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My Favourite Image

This one is a fun one. I spend a good while trying to get this one. So to get the church exposed correctly with the lights on whilst still having the background correctly exposed I needed to use a long exposure. If I has only used a long exposure however, the lights would have been well over exposed. So in order to get the best of both worlds, I set my camera up on a tripod and connected my phone to it via Bluetooth so I could use it as a remote shutter button. I then ran into the church, pressed the shutter button and then turned all the lights off in and around the church after around 2 seconds. This was long enough for the lights to still be bright within the scene without overexposing the whole thing. It took about 8 tries to get the timing just right, which meant I had to run back and forth between my camera 8 times just to check the photo.

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My Final Images

After a lot of deliberating and sorting through hundreds of images I settled on my 12 final images.

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Deliverables

(These last couple of posts are purely for my own reference).

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Checking the Criteria

I thought it a wise idea to double check exactly what the brief asks for.

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36 Photos Week 8-9

I just had a look back at my previous work and I realise I never posted my week 8-9 contact sheet so here we are.

These were all taken at Murry's Bay over on the north shore and used the burst more on the Canon 5D MkIII I was borrowing from Uni at the time. My original intention was to use these photos for my Communication Design project, but I didn't think they suited the feel I was aiming for with that assignment. On the day I took far more photos for fun than for my assignment.

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36 Photos Week 10-11

Week 10 and 11 is basically a continuation of the previous week, with a lot of shots only taken for fun on my new camera. Many of my photographs were playing around with light and how it interacts with the scene and mood of the shot.

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36 Photos Week 9-10

This was the week I bought a new camera so I spent a good amount of time playing around with it while figuring out the controls and button layout. This new camera has a fun burst mode of up to 40 photos per second and as such I took a lot of photos of moving things so test it out. I ended up with over 1000 photos over this week and the next one which took a number of hours to sort through.

During the week I had a bit of a wander around my neighborhood and church to give myself a greater variety of shots with which to choose my theme and focus. A week or so ago I believe I had chosen my church as my focus but now I am not so sure. I do have plenty of shots in and around my church but I don't think they are my strongest images. As of now, I am tossing up between themes.

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Martin Parr

Martin Parr's Photography is quite unique. He is fighting against the media's perfect image of society using "criticism, seduction and humor" as Thomas Weski put it. He likes to portray people looking less than perfect through his use of garish colours and unappealing compositions. I don't really aim to emulate his work, but I thought it was worth looking at his work as it very different to the modern look and often times captures life as it actually is.

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During our chat, Emil suggested a couple of photographers that I could check out. One of which was Chris Corson-Scott who uses his images to show human impact on the planet and how it can be good and bad, beautiful and grungy. I think this style relates more to my 'city' direction of story telling as the church direction would be more about connections between people rather than talking about our impact on the place.

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Here are a couple of images from my youth group that create intrigue and could be accompanied by other similar or different shots to add context and allow the viewer to figure the theme out on their own.

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Finding a direction

Looking back at all my posts I am realizing that most of my photos are unrelated and as the assignment brief wants us to tell a story, I am going to need to pick a direction.

I have a lot of photos in the city so I considered going in a direction more related to travel and the city. Unfortunately the problem then becomes the fact that the city is going to be the focus of a lot other people on the class. Alongside that, many of the photos in the city, though maybe good photos, are somewhat generic and do not have a particularly strong link to one another.

In light of this I have a couple of options. I can either pick and choose the images that most connect and then attempt to add to them by taking more photos to more effectively connect them together in order to tell my story.

The other option would be to change tack and switch my focus to my church and the community therein. I have not been counting them in my 36 photos per week, but I have been taking photos for my church youth group for the duration of the year. These photos could easily fit the brief an aid me in telling the story around the church. In addition to the photos I have now, I will need to take more shots of the church itself in different light as well as the interactions between people using light and dark to guide the viewer through the image and to help them understand the story being told.

After having laid this all out I am still not sure which direction I would like to go. I think I will have to collate 2 different sets of images as preliminary drafts so I can get a better idea of the direction I want to head.

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Week 7-8 36 Photos a Week

Feel free to check out all my contact sheets through my website!

Between weeks 7 and 8 we had our 2 week break. During that time I didn't end up taking as many photos as I had anticipated as a couple of the trips I had planned never panned out. Nevertheless, I took about 200 or so phots which I culled down to about 40 or 50 so as to give myself less work to do. From there I narrowed it down further to the 36 as shown above.

This week's contact sheets is comprised of 4 different shoots, two if which were in the city and the other two from around my house. I find when I am not in the city, I am often drawn to warmer tones like yellows, oranges and even purples. As such I will normally edit the greens on my image to be warmer and yellower than they may appear in nature.

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Peter Mckinnon is another one of my inspirations. He has a very wide variety of work including landscape, street, portrait and more. He often leans toward a moodier feel with his photos but he is very good at a wide variety of styles.

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James Popsys is one of my main inspirations when it comes to photography. His favorite scenes to shoot are natural with some sort of human touch whether that be a building, a sign or a person etc. A lot of his images are very bright and warm which I am a big fan of and this sort of bright feeling is often what I am aiming for in many of my images.

Not all of his work has this bright feeling but a good portion of it does and I am quite partial to it.

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Nigel Danson is a landscape photography who I have been following for a while. He is a master of light and composition. He tends to prefer softer looking photos with less of the harsh light, preferring instead to shoot in more overcast weather or to use fog and cloud to frame and add interest in his images.

Nigel is a landscape photographer which is obviously different to what we are doing, but I love his use of light and the way he composes his images and I have taken a lot of inspiration from him.

He has so many amazing images is was hard to just pick a few!

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36 Photos Week 5-6

I took all of these photos in one day while walking around the city. This was really fun as I was able to watch the light change and the sunset which made for some really unique light.

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36 Photos Week 4-5

All of my photos were taken either in my neighborhood or the CBD. I challenged myself to photograph my street at night. This was difficult as the light was very limited so there were fewer things I could take photos of. This was even more difficult because I didn't have a tripod and the lens I was using only opened to f4.

The rest were less difficult as the light was much better in the city. I also got a couple of shots of a cool looking car as I was walking back to the train station.