Evaluation of my blog portfolio.

To be honest I think I am quite happy with the collection of photographs that I have produced over the last few weeks despite sadly missing a few days. Hopefully it fits the criteria of the course, I tried my best for it to. But I have honestly really enjoyed doing the past few weeks worth of work. I think there have definitely been a few limitations when I did my street photography, one my fear of taking pictures of people incase they are angry and also with the fact that I couldn't walk great distances without getting into a lot of pain, but I think that in the time that I did have taking photos that they came out alright and that I am happy with them. To fix this I could maybe get buses instead of long walks through town to get somewhere but if that's impractical I would try and carry as little weight as I could, leaving bags and things I don't need behind in the class room. One of the images that I am especially happy with is my macro photo of my pocket watch, also I am pretty happy with some of the street photography images that I took. I do think that knowing all of the things that I have learnt over the past few weeks, if I did get a chance to re do my images on my blog that the quality would be increased as I have learnt lots of useful things to help my photography greatly. I think there was a few times where I couldn't do the shoots I wanted to do, but that wasn't anyones fault it was cause my camera didn't cooperate with the lights and then some batteries died, so I will definitely have another go at doing studio photography if I get the chance again. I also do need to try and post more images to my blog because at the moment I only put the pictures on that I am happy with, because I hate showing people my images that Idon't like, but it does show where you've improved and stuff, so I'll need to get over that and start putting more pictures up :)

Toms lessons, evaluation :)

In our lessons with Tom we have covered quite a few things, and even though I wasn't there for a few of them unfortunately. I did manage to catch up on most of it and learn from other peoples notes and my own research. 
Firstly we covered street photography, I love doing this I just think I need to actually over come the anxiousness of taking a picture of someone and worrying they'll say something to me. I do think on our trips out I came up with a few images that I am really happy with, these are on my blog further down. I think to improve my street photography I need to also take alot more pictures, I have the habit of only taking a few shots that I know I'll be happy with, but I also get that I could also miss a good shot, so I'll try and take more pictures on future trips. 
We also did light painting, although I wasn't there for when we did this in class, I read my friends notes and had a go myself at home and really loved the results of this, hence why I did it for my project over the half term. I learnt that it really helped to use a tripod to avoid camera shake, so now always use it when I'm doing light painting photos. 
I also wasn't hear for fast shutter speeds either, but I did also look at my friends notes and I already understand how to change my shutter but doing lots of pictures at different shutter speeds got me to understand it better.
Lastly we did Macro photography, here I did my picture of my pocket watch which I loved. I really enjoy doing macro photography because I love how much detail you can get from such a small object. I used my macro lenses for the macro shots I did at home and also my fish eye macro lens with was really good for creating a weird yet effective effect on the photograph and helped pick up great detail.
Probably one of the things I've learned best in these lessons is how much a tripod can aid you so much in photography, and how much better and clearer photographs look, especially the painting with light photos.
(:

Mini Half Term Project Proposal and Images (:

For my mini project I plan to try and take more advanced painting with light photos. I had a look on the internet at other pictures that people had done, and really loved the images where people drew around objects and people and lit them up, so I decided this was what I'd love to have a go myself at. I tried lots of different ways to get light into the photograph such as different sized torches and candles and lights and things, but lots of them either gave off too much light in the photograph or not enough. For example although I thought a candle could look really effective I tried it out, nearly ended up burning myself and the photo came out just orange from all the light that the candle gave off. The thing that seemed to work the best was a little torch that was from a car. I tried lots of different pictures before finally coming up with these final three, but things didn't go right one way or another. For example, I tried to draw around a teapot with a torch but the light reflected too much on the teapot and there was so much glare on the photo. Another picture that I tried was to try and draw round my cat as he was sat on the side of the sofa, but he got scared by the light, made a funny meow and ran away.
So these are the three pictures that I think worked the most. The first picture of the three people sat at the table was the same person, in three different pictures put together. I put my camera on a tripod. With an Iso of 200, shutter speed of 15 seconds and an F number of 3.6. I turned off the lights, set my camera on a ten second timer so I could have time to go over and draw round my person. I did quite a few attempts at this because it was really hard to draw round the person and actually have them look like a person, but I am pretty happy with my final image, but I can't decide whether I should have had a forth figure on the other side of the table.

Here next final image, this photo is about 7 images put together using photoshop. It took me ages to get the shapes of the sofa correct without it looking even more wobbly. For putting all the images together I opened them in photoshop and layered them all up and rubbed out the image so that they all fit together, it took me quite a few attempts to get right, but I am really happy with the final result.



