Entries for Assignment 1 - Part 3

Final batch of photos for the assignment

7. Opaque / Transparent

Again, one of my early thoughts on this was to use red / white wine bottles.




Again, I was looking for additional contrasts, thus using the bottle bases for the opaque and the necks for the transparent. A tight crop on the opaque one has brought out the curves in the bottoms of the bottles, while the bottles of the transparent one have introduced some interesting bending to the straight blinds behind them.

8. High / Low

The high picture is one from some time ago, looking up at my daughter on a climbing frame. I've always liked that picture, and when I was first thinking about the contrasts assignment I thought that it could be useful for it. In order to get the low picture I asked my daughter to sit on the grass, lean on the side of the patio and look up.



The choice to have the green grass and red brick was deliberately to contrast with the blue sky and yellow netting in the high picture.

9. Continuous and Intermittent

Again, one of my earliest thoughts on the single photo was to contrast the continuous yellow lines with intermittent white lines down the middle.



This photo was taken over a wall, up a hill and round a corner, and was then cropped and rotated to ensure that the lines moved off towards the top right hand corner. In the original photo the yellow lines weren't very yellow, so I essentially repainted them in Photoshop.

Entries for Assignment 1 Part 2

Next 3 sets of photos loaded.

4. Sharp / Blunt

As planned from the start, pretty much, pictures of different ends of pencils as a fairly obvious contrast. However, I have tried to include other contrasts as well.



For sharp, I have decided to go with a sharp focus all the way through, as well as a circular shape and a landscape picture. However, for blunt I have chosen to go with a narrower depth of field, straight lines and a portrait aspect.

5. Many / Few

This is intended to contrast the few on a stage with the many who are in the crowd.



The few photograph is deliberately wide in order to show the amount of space on the stage, whilst the many has been cropped to a panorama to try to concentrate on the people, and lose the expanse of sky in the original photo. I decided to retain the purple 'tents' (stage and sound board) in both photos to give a feeling of continuity in the two photos.

6. Little / Large

Photos taken at last year's Malpas Yesteryear Festival, and the first photos included that predate the course. However, the contrasts were deliberate when I took the photos at the time.




So we have a large man with a little engine and a little girl with a large engine.

Entries for Assignment 1

Time to start thinking about the photos to put in for the assignment, and to work out where there are gaps.

1. Light / Dark

Two model shots here, I think, one high key and one low key. These were both taken on the same night as part of a group shoot.






As well as the high key / low key contrasts, I've also chosen these because of the left / right contrast of the positions of the model as well as the backwards / forwards poses.

2. Rough / Smooth

Two pictures of tree trunks here, one from Ness Gardens and one from Bodnant.




Again, the photos have been selected to show other contrasts, with a wide angle for the smooth photo and a tight shot to accentuate the roughness.

3. Still / Moving

Photos from a trip to Oulton Park. The aim is to contrast the car on the track with the trip down the pit lane to show it in its still state. I thought about several options for this, with different cars and whether to use the full car or parts of cars (tyres), but decided on this as my best combination of still and moving shots.




Okay, I'm now officially bored of the pain of putting photos into this blog - it seems that it always puts pictures in at the top and you have to move them to where you want them. Thus it's probably best to put the photos in first and then add the words around them. I'll continue later.

Catchup

The course has taken something of a back seat over the last few weeks, unfortunately. Photography itself hasn't - I've done more of that than normal, and more varied stuff than has often been the case.

On April 24th I got involved in taking photos of a 'Clean Up Mold' activity as part of the camera club. That was quite an interesting experience, with the opportunity to take a more 'reportage' style of photo. To some extent that is the way that my photography has normally worked - taking the opportunity to photograph the scene in front of me rather than particlarly creating the scene. That said, I've often found it sufficiently hard to determine where a picture is going to happen, what the best vantage point is likely to be and what combination of focal length, speed and aperture will give me what I'm hoping for. Some of the photos from that have been sent in to the local council for them to use. I also took the opportunity to keep an eye out for contrast photos, and think I've got one for continuous / intermittent - a road with solid yellow lines but a broken white line down the middle. Finding the right road, with the characteristics that I was looking for, without too many obstructions (such as parked cars) and which was also a slightly more interesting shape was not straightforward, but I think I found it. Now I neeed to decide whether to go with black and white or colour. B&W was my first thought, but the temptation to make the yellow lines more obvious is certainly present.

April 25th was a scout parade that my daughter and wife were involved with. Again, I went along to take some pictures of the event, with some ideas working quite well. Some nice portrait shots came out, as well as some slightly less obvious ones of flags and the like. Certainly some of these are likely to be used on the scouts web site.

My parents came up the following weekend, and with it the chance to do a couple of day trips. Speke Hall on the Saturday was all right but a combination of my father's poor health and a lot of scaffolding on the building itself reduced the photographic opportunities. On Sunday we went to a carnival in Mold, with a few decent candid shots and also of the musicians appearing. Then on Bank Holiday Monday we went to a Victorian Extravaganza in Llandudno. Lots of photos there, from portraits of people in Victorian costume to vintage cars / lorries to pictures of the town itself.

The weekend of the 8th was quiet, with me babysitting my son while my wife was away. The following week, however saw me take some photos of for a friend of her son's prom night get up. With his girlfriend I got some nice shots. Certainly the friend was very happy with them. On the Sunday I got to attend a group shoot in Chester with a number of models. This allowed me to play in the studio a little bit as well as outside. My comfort zone remains very strongly with natural light, but the studio was an interesting departure. It also showed how different it is to work with models who already know how to make themselves look good.

And so to the weekend just gone. We attended our first music festival of the year, one that we have been to for the last four years. Great fun, with good music and plenty of possibilities for photos. One of the nice things about it being a small festival is that they're much more relaxed about people with cameras than at bigger ones. It also gave me the opportunity to catch up with some of the other regulars, including one of the official photographers who gets to go into areas we mere mortals can only dream of. Regardless of that, there were certainly some good shots there and several that I am very pleased with. For the contrasts assignment I think I have also managed to get some which will work. Many / few could certainly work with shots I have from the front of the audience, one pointing towards the band and the other towards the audience.

Zoo trip

Saturday was quiet - nobody was really in the mood to do much. I went through a few old photography magazines to split the articles I wanted to keep into four groups - inspirational photos, criticisms of reader's photographs, photography tips and techniques (including use of the camera and other elements around the actual creation of a photo such as lighting) and post-processing tips and techniques.

Today we went to the zoo - partly because our annual ticket expires at the end of the month and we haven't used it anything like enough. However, I (obviously) took my camera and was looking for photos to take, in particular thinking around some of the elements of the first assignment on contrasts. In reality, if I could put in multiple options around many / few I think I could probably have completed the assignment in one day - flowers, balloons, flamingoes, people. Lots of options. Ultimately I think I'm going with the flamingoes. I've used a tight crop on top of the foreshortening already included in the longer lens (300mm) to try to maximise the impression of closeness between the birds on the 'many' option, whilst concentrating on a couple of outliers for the 'few'.

I also got an idea for still / moving from the Oulton Park trip a couple of weeks ago. There was one car that I got a decent panning shot of as well as a photo of just before it was pushed into the pit lane at the end. After getting home I've dug them out and put them into my Assignment 1 portfolio on the OCA website.

I've also got a reasonable idea for high / low. I've got a photo of my daughter on a trampoline / bungee thing which is one of my favourite photos of her, which will certainly do for high. I now need one where she is lying on the ground for 'low'. Surprisingly, I don't seem to have many of those. Whilst searching for one, however, the large / small one jumped out at me as a nice double contrast. I went to an old steam (amongst other things) rally last year, and have two photos in particular which work well as contrasts - one a photo of a large man leaning down to look after a small steam engine, and one of a small girl standing by a very large wheel on a steam engine.

I'm aware that the contrasts do not need to be linked together and are intended to be used as concepts. However, I think that it makes most sense to have contrasts within a theme. It's certainly easier for me to think of it in that way. Whether all of the photo pairings will end up being linked is still to be determined - after all I only have three sets so far.

I've looked at some of the entries of other people who are on the course. It's quite scary to see that there are a fair number of entries that are already creating what looks to me like really good photos, whilst I feel that mine, so far at least, are little better than snaps in many cases. That, of course, is one of the reasons why I'm doing this - to improve the quality of the photos I take - but it is sometimes daunting to see students at the same level as me producing work that appears to be notably better.

Summary of the Week

A week with a fair amount of photography-related stuff, although not necessarily course-related.

Saturday saw me wandering around Chester, but no photos. I was looking around for possible shots, and have seen a couple that might be suitable at some point. I may, however, wait until a Sunday morning when there are fewer people / cars around. I did, however, end up with a new (to me) lens - 100mm Macro F2.8. I bought it because I know that 100mm is meant to be a good lens for portraits, while I don't otherwise have a macro lens.

On Sunday we decided to go round Ness Gardens, a local garden run by the University of Liverpool. This was primarily to give the lens an outing, and I've got a few decent shots. Some of them might be usable within the assignment - leaves on a monkey puzzle tree for sharp, perhaps, with a magnolia plant for soft. Also, I've got a fern circle that may do for rounded although there's nothing there that really stands out for straight. There's also a tree with a very smooth bark, but the shots I took of rough bark didn't really have a sufficient depth of field and haven't come out right as a result. Overall, though, I'm pretty happy, especially as I was focussing manually rather than using AF for pretty much all of it.

Monday night was camera club night, with a competition result night. Not one of my most successful nights, to be certain, with the judge only really liking one of my photos - a hot air balloon that I was considering for rounded in the assignment but which might be better for diagonal. However, most of the comments about the others were reasonable - it is always interesting to get external views on your photos, even if you don't necessarily agree with them.

One of my favourite photos was in the competition - one of Coniston Water. In my original version the horizon was halfway up the picture.


For the competition I re-edited it so that the horizon was on the lower third. I liked it, but the judge took the view that the sky wasn't strong enough for it. One of the reasons that I liked the original picture was because of the sky, and the reflection in the lake. However, putting the lake on the bottom third does lose much of the reflection and emphasises the sky, possibly beyond what it deserves.

As a third attempt I've now come up with a third crop, with the horizon on the top third. Wish I'd tried that earlier - this time it emphasises the reflection and the lake, and I think it's a better result.


In both of the edits I have also cropped out some on the sides, particularly on the right hand side, because I don't think the trees on that side particularly add anything to the picture. That said, of the three I think I still prefer the original halfway split. That may be because I'm more familar with it in that guise, but I rather like the symmetry in that version (perhaps that's the mathematician in me).

Had a chance to speak to my tutor on the phone this evening. I've got a proposed deadline of 16th June to get the first assignment in. That is around getting together photos to show contrasts. Temptation to go back to existing photos to find examples is strong, but I may well look to take specific photos in most cases.

One photo is intended to show contrast in one picture. Given that one of the list of contrasts is continuous / intermittent the thought that has occurred is of a road, with continuous yellow lines down the sides and intermittent white lines down the middle. Shouldn't be too hard to find an example, I hope.

I have some ideas around some of the other contrasts too. Large / small is something where I would be tempted to take two photos of the same object, one close up with a wide angle lens to make it appear big, and one at a distance with a standard focal length (or longer) to make it appear small.

Still / moving is one where I may well make use of existing photographs. One of my favourite photographs of (my wife) Deborah is of her relaxing on a bridge in Amsterdam, while I also have some photos of (daughter) Kathryn at her school sports day.

Pointed / blunt seems to be too obvious - photos of different ends of a group of pencils. However, that may well be something of a cliche so I will need to give it some thought.

Other ideas are far more sketchy:

Transparent / opaque - white and red wine bottles?
Many / few - use Kathryn's cuddly toys or dolls?
Liquid / solid - might be an opportunity to take droplet photos
Sweet / sour - I know I've got photos of Kathryn with expressions that cover both, but that might be deliberately misunderstanding the remit?
Smooth / rough - polished wood and a tree close up?
Light / heavy - I've got a decent photo of a hot air balloon for light; I'm sure that one for heavy can be found somewhere (something sinking in mud, perhaps).