Gary's Photography Blog

In my previous blog, I was required to show the corresponding histograms to the images taken of the egg. I got so carried away with that activity and actually overlooked the discussion forum for 2.3 of module 2 and was only following module 2 learning activities…….oops!. Now in saying that I exported the previous images to my pc and took them out of the camera. I was unable to get them back to my camera for histogram view, so I had to take some extra shots to include the histogram side of the activity.

This image is hard warm light from the side.

 

This is warm light softened with a diffuser in same position as image above.

 

This image is hard cool light from side.

 

This image is the cool light softened by the diffuser in the same position.

I can see the rise on the dark side of the histogram and a decrease on the light side when the diffuser was added. The extreme highlights have to be coming from the white background. Thanks for reading my blog 🙂

“Understanding Light”

In this activity, we see how the direction, quantity and quality of light change the photograph and gives different effects. For this, we use an egg for our subject and position our camera on a tripod or steady surface and keep that position, only moving the light. Each lighting angle we take an image with both soft and hard lighting to see the difference that light quality can make in an image. Also, I moved the light closer and further away from the subject to see the difference quantity makes. Below are the results of this activity. The left images are shot with hard light. Hard light gives hard edges with clearly defined shadows. Hard light produces a lot of contrast picking up more texture. The images on the right are shot with soft light (the same light with a diffuser added). Soft light gives softer edges and less defined softer shadows. It is typically a lower contrast light resulting in less texture. Soft light shows more shape and volume as it tends to wrap around the subject.

In this first image, the light is above camera face on. Front lighting minimises texture and volume. It creates fewer shadows and lights the entire subject straight on.

In this image, the light is off to the side and slightly elevated above the subject. I found this angle gave some volume and just a little more texture than a front-lit image.

In this image, the light is off to the side and slightly lowered below the subject. I found this angle gave even more volume and more texture, even with the soft light.

The light is directly above the subject in this image. Having a white background, it will be reflecting and creating fill in the shadow areas. I feel the bottom would have more shadow on a darker background.

Sidelight enhances texture and volume. Depth has become more prominent and there is a lot more tonal contrast. Side lighting also helps to define the shape of your subject.

The light I used was a warm work light and the diffuser was a white glass light shade. There are different colours when it comes to light and photography. Warm being an orange tone and cool being blue tones. I opted to go with the warm light as I felt it showed better shadows and worked better with the colour of the egg. From this activity, I learnt so much about light from just an egg and a lamp. Moving the light just a fraction can change the image completely and then there is the colour of the light, if it’s soft or hard light, the combinations are so fun to play with and experiment with different outcomes. I really enjoyed this activity and look forward to learning more about lighting. It has also given me a deeper appreciation for natural light and the artificial light that is all around us.

Thanks for reading my blog and keep shining your light on the world 🙂

Backup! Yes, you………..and I and everybody should backup their data. I have fallen victim to this tragic event, the modern-day version of losing your photos and personal data in a fire. One day your external hard drive is fine, the next it’s just a paperweight that just ate all your photos and data. So how did I combat this? At first, I didn’t, but google and apple did. Unaware really at the time, using my phone to capture photos, iTunes was automatically backing up my photos. Then I moved to Android and Google did the same with my photos, instantly backing them up to the cloud storage. I prefer android and like the way Google stores any image I upload on my computer including all my camera uploads and any photoshop projects I save. I haven’t lost trust in external hard drives, I just tend to upgrade more often and transfer the data over to a newer hard drive. In addition to hard drives, I use USB storage for albums and clearly mark what the contents/event/theme is. The more important stuff or current data I’m working on stay on my computer and I have a temp folder on my external I save a backup of such files until they are edited or saved to a folder, of which then they can be deleted from the temp folder. The real safeguard for me is that cloud. Once it’s on the cloud, I can even access it from multiple platforms and any computer in the world that has access to the internet.

Thank you for reading my blog, now go, “Backup”

This activity is a little bit of visual thinking. The questions being: What is going on? What do you see that makes you say that? Look again, can you see more? What’s a good title for this image?

A family departing a jet, dressed in matching outfits that match the jet. They look as though they would be a family, going by the look of age and the fact there is a lady carrying a baby next to a young teen boy followed by a man. The other man coming down the stairs is either the pilot or grandpa who can’t keep up like he used to. I would hope they wear this suit out of necessity and not because they love the way it glistens in the sunlight. They look a little NASA and a lot glamorous. In conclusion, I think this family won a trip to the stratosphere on some funky European radio show.

The first activity for focal lengths is capturing a portrait image in three different focal lengths, wide-angle, normal and telephoto. For this activity, I decided to use three different lenses.

Firstly, I used a Canon zoom lens 18-55mm 1:3.5-5.6 at a focal length of 18mm in aperture priority mode with an f-stop of f/3.5, at ISO-100 and an exposure time of 1/100sec.

Wide-Angle: The zoom lens at 18mm on autofocus, I struggled to get the autofocus to get its field of view where I wanted it. I so badly wanted to go into manual mode, however, I thought I’d stay with autofocus just to see how it would turn out and compare to the other focal lengths. In camera, it looked like my subject was in focus, but now looking at the image it seems the field of view was still a little behind my subject. I really do not like shooting portraits with this focal length, for me, it’s a little frustrating and unpredictable. This was shot a couple metres away from my subject.

Secondly, I decided to use a Canon prime lens 50mm 1:1.8. I kept the camera in aperture priority mode with the same f/stop of f/3.5, at the same ISO-100 and the camera decided for an exposure time of 1/60sec.

