Film Exploration

The last day of term, I have recently got my new (yet old) film camera, and yet had not properly tried it out, a college class friend and a friend from another college who also studies photography, where on their way to a local graveyard, for my friends project and asked if I wanted to join... of course I would not pass up the opportunity to explore my new camera.

Basically, it was me, my new camera and a full roll of film left in a graveyard, to explore at my own will... it was fantastic and I really enjoyed myself. I had no brief to work against, just what ever I felt would make a good image. Also, I found the graveyard to be quite a great place to take pictures especially with a black and white film camera which basically pre set the atmosphere for me... yet the images and atmosphere just fit together and work really well. 

I just strolled at my own place, looking for interesting angle, points of view, graves, statues, etc

I must of spent about two and half to three hours just wondering through the graveyard with my camera and I had an excellent time and I am really pleased with the results...

Macro Photography

For my brief, of which is based on landscapes and nature, I thought an interesting experiment/technique for which I should try, is Macro Photography, as I believe it will be something a little bit different. For these images, I use a macro lens adapter, which is 10x magnified. The subjects, in relation to my brief where natural, most of the subjects are objects from which I brought from home, to specifically use with the macro lens. For most of the images I used the light box instead of the studio, however for some of the images I was outside with natural light. Before I started, I quickly researched images of macro photography, looking at no one in particular but to just get a feel for the typical style of which I want to avoid. After, a few shots I become very comfortable with the lens adapter and my own style of macro photography, therefore as I already found a shutter speed and aperture of which gave me correctly exposed images there was not much to alter. However, I found that by changing the white balance, it changed the whole colour and atmosphere of the image, and therefore giving it a completely different feel. Also, as I had not previously altered the white balance, this gave me a good opportunity to become accustomed to these settings and a good chance to experiment with it. 

I mainly used the pre-setting options of Incandescent, Direct Sunlight, Cloudy and Florescent White Balance. Each setting had a different outcome...

The effects that I prefer the most are Incandescent and Florescent, which are the majority of my final images...

Photoshop Techniques

Recently, both in college and at home, I have been experimenting with photoshop effects and techniques, which lean more towards graphic design, however I feel they are useful to me, to understand more about photoshop and how it works. Quite a few artists have inspired me for this, such as Miles Donavan, Julien Opie and Jason Brooks, just to name a few. Just a sample of the techniques I have done include vector based images, using layer masks, joiners effect, panoramic images as well as adding my own style to each image. Overall, I found most of them quite easy, however mainly the vector based images where tricky at first but more time consuming as one alone took me more than two weeks to finish. I have really enjoyed working alot more with Photoshop, and I will continue to research and learn new techniques and to better myself with the program...

Firstly, this is my Panoramic image which I created through Photoshop, by taking several images and merging them together through the Photomerge selection tool. This technique was extremely easy and presented no problems at all as well as being able to achieve it within seconds.

This is my joiners image, the image is of a Jim Morrison poster which I own. Again, I did this technique very simialr to the panoramic image as it is made up of several images which are then stuck together through the Photomerge option in Photoshop, however this technique can also be achieved manually, which for this image both ways where utilized as Photoshop was only able to creat half of the image and then it was up to me to complete the image manually. Again, this was a very easy technique which produces very interesting and aesthetic results.

This image was inspired by the work of Miles Donavan. I created this image using the layer mask tool in Photoshop and used a photocopy style image as the background of which then I used the monotone colour option. However, for this image to be different I created two of the same image only with different colours then offset them to create a 3D style image and then I added the background using the same effect as the main image. Aesthetically, I am really pleased with this image and feel it is quite strong aesthetically. I really enjoyed the process of this image as although it was easy, it was quite lengthy at first but never the less very rewarding at the end.

Again, this is another image of Jim Morrison (unless you have not noticed this will become a re-occuring feature) this time the image has been inspired by the artist Jason Brooks and his vector style images, however unlike his images I have not used the gradient tool, I have kept each shade a solid block as I prefer this look. This is my favourite image out of my experiments, as it was the most challenging and the most time consuming (two and a half weeks) however again, it was worth the labour as I feel this is a very strong aesthetic image and I am really pleased with how it turned out.