Karen's Blog: DPP - Assignment 2 Seeing like your camera

Monday, 8 October 2012

DPP - Assignment 2 Seeing like your camera - EDITED

DPP - Assignment 2 Seeing like your camera - EDITED

A little overdue, but the weather has been really unkind to me!

Part 1: Four Situations

Street scenes in the middle of a clear sunny day, narrow streets, high buildings, deep shadows
Indoor space, with available natural strong window light
People in the shade with background sunlight
Early morning or late evening landscapes
Backlit scenes whether in direct or indirect light
Scenes which include objects of very different reflectivity, even in flat light on an overcast day
Indoor scenes illuminated by a single source of artifical light of high luminance ie: desk lamp
A scene with strong dappled light

Window light

I visited Old Portsmouth Cathedral and walked around looking at all the possibilities that it held - these are the images using strong natural window light.

Sunlight through a stained glass window

Window light through a large window, sheilded by a large tree and dusty window

Strong sunlight against the candle orb with reflecting shadows

Objects of different reflectivity

Wightlink Ferry Terminal - reflective objects

Old Portsmouth Cathedral chandelier

Spice Island - The Bridge Pub and Spinnaker Tower in the background

Objects illuminated by an artifical light

Wedding headgear

Every girl must haves!

Mr Grey

Dappled light

Dappled tree shadows outside the Cathedral

Garden of Remembrance

Tree shadows

I found this a particularly challenging assignment for various reasons the main reason being the weather that restricted me so much during this time.

I had a list of places that I wanted to visit, but each time I tried it rained. So I decided on somewhere completely different and that location was Southsea. It was a bright clear sunny day (for a change) and I packed my bag, jumped into the car and set off. I made the most of the day starting at Old Portsmouth Cathedral, where I have visited on a few occassions before. I knew that this would provide me with the strong sunlit window images and also some dappled shaded areas outside and around the Cathedral.

During the wet and raining days - I set up an indoor studio with the aid of a desk lamp and a few objects suitably arranged.

Part 2: Choose one scene and think about what the lighting conditions should be in order to reduce the contrast.

Tree Shadows using a flash gun

Original image was taken on a bright clear sunny day in Southsea Common. It shows deep dark shadows cast by the trees along the pathway. Some ways around this would be to wait until the sun was behind the clouds, but this would have left the image dull and flat - I decided that I would use some fill flash and attached my speedlight to my camera. I took another image using the speedlight to lighten the shadows - this also helped to brighten the trees, although the sky was blue it appears hard to see through the leaves.