Here is my last final image, this was probably the hardest image out of them all to do because there was so much shine coming off the sink so I had to be careful about where I shined the torch. In the end I couldn't get a good picture of the light coming from the tap so I added that part from the light in the sink later in Photoshop. 

Natural light photos with Tim at Hyde park

Here we all had a walk up to Hyde park in Tims lesson, we had to go round the park taking photos using only natural light through the trees and things :)
Here are a few of my favourite photos that I took

Task 2; Risk assessment ^-^

There are a number of health and safety issues that need to be considered when doing different photography shoots, here are a few examples of issues that can be resolved :)

Painting with light; when doing painting with light, obviously you'll be in low lighting situations so you need to consider how safe your surroundings are, like is there anything that could be tripped over when doing the shoot, to resolve this you could check the area for obsticals and if there are any like wires tape then down or something, or give the person a torch to check their area out :)
You need to check that your tripod with your camera is sturdy to stop the factor of someone accidentally knocking it over or tripping up over it, same for any lighting. You should make sure that you're stood in a safe place, that there's no dangers of anything that's going to interupt your photography. When doing photography in a public place you should check out the safety of where you're standing for example not standing in a road to take a photo or blocking a foot path. When doing things like working on a computer editing a picture you need to make sure that the chair is the right height and the screen is at a comfortable position for you to sit in comfortably and not strain yourself, you also need to take regular breaks to look after your eyes when having to use a computer for long periods of time :)
You also need to make sure equipment doesn't block fire exits and that you don't leave cameras ect unattended for threat of theft.
You need to mop up any spills that have happened, or ban drinks and stuffs so that no spills are made that will damage equipment or give the posability that people might trip over.

Low key photography

Low key photography is done in a dark room with a black back ground and one light reflecting on the other side of a subject, low key lighting causes a halo effect and a reflector gives a soft effect. Sometimes a spot light behind the subject is used too, in low key photography you have to be careful to get both eyes in the picture other wise dead eye will occur. 

High key photography

High key photography is photography done with a white background and lots of lights, show on the diagram above. The bright lights and white background make the colors on the subject look brighter. 

Squares and Circles! :D

Here we had to go round finding squares and circles and we had to photograph them, I picked my best ones and put them into two videos :) 

Squares! ^-^

Circles! ^-^

Mini Project, Final 5 images (:

Here we had to pick one of the things we'd liked best doing over the past few weeks, I decided to pick macro and have a go myself at home doing some macro images for myself :)

                                      

Online Display (:

Here I used iMovie to put a collection of my photos into a video then I added music, Cage the Elephant; Ain't no rest for the wicked. (:

WORD HUNT :O

So everyone in the class had to pick one word, then we all went out and tried to find all the things :)

Photo trail; Sainsburrys to the bus station with Sandy, Josh and Georgia (:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWbTKXmWLXU&feature=youtube_gdata

Story; 407 reasons not to kiss the girl. :o

Pages of scribbles. Layers on layers of reasons, in catergories: the idea thing, the people thing, the tools thing. Nightmare all.

But she was young and willful and smelled so amazingly sweet. The single reason on it's own page, suddenly, magically, outweighed all the others.

She leaned into the kiss. 

Macro shots (:

Here we had to take some macro shots of our chosen object at college,  I used a low F number in this macro shot to get the blurred background in the photo and set my camera to macro (:

Light paintings edited with Photoshop (:

Here I used a shutter speed of three seconds then run about with a torch, The top photo was two photos put together then had the colour edited in photoshop. On the second photo down I'd held a torch and swirled around in a circle three times, then added the three photos together. I then changed each of the photos to different colours. For the third photo I started far away from the camera and swirled the torch around getting bigger the closer I got to the camera, I added two photos together of this then over layer a rainbow gradient for the rainbow effect :) 

Photoshop editing.

Here we used photoshop to mess about with a picture of ourselfs :)

Water marks.

Here, we learnt how to put a water mark on our photographs using photoshop :) by adding text in a new layer then editing the text till it was see through. (:

100 strangers.

The brief was to go out into the city and take pictures of random people we came across, asking them their name, age, occupation and their favourite thing, here are my six strangers.

Name; Yvonee.

Age; 70

Occupation; House wife

Favorite thing; La vita bella (tv show)

Name; Jim

Age; 19

Occupation; Student

Favorite thing; his fiancé

Name; Peter

Age; 23

Occupation; Catering

Favorite thing; Spiders night club

Name; Connor

Age; 19

Occupation; student

Favorite thing; Sloths

Name; Ryan

Age; 18

Occupation; Student

Favorite thing; Music

Name; Nigel

Age; 49

Occupation; Butcher

Favorite thing; Rock music