocurred to me that this image could be construed as 'intermittent'.

I converted this image to black and white because several of the demonstrators wore brightly coloured clothes. The balloons were all dark blue, so I coloured them orange to make them stand out and because I thought orange blended with the tones in the picture.

This picture represents 'continuous' and was taken just after the start of the 2009 Edinburgh Marathon. This is the debris left behind by the runners when they set off and I used a narrow depth of field to emphasise the length of the railings.

Contrasts: Moving

I wanted to get a shot of light trails created by moving vehicles, and read about a novel way of obtaining them from the inside of a moving car, in the February 2010 edition of 'Practical Photography' magazine. In the absence of a willing passenger, I clamped a 'magic arm' to the tray of my glove compartment with the camera pointing straight ahead, I triggered the shutter by remote control at various intervals while driving around local streets. Many images were completely ruined by the extreme blur caused by uneven road surfaces, but I got two reasonable shots, and this was the better one:

I shot this in RAW using auto white balance, which gave it an orange cast, so I changed it to tungsten simply because I prefer the effect. I've bumped up the saturation on this occasion - it's usually an adjustment that I use in moderation, but I thought I could probably get away with it being a little OTT in this image.

Infrared Day

The light was good this morning, and there were lots of clouds in the sky, so I decided to just shoot in infrared today. I went to London Bridge, Southwark Cathedral and the Tate Modern.
I took some shots of a stained-glass window to represent 'opaque' and I think this works in IR because the colour of the glass is not really the object of the exercise:

I had originally thought of capturing something small through a magnifying glass to make it 'large' and taking a large object from a distance to make it 'small'. As I was crossing the Millenium Bridge, I noticed that my shadow stretched quite far along the bridge, and decided to used this to denote 'large' instead:

Looking  down onto the main entrance of the Tate, I found some 'small' people. This was converted to greyscale in RAW, but I wasn't happy with the dominant light coming from the windows in the ceiling and at the back of the hall. I cropped it, which places the subjects on a rule of thirds 'hot spot', and applied a Guassian blur to lessen the impact of the windows. I then applied a layer mask to remove the blur on the subjects and draw attention to them:

Twilight shots

I took some shots of Poplar DLR station and found an image to represent 'transparent'. I've bumped up the contrast, vibrance and saturation to try and replicate the effect of the artificial lighting:

Contrasts

Brief:
Identify subjects that best express the extremes of different qualities and take pairs of photographs which bring out the essential qualities. make at least 8 pairs from the list provided.
In addition, produce one photograph that demonstrates contrast 'in one picture'. 

I went to Green Park and came across some pelicans which satisfied the description of 'few'. There were a couple of pigeons in the background that I cloned out because they were distracting:

For the image denoting 'still', I wanted a shot of a moving object that I could freeze and make it still. I remembered some fountains in Kensington Gardens that I photographed in IR last year, so I walked up from Green Park and found them again. I kept the top of one of the trees in the shot to give it context, otherwise it would just look like a splash of water on a blue background. I shot in RAW and processed the image to increase contrast and sharpness so the individual droplets stand out:

Just behind the fountains, is a building where several pigeons were basking in the sunshine. I thought this was a good example of 'many', but the shot was a little static. Luckily, a little patience paid off and I got a shot of a group of incoming pigeons in mid-flight. Not only does this make for a more dynamic image, but I think it also adds balance:

I walked back to Green Park and got a bus to London Bridge. It was threatening to rain by this stage, so I took some shots of dark clouds across the Thames that I hope to use for a later assignment. From there, I walked to St Katherine's Dock and found an image to fit the description 'curved':