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Business card research

The first four examples are of bad business cards and the last four are good ones. The reason the first three are bad is because they’re very crowded, with too much information and no consistency with their fonts or colours. There’s not enough negative space and one’s eye doesn’t know where to look. The fourth one is slightly more consistent but the design and the addition of his photo looks really old-fashioned. 

The last four are much better designs as they have more negative space, as well as consistency with fonts and colours, and one’s attention is drawn straight to the most important elements. My only critique of the bottom-right card would be that the text doesn’t stand out as much as it would if it were a contrasting colour, however I do like the matt black as it’s a bit different but still looks professional. The bottom-left is particularly eye-catching due to being printed on brown “kraft” card, and has the important elements in bold, with all the social media logos for the platforms that he’s on grouped at the bottom of the card, with the implication that one should just search for “pixel perfect”, rather than having row after row of different social media info taking up space on the card. 

Printing companies:

There are many different options for printing business cards, with one of the most popular being MOO (https://www.moo.com/uk/), as they offer loads of customisation options, however they are also one of the pricier ones. They are currently having a sale and their base price for 50 cards with a 25% discount is £10.49. 

https://www.instantprint.co.uk offer similar services to MOO, but at a much cheaper price and the quality isn’t bad. They are also having a sale at the moment and their base price for 100 economy cards is £6. 

https://www.banana-print.co.uk are much cheaper than either of these two with their base price of £4.95/100 standard cards, and even offer free business cards, but obviously one is limited with the designs and customisation options because of this. I found their design templates to be much less professional than the others, and their site isn’t as user-friendly, especially in terms of customising the design of the card. 

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Exhibition review - David Eustace: Still, Landscape, Life

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Neg scan optimisation exercise

I forgot to take screenshots as I was going along so these don’t really show what I did! In the first image, I’d already cropped it from a square to A4 using the 8.5 x 11 aspect ratio, then used the white balance eye dropper to get the background grey (instead of yellow). I also adjusted the exposure, whites, blacks, highlights and shadows, and added a tiny bit of clarity and vibrance. I then opened the image up in Photoshop (with Lightroom adjustments), duplicated the background layer, and added a Dust and Scratches filter to soften the hairs and dust from the scanned negative. I only did this at 2 px otherwise it softens the image too much, so there were still many spots and hairs to clean up. This I did with a combination of the clone stamp for the background and the spot healing brush on the model. Getting rid of the lipstick stain on the glass was really tricky and I had to use both the clone stamp and spot healing brush on that but still couldn’t get it perfect. I saved the image and went back into Lightroom where I added a very slight vignette. I also went into the HSL panel and desaturated the yellow a bit as I felt her skin tone was still a bit too warm. Finally, I sharpened the image in the Detail panel and then exported it as a Jpeg.

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“Wrong” contact sheet

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People at Work presentation & feedback session

Although I had some experience of shooting strangers from a brief we had last year, this one required a bit more thought, planning and communication with the subject. The working environment of the person needed to be visible in some way in the shot, but the person also needed to be posed within it and engaging with the viewer. I found this daunting at first, however, after the first one it gets easier every time. I found that people generally became more comfortable after I chatted to them for a bit about their work (or my course), and showed an interest in them beyond just taking their photo.  

The feedback on my images was quite positive, with several comments on how I’d handled the depth of field and composition in some of them well. For my part, I think the lighting in a couple of them could be better, and the main negative point for me is that the backgrounds are quite busy and distracting, so I possibly could’ve thought more about that in the moment. I’m quite happy with how I engaged with my subjects though and I think this is fairly evident in the images. 

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Depth of field contact sheet

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Exhibition Review - Brian Griffin: POP 

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Class discussion on John Baldessari’s image ‘Wrong’ and rules in photography

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Speaker notes: Andy Buchanan

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College Spaces 

This was slightly challenging as our first brief because of having quite a limited time to do it in. As I had to leave early, I had even less time in which to complete the task, so I had to move around the college quite quickly in order to capture a wide range of images, and consequently didn’t take as much time and consideration over the images as I would’ve liked. One of the aspects discussed beforehand was to try and show scale in at least one of the images, but whilst I did have various shots that portrayed this, I felt that a lot of people would probably have similar ones, so when editing, I instead decided to focus on detail shots and environmental portraits that showed different aspects of the college. I think these three images work well as a set because the colours complement each other. The image on the left, though candid, makes quite a bold, positive statement about coming to the college, whilst the other two illustrate different aspects of the college in a more literal way. Unfortunately, half of the terrace with vegetable beds is in shadow, but I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the right time of day for the shot, and I still thought it was a strong image due to the viewpoint, looking down on it from above and therefore getting more of the scene in the frame. 

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Structure Finals and Evaluation

This is another project that I wish I’d had more time for, as architecture photography is something that interests me a lot, but the timing of this brief in the middle of our Graded Unit meant I couldn’t really explore this as fully as I would’ve liked. I decided to shoot a different building for my interior shots to the one I used for the exteriors, as this was an option we were allowed. The exterior shots are of Strathclyde Uni’s Technology and Innovation building and luckily I managed to get two of these on a sunny, cloudless day, so I have a nice, blue sky background. The first detail shot, on the left, was taken on a cloudier day, as I felt this would look better with diffused light on it. The second detail shot, on the right, is a bit more abstract due to the reflection on the glass, and I like the zigzagging lines this creates with the glass panels. My interiors were shot inside The Briggait, which although not especially contemporary, has been done up a bit in recent years so it was approved beforehand for me to shoot there. I really like the main overview image of the interior, for the sense of space, symmetry and repetition one gets from it, as well as the streaks of afternoon sunlight and shadow on the wall. The detail shot of the interior (bottom right) is an unusual shape and an angle of that building not usually captured. 