Normal: The Canon 50mm prime lens, although it’s still within the realm of normal focal length, to me, it has a little bit of a telephoto feel to it. It creates great bokeh when focused in on a subject but also has quite a normal looking field of view for landscape type images or if your subjects are a little further back in the frame. I had to move back for this one to maintain a similar composition and would say it was roughly 8 metres away from my subject.

For the third, I decided to use the canon zoom lens 75-300mm 1:4-5.6 as this is the only telephoto lens I currently own. Now in saying that, I did leave my camera in aperture priority mode, however, I didn’t realise until after I took the shots that the aperture for this lens had a minimum f-stop of f/4 and at the focal length of 170mm it would be an f-stop of f/5. Still at ISO-100 and the camera chose 1/30sec for the exposure time.

Telephoto: The Canon zoom lens 75-300mm at a focal length of 170mm really pulls everything in tight, like a pair of yoga pants, and puts more emphasis on the focused area. Although the f-stop was not maintained and closed from f/3.5 to f/5, it shows the amount of bokeh you still get a couple stops away, I’d imagine a faster or a wider aperture zoom lens would produce more bokeh/ blurred background and would lower the exposure time.

Ok, so now we move on to the second part of this activity, an image from three different focal lengths, however, this time it’s just the scenery/cityscape and we maintain the camera position, only changing focal length. Again I stayed in aperture priority with an f-stop of f/3.5 and at ISO-100. The first image is at a focal length of 18mm using the Canon zoom 18-55mm and the camera decided 1/200sec exposure time was right for this setting.

Wide-angle: The Canon zoom lens 18-55mm at 18mm has a wide field of view, it captures a lot more of the foreground and peripheral view giving a decent representation of this locations length from my position.

This second image is from the same 18-55mm zoom lens, however, now we have zoomed in to a focal length of 48mm and the aperture had to change to f/5.6 and exposure rose to 1/50sec

Normal: The Canon 18-55mm zoomed in to 48mm. I decided to be lazy and leave the zoom lens on and just zoom to a focal length of 50mm rather than swapping out for my prime 50mm. It is roughly the same field of view, just a little lower quality than the “nifty fifty” and the aperture could have stayed at f/3.5 with the prime lens, reducing exposure time. As you can see, we have lost the foreground and peripheral view and have started narrowing our field of view.

The third image is from the Canon zoom lens 75-300mm at a focal length of 190mm, f-stop of f/5 and exposure time of 1/25.

Telephoto: The Canon zoom lens 75-300mm at 190mm has a very narrow field of view and we have now zoomed right up to the pole and lost all foreground and peripheral view, however, if you wanted an image of that pole and couldn’t get any closer, this lens is definitely your go-to lens.

So that’s it for now, but before I go I just want to mention that up until now I never shot in raw and had no idea what or why anyone would shoot in it, all that extra editing, software, storage space etc. But after using it a little and having a look at its capabilities, I can see how it can be an advantage and produce a better picture. I haven’t spent much time shooting raw or playing with the editing side of it yet but look forward to learning more about it and having fun experimenting with it.

Happy Snapping 🙂

 

The light in this image is artificial, just a small amount of light possibly from a single lamp off to the side of the subject. A soft diffused light creating a warm light. This image makes me feel curious as to what exactly is on this young man’s mind, pondering life and his future perhaps?

The lighting in this image is also an artificial light, a very bright cold light, and lots of it. Straight on to the subject, the reflection gleaming in her eyes making it apparent they really wanted a well-lit pic. Youth and innocence are what this image screams at me.

The light in this image is natural warm undiffused sunlight. My guess is late afternoon when the sun is a little lower in the sky, casting light roughly from a 45degree angle onto the back of the subjects. The shadow from the trees and the light bouncing off the top give it that mystical feeling, along with the girls and their bubbles, it has a really playful happy feel to this image.

The light in this image is heavily diffused by the clouds. My only guess here is the sun is overhead. It has a cold look to it and the water has an even amount of highlights. I straight away think winter and cold.

The lighting in this image is very warm and clearly artificial. The additional lights in the background help separate the subject from the background. Her expression and the ambience of this image really depict sorrow and heartache.

The lighting in this image is a little tricky. We have warm natural sunlight on the side of her face but the rest is artificial light. A strobe from the front and a red gelled light from the back. This image has a very artsy feel to it, each to their own interpretation.

This image is natural sunlight. Warm, but only a small amount coming in down from the window. Just enough to light the subject and facial features and capture the inquisitiveness of this young human.

This image is natural warm light from the sun, directly in front on the horizon. It displays a great colour contrast. A little diffused by cloud and the horizon itself creates a nice ambience and slight vignette. The road before you, the sun on the horizon, makes me feel adventurous.

 

This is my workspace. I don’t have before pictures as this is how it is. I would like a new chair, wink wink, but apart from that it works fine and is comfortable. I enjoy sitting near the window and feeling the cool breeze come through while I’m editing, on that note, Raw. I have not shot nor edited RAW before, not really sure why, maybe ease of having images in smaller already jpeg files. Until now I didn’t see or know the need for RAW. First off I can see the files are bigger, roughly four times the size of jpeg and hold more detail. I already had Camera Raw installed but never knew it was there until opening RAW files from my camera. I found it fairly easy to use and navigate and liked the features it has. I look forward to using this format more in the future and playing around with editing and seeing a step up in my photography.

If colour is solely the way physics describes it, the visible spectrum of light waves, then black and white are outcasts and do not count as true, physical colours. Colours like white and pink are not present in the spectrum because they are the result of our eyes mixing wavelengths of light.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton