Tuesday 25 December 2007

Holiday Assignment

Ok, As a joint assignment over the holidays, we are to take 3 pictures. The first will be entitled 'Happiness' The second 'Tree(s)' and the third is an open photo.
Deadline is whenever we are both back.

Sunday 16 December 2007

Submission:Flame:Smokes


As you said, the hardest part of this was not being obvious. As the last few photos I've taken have been against black I thought I'd try something different. I only had my blue background, (other than black) so thought I'd fire a red gel against it to make a purple. I was however astounded by how red the background came out.
Next problem is I don't have any candles and rubbish matches. So I used three together, and a candle lighter.
In the end I quite liked the way the side flash had caught the smoke, so here is my offering. Did four other pictures on a similar vein, which can be seen here.
One of the problems was I couldn't get close enough to the match, so I've just ordered a macro lens and some extension tubes..

Submission: Flame



I started off with just taking some photos of a candle flame, but found that to be okay, but a bit boring. I couldn't find the inspiration to do a still life composition, so instead wondered what would happen if I blew bubbles in front of the flame. That created some really interesting effects and gave the flame some movement, which it really needed. The bubbles didn't always work how I expected them to, which meant the results were unpredictable, but it was very messy and fun!

Wednesday 12 December 2007

Assignment: Flame

Deadline Monday 17th December.

Sunday 9 December 2007

Submission: Power.

So here is the image that I've finally decided to post. Have been umming and ahhing about which one of these to use. Finally I used this one, as on my machine the colours have come out most like they would normally do on the batteries. This time I experimented with snoots and gels. You can see some of the other stuff and the comments using the link above. My favorite bit of this is the shiny surface, which is a shiny red cheap exercise book which I coaxed a reflection out of.

Submission: Power


I wasn't sure if I would be able to do this, as when I first turned on the light, I thought it was too bright to work with; but my eyes must have got used to it as I was able to take some photos, without using any other lighting. I then played with it a little in photoshop to give it a slightly more interesting colour. I quite liked it bright green, but decided it was better to keep it at least slightly realistic.

Thursday 6 December 2007

Assignment.

The theme for this assignment is "Power", which again can be interpreted in whatever way you want. Deadline Monday 10th December 2007.

Monday 26 November 2007

Submission: Table Top




I also really enjoyed doing this one. I had three ideas, but only the first one worked as I had planned. I was using my studio lights, and started off by just taking standard photos of the bottles lit from the front, but decided concentrating on the shape of the bottles would be more interesting. I set up one light with an umbrella to the left rear of the bottles and tried to backlit them. I thought spraying them with water would add an extra dimension, but not 100% sure that it worked.

Sunday 25 November 2007

Submission:Table Top

Well. I really enjoyed doing this assignment - it was good to have a deadline again. As I said in my previous comments I had loads of ideas, and I have taken around 100 frames of around 5 different ideas. This was my final idea, and I was happy with this as it was mine, the other ones I'd got by looking around the web for some inspiration. Three bottles on a black ash tabletop. Took about 15 shots to get this as I was using one flash to illuminate the bottles while trying to get a reflection on the table of the bottles as well as get the specular highlight in the right place behind them. Really happy with the final shot with the exception of the cup ring on the table which I only saw once I had this picture on the screen.
Some other ideas I had are on my flickr stream.

Saturday 17 November 2007

Assignment

The theme for this assignment is "table top", which can be interpreted in whatever way you want. Deadline Monday 26th November 2007.

Sunday 1 July 2007

Blue...


I had four ideas for this. I took pictures for three of them, one I waited all day to get - but the conditions I wanted did not arise. Finally I tried this one, which is the best out of all my ideas I think. Took 40 pictures today - this was about 38...

Submission: Blue



Spent ages playing around with blue food colouring and water, and in the end it was the first picture I took that I liked the best.

Sunday 17 June 2007

Submission: Coffee


And here's mine. I started off with just a trail of beans, but decided that I wanted a bit more context, so used this grinder, which I thought had an interesting shape.

Submission: Coffee

Heres my weekend offering. I had 3 shots in mind, the first I couldn't get the composition right, the second was the above, and the third one I never got around to taking.
Took me quite a while to get the lighting right on this one above, I went and bought shiny beans, but then this was about the 9th shot. Decided to go tight in. had to put way more light into this that I thought at first. The coffee was in a tupperware box, and I had a flashgun to the side which diffused nicely through the side of the box. But I had to ramp up the light to get the exposure right. As soon as I saw this shot in the preview I knew it was right, as it had way more colour than the others. Gave me a bad back though as I had to hand hold it.
Thought I better get this uploaded in case you had done a bean shot as well :p

Tuesday 12 June 2007

Assignment: Coffee

Pure and Simple. Coffee.

Inside or out.

Interpret it as you wish.

Deadline 9am 18th June

Sunday 10 June 2007

Submission#2: Take an action self-portrait of what you did this weekend.

But I thought I's surprise you with another entry. I did this as a test shot on Friday night. You see I spent most of Friday night doing some video editing, so this was one of my activities. Interesting thing is that it was still light when I did it. I stopped down so that I could just about make out the back of the mac, then I put a off camera flash on the keyboard pointing up at me. First attempt was way too bright, so I put a page from a reporters notebook curved over the flash head. Hence this picture. Really pleased with it as I've been wanting to do one of these for ages - pity it makes me look so old..

Submission: Take an action self-portrait of what you did this weekend.


Well here was my exciting weekend - this is the 5 minutes when I wasn't sneezing. Wanted to get the front of the mower in focus and then blurr backwards. Camera position was difficult, so used the beanbag effect on the bottom of a lap-tray. Then took ages trying to get the sun to blow the sky without leaving lens flare. The action part was the blade of grass desparately trying to get away from the blades...

Weekend Assignment: Take an action self-portrait of what you did this weekend.


Title: A girly afternoon in the sun.
This was taken on my balcony. The idea was to use a slow shutter speed (1/25) to blur the action of the hand to add some movement to the image. Ideally, i would have liked less depth of field, so that the background was more blurred, but that wasn't possible with a slow shutter speed in these bright conditions.
I had a few problems with unwanted shadows, but I liked this one , as it is broken up and has some form. I also had issues with blocking out the pringles logo, as othewise it just dominated the whole image. If you look closely, you can see the toes reflected in the table - he he!
This is really what I did on a sunny Sunday afternoon!

Tuesday 5 June 2007


I also used mirrors to take the image, but found it a lot more difficult than I first imagined. Trying to the camera reflected in the mirrors took a lot of tweaking, but I wanted to get the camera from more than one angle. The white balance is also out, but since I have only had the camera a week, I have yet to master that. Did find where the self-timer was though!!

Mirror Mirror on the wall




I had trouble with the colour balance using the house lights, ended up using the flash - and what I didnt show in the setup was me holding the posterboard up behind it.

I had to tweak the levels as well - In the end I just bounced the flash in from the ceiling and didnt set the exposure - hence the levels tweak. Ran out of time in the end.

Also I was getting some double reflections from the cheap mirrors (or angle of lighting) i was using.
And here is the setup:

Sunday 3 June 2007

Assignment: The Camera

Take a picture of your camera with your new camera. Not the obvious down the lens shot.
Mirrors?
Deadline: 9am Monday 4th June