Post-production: I had to correct the perspective of both the exterior and interior overview images. The exterior was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, as it’s such an extreme angle. I tried several different methods of correction, from Auto and Guided Upright in the Transform menu of Camera Raw, to Perspective, Distort and Skew in the Transform menu of Photoshop, but none of these seemed perfect for one reason or another. Finally, I tried the Adaptive Wide Angle filter in Photoshop, and this gave me the best results. Due to the image being awkwardly cropped after this, I had to use Content-Aware Fill to fill out the gaps again, then used the Clone Stamp to correct any bits that didn’t quite match up. Finally, I brought down the highlights on the left as these were a bit blown out, and cleaned up some marks and dust on the image. The interior was a lot easier to correct. I used the Guided Upright tool in Camera Raw and this worked perfectly and the image didn’t need any further adjustments with regards to the perspective. This, and the three detail shots all had minor optimisation adjustments made and marks/dust cleaned from them. 

I learnt a lot from this brief, despite the time constraints, and look forward to putting these new skills to use with any future architecture photography I do. 

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Illuminate Final and Evaluation

For this shoot, I made sure I set up facing west, so that there would still be some colour and detail in the sky after the sun had set. I had my camera on a tripod and used a remote trigger to release the shutter so that a) there wouldn’t be any camera shake due to the long exposure time, and b) I could run around and light the parts that I needed to, which I did with an LED panel. I initially tried to get everything lit in a single shot, but soon realised this wouldn’t work as I was getting light trails in the shot and the light on the fountain looked very flat, so I decided to light each part separately, and put the images together in Photoshop afterwards. I lit the left and right halves from the side of each, rather than from the front, so that there would be shadow detail giving shape to the designs on the fountain. I also lit the top of the fountain a little and the trees to either side of it. 

Post-production: I selected nine images in Bridge, then clicked on Tools -> Photoshop -> Load files into Photoshop layers. Next I aligned them by selecting all of them, then going to Edit -> Auto-align layers and selecting the auto option. I had to crop the sides a bit after that as I’d obviously moved the tripod a little while shooting. I had the layers in the order of darkest at the bottom to lightest at the top. This meant the image I shot last, when the light was totally gone from the sky, would be my base image and starting point. I “turned on” just the bottom layer by holding down Alt and clicking the eyeball icon next to that layer. This turns off all the other layers except that one. I then clicked the eyeball icon for the layer above that, meaning I could now see it, and changed the blending mode to Lighten, then right-clicked on the layer -> Copy layer style, selected the rest of the layers, right-click on one of them -> Paste layer style. This changes the blending mode of all the layers to Lighten, so you can then see the effect each one has on the image as you turn on each eyeball icon. At this point I decided the top three images were too bright and flat, so I just ended up using six out of the nine. Out of these, there were a few that worked with the image but were just a little too bright so I brought down the opacity of a couple and added layer masks to two of them where the adjustment had to be more specific. 

On the whole, I’m quite pleased with how this image turned out, although I had originally wanted to play around with coloured gels but due to time constraints and a lack of clear evenings at the time, I stuck with the simpler option. 

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The Unseen Finals

1. Cross polarisation

2. Ultraviolet

3 & 4. High Speed Flash

Couldn’t decide between the last two. Evaluations in report. 

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Move It Final and Evaluation

Although it’s not perfect, I’m fairly happy with my video considering it was my first attempt at shooting a video using a DSLR and editing in Adobe Premiere Pro. Shilling Brewing Co were kind enough to let me base my video on their premises, specifically on their brewing process and a few other bits about the pub. This was quite challenging for a number of reasons. Firstly, I had originally wanted to have shots looking into the brewing tanks, but these are really tall and even tall guys need to stand on a ladder to see inside, which meant my tripod wasn’t tall enough. I was going to try using a “magic arm” to clamp my camera onto the side of the tanks, however, they weren’t too keen on me doing this because of the high temperatures and steam, and I agreed, for the sake of my camera it was probably best that I didn’t do this! So I had to find another way to shoot these scenes that would still look interesting, which is why I have the shots of pouring the grain in, and the steam rising as the brewer opens the lid to pour in the hops. The close up of the beer going through the tube was also the only interesting way I could capture the process of the beer going into the fermentation tank, which would otherwise have been a really boring shot. The conditioning tanks are above the bar, up a very steep ladder, and there’s not much space to move around up there, so the best option for that was the focus shift of the tanks through the glass, looking up to them from below. I ended up including quite a few focus shifts in the video (maybe too many?), as it takes a while to get it right in some instances, but I found it to be quite an effective technique. Panning is another technique I used that is not as easy as one might first think, as going too fast looks really bad. I didn’t do any zooming as I shot entirely with prime lenses due to the fact that I shot on a Nikon camera and the college doesn’t have many decent zoom lenses for Nikons. Noise was an issue in a few of the shots due to having to use a high ISO, because some of them were shot very early in the morning when it was still dark outside and there were lots of weird artificial light combinations inside, and some of them were shot at night, when there was even less light inside as it had been dimmed for ambience. I also struggled a bit with correcting the colour in some of the shots and I’m still not happy with all of them in that regard. 

I think there’s a fairly good flow to the sequences, and there are a few things that I particularly like, such as the way I managed to time the shot of the pizza chef nodding with the timing of the music, so that it looks like he’s appreciating it, whereas in reality he was just nodding in conversation with someone. I think the interactions of the bar staff look good, and I’m really happy that I managed to catch the customer’s expression at the end as he tasted a beer! With regards to the music, all the copper in the pub made me think of a previous era, so I wanted to use a song that reflected this. Some 1930s gypsy jazz by Django Reinhardt fit perfectly I thought, and it’s out of copyright too which made it easier to use.