Exercise: Outdoors At Night

The exercise on p152 is all about photographing at night in the city centre. The aim of this exercise is to explore the variety of lighting effects and colour in artificial light. To include in our list of image were the following:

• A floodlit building (where the lights are hidden)
• A brightly lit storefront
• A large interior such as a shopping centre
• And a view of a busy road where we can create light trails of the car lights rushing by.

The view skyline would look much better at dusk where there is a hint of light in the sky however I usually go home before its dark at this time of the year or I’m out for a reason until it’s full dark – this time I was at the David Bailey and Bruce Weber exhibition. Although having said this – London has so much light pollution it is never really black anyway.

Exercise: Rhythms & Patterns

On p99, the last exercise for part 2 is of patterns & rhythms. Photos with Rhythm lead your eye in a pattern to a beat. And for photographs with patterns your eye can imagine the pattern continuing on out of the frame.  Following on from yesterdays post these photos of rhythms & patterns are also all from central London buildings.

There are quite a few so I’ve put them into this clickable gallery, click the images to see larger. As you can see there are some triangle influences here too…

my favourites are #1 and #9. Next to do is the assignment for this section.

Exercise: Real & Implied Triangles

The section on shapes end with an exercise on real & implied triangles (p92). Does anyone else think of the Eddie Izzard sketch about Darth Vader eating triangular food? No? Just me then. Ok, so I went for a walk in Central London to take photos to cover this, the previous (with the Batman building) and the next exercise. As it turns out I really enjoyed taking photographs of bits of buildings! I thought they’d look better in black and white but as usual I just couldn’t part with the colour for most of them.

The one above is triangletastic, looking up into a triangular section which is reflected in the shiny windows causing even more triangles. The one below is part of a construction saw I saw on the walk to work (one of the few here not from the south bank).

The one below is also looking up and if I had been shooting with a wider focal length would have made a giant triangle so this one is an implied triangle with little real and reflected triangles in it too.

This is another looking up one, I thought the negative space of the sky made an almost implied triangle but there are other triangles by perspective in it too.

The one below is another from the 1/2 finished building. In this one the inverted triangle leads your eye down to the little worker men at the bottom. I should have taken more time over this one, the men are a little close to the edge of the frame for my liking but it was touch and go for getting to work on time at it was. This is why you should never take photos in a hurry.

And now for something completely different….

The last part of the exercise very clearly states that it has to be a photo of 3 people arranged in a group such that their faces (or bodies) make an implied triangle. Well luckily for me it did not state 3 living people! Here is a family portrait from the Acme Family Portrait Studio of my kitchen table:

Exercise: Implied Lines

The exercise on p85 is all to do with implied lines. The first part of the exercise is to find the implied lines in the photographs supplied in the coursework, to make a sketch and note down what the lines might be. I’ve done that in my physical notebook. I’ll finish up the exercise here with these photographs.

Firstly this one of the diver lighting up the corals…

This photo is actually an optical illusion. The diver swimming by happened to have his flash set on slave so when mine went off so did his. Now normally this would ruin a photograph however my flash was pointed at the corals in such a way it looks like the diver had a torch on the corals creating an implied relationship (even though in reality he was much too far away). This small version here shows the implied lines, the main arrow shows the “torch beam” effect. And the smaller implied line shows the space for the diver to swim into.

The next photo has the following implied lines. This one is less subtle with the lines of ridged sand leading you eyes from the shell to the rays, the foreground rays swimming forward and right and the background rays swimming straight right.

This guy on the front of the Duomo in Florence looks as though he’s impeaching the heavens. You follow his eye line upwards but the alcove that he’s sitting in all point inwards and the star pattern leads your eye back down to him again creating a circuit within the frame.

For the third part of the exercise was to plan and take a photograph that has these types of implied lines. I took this one of my little people in their snowy landscape. Even though the man in the foreground is blurred by the DOF your eyes still go between him & the woman in yellow because they are holding eye line and waving. The people in the background are much less dynamic so hold less interest in the composition, however they are all walking inwards keeping your attention within the frame and back to the woman again.

Exercise: Diagonals

Looking back over my work, I seem to use diagonals a lot. The exercise on p80 is designed to make you aware of diagonals and how they can bring dynamism to your photos. I’m not sure that I agree that there are few true diagonals apart from stairs (the rest being a matter of perceptive or angle of the camera). Clearly the author of the coursework hasn’t been to London in a while, the place is littered with buildings that are not straight with diagonals and curviness abound.

For some reason (maybe because its easier on the eyes for a western reader, I dont really know) I seem to favour the diagonal going from left to right up the image. I had a dig around to see if I could find any that were the other way around – not many I must say.

This one is a matter of perspective of a very tall building, so not something I really intended to be diagonal but without a tilt shift lens theres not much you can do about it. However, I’d still label this vertical rather than diagonal.

This one of sun rays lighting up the fish eggs is more of a radial pattern….

Lunchtime walkabout

I went for a walk yesterday lunchtime across Southwark bridge. I didn’t realise how close to the Tate I am so I’ll have to pop in there more often. I walked all the way to the Golden Hinde. Who says I can’t take a shipwreck on land?

The dynamic range from sky to land was very high when the sun came out so on the bridge on the walk back I tried the HDR pro app where it takes two photos – one light and one dark, and blends them for you. Here are my two views from the bridge:

Exercise: Positioning the horizon

This exercise (p57) is all about how your choice of horizon placement affects the photograph. I couldn’t quite find an unbroken and clear horizon but I got up as high as I could and took these shots of the London skyline horizon with my iPhone. I tried to pick a cloudy day so they wouldn’t blow out too much. but the even then the dynamic range of the camera wasn’t good enough.

The photo above shows a very low horizon placement that emphasises the sky as the main element of the photo, which in this case it isn’t really an interesting enough sky to justify that.

With the placement in the middle both the sky and the land has equal weighting. In this case the main interest is in the thin strip buildings in the middle. I would be tempted to crop out the boring looking roof top in the bottom section of the photo.

In this one there is not much sky at all and the foreground building really isn’t interesting enough to justify this horizon position.

The photo above isn’t part of the exercise but it seemed a shame to go to the roof of one new change taking photos and not get a shot of St Pauls. As you can see for the exercise I deliberately didn’t include St Pauls because it breaks the horizon too much.

Again, I can’t seem to go to one new change and not take a version of this shot. As the sky is always different it always has a different feel to it. This one is nice and moody.

Lunch break Walkabout

So theres a London festival of Photography on this June – who knew? I didn’t see any adverts about it anywhere. So at the end of June I see the link. Figures. Since there’s still this week left of June I made a mission to see at least one exhibition. Luckily the Frederick Wilfred exhibition of London Photographs is in the Museum of London (until 8th July), which despite being only minutes from my office I have never been to. For shame. I went yesterday lunchtime. The exhibition itself is only small, less than 10 photos but it was lovely to see the old views of London. I especially liked the one with the butcher staring out at the photographer past all the meat in his shop window.

My tutor sad I should try some street photography, so on the way there and back (and cheekily inside the museum) I took some shots with my iPhone.

Make Love Not War:
As I came back I saw a bunch of dressed up Army guys with massive guns crossing the road, called Love Lane. I wanted to get both the sign and the group of men in the shot.

Museum of London:
The architecture around the museum is quite nice, this view of the museum is from the foot bridge over the road. I like all the zigzags lines and many block shape windows. Pity the iPhone blew out the sky, but it was pretty sunny.

Lift:
Inside the museum they had this amazing 1930s Bronze lift that used to be in Selfridges. This part of it caught my eye.

Taught:
There were quite a few little school parties of kids all being taught about our great cities history. These guys are learning about the time before the Romans got here.

GuildHall Flags:
They were having some fancy todo at the guildhall (I asked someone and thought thought perhaps a flag was being raised). All the preparations were out, ambulances, union jacks, microphones, chairs for the old folks etc etc. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for the main event as I had to get back to work.

Anyway, I hope to bring you more lunchtime wanders. You never know I might even get to more of those exhibitions this week!

Exercise: Focal Lengths from different view points

Continuing the Focal lengths project, the exercise on p49 is designed to show perspective distortion. When trying to take the same photo with two different focal lengths (I used different levels of zoom) we see the distortion quite clearly.

First the telephoto. I zoomed into this doorway on the Guildhall buildings in central london. This is taken at 95mm and notice the lines are straight:

I walked forward until I could get the same (or as close to it) view through my lens at 18mm. Notice the distortion of the perspective: