Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition in illustration is described in the learning text as the putting together of two objects so as to suggest a relationship. The exercise gives the option of creating a still life to act as the cover for a book or to photograph a person with a possession or the result of their hobby or work. I have a friend called David who has a model railway layout so I chose the latter of the two exercise options.

Below we see my image of David with one of his model trains.I have asked David to hold the train the way he is holding it, to really emphasize that this picture is about him and the locomotive, his possession. In the bottom left had of the shot I have also included part of the layout. I took about two dozen pictures in this session and have photographs both with and without. It was a difficult decision whether to include it or not but in the end I chose to as I felt it added a little context to the image without distracting too much from the main subject.

Technically the shot was very straight forward. I set up a flash light on a stand to camera right and a little higher than David. This light was diffused by shooting through a white umbrella and the flash was fired by a remote radio trigger. Other things I tried in the same session were a bare flash which was too harsh, A snoot which was harsh but did work and finally a grid. I should explain that there are some shelves behind David that I did not wish to include, hence the exercises to limit the amount of light falling on the background.

In the end I preferred the light from the shoot through umbrella so solved the problem by hanging some black material over the shelves and carefully positioning the light so that as little as possible spilt on to the background. Finally I did a little post processing in Photoshop by using the burn tool around the edges of the photograph to concentrate the viewers attention on David.

A narrative picture essay

For my narrative picture essay I have decided to document our anniversary weekend break to Ghent in Belgium. Ghent is a beautiful city with much to see. Canals, Cathedrals and a very attractive medieval quarter provide for the cultural side of the visit whilst the many bars and restaurants provide entertainment.

Ghent is a university town and is becoming a very popular tourist attraction. We travelled there by car using the Channel Tunnel.

Before we went I made the made a note of shots which I took with me. They were as follows:

1. Setting of in the morning - show the car and either bags, the time or the sat nav with Ghent as the destination
2. The channel tunnel - to show the way we are crossing the channel.
3. driving through France to Belgium - maybe a shot of the border?
4. Arrival in Ghent - a landmark to show we have arrived.
5. The hotel.
6. Things we do in Ghent.
7. A flavour of the holiday atmosphere in the town centre.

I managed to capture most of the images I needed but did fail to get one or two important ones, such as a shot to specify that we were in Ghent.

Anyway, we set off with a shot of the Channel Tunnel. It is pretty difficult to take pictures in this area as you are confined to your car so this shot was taken through the car window with a compact camera. In my notes I had put a shot of bags or luggage as we set of in the morning, but this didn't add anything to the story that couldn't be deduced from the following shots.

Boarding the Channel Tunnel.

The next image is of the car on the train in the Channel Tunnel. This symbolises the short trip across to France.

Making the crossing.

Again in my notes I had the border crossing but as it turned out there was not anywhere to stop! Again we took shots through the car window with the compact camera. None were that good but I needed a shot and this was the best one. In my picture montage at the end of this piece, I have hidden the quality of this image but setting it as a background.

Entering Belgium.

We have now arrived at the hotel. Although there is no sign that actually says Hotel I believe this is clear from the location of this photograph in the sequence and from the interior of the building.

The hotel.

Now a bit of a jump. Here (or before the last image) I should have had a sign or something with the word 'Ghent'  to show the city we were in. With this missing we go straight to a shot of a typical building and crowds of people sitting on the waterfront.

Typical buildings and masses of tourists.

Now showing a more modern street view which also conveys the faster pace of this part of the area.

Busy town centre.

 Ghent has award winning illuminations which are shown here in the most popular part of the city to visit. This is also a glimpse of the many restaurants and bars.

Ghent in the evening.

The next three images are grouped to show some of the other types of attractions to visit. The tower houses a museum dedicated to bells and also allows visitors to see the clock mechanism.

The Belfort.

The clock mechanism.

One of the cast bells.

More bells in the bell museum.

Below I have tried to select images to tell the story over three pages. The three pages roughly outline different parts of the journey, namely travelling & accommodation in the first page, the tourist element in the second and finally the historic aspect.

Conclusion
This was good fun and highlighted some of the problems you may come across, even with a photo script. Some of the images were impossible to get, like the border shots. Others I think I may have been able to get in different circumstances. Another point that this exercise highlighted is that it is not always possible to go back if you don't get what you need to in the first instance. 

Symbols

This little project is about symbols. Below are a number of concepts for which I need to find suitable symbols and give a brief description of how I would use these in a photograph.

Symbols are important in photography as they help us get a message across with limited imagery. This can be very useful for advertising or illustration for example.

For a symbol to be effective, its meaning has to be easily recognisable. The problem with this of course, is that it is easy to fall into common cliché's. Symbols may also have different cultural meanings and can change meaning over time.

Growth
Could be represented by a seedling. The image could be a macro shot. Growth could also be represented by a shot of a line chart hanging on a wall with the graph always increasing and eventually leaving the chart and continuing on the wall.

Other ideas: young animal with mother, baby

Excess
Imagine a cocktail glass filled with diamonds. The image could be shot with the diamonds actually spilling out of the glass. Secondly a shot of a dozen credit cards held in fan fashion. Maybe a city gent with money notes spilling from every pocket and under the brim of his bowler hat etc.

Crime
First symbol that springs to mind is a CCTV camera. Could be used in a photograph as a close up against groups of people. Handcuffs & justice scales could be used as stand-alone imagery.

Silence
A finger held to pursed lips is pretty much a universal sign of silence or 'quiet'. Would work best if fairly large in the image. Also an exam hall or a very tranquil pond or lake scene.

Poverty
To represent poverty we could have a close up of hands holding a begging bowl. Another symbol for poverty is related to the home, such as an empty fridge or a dirty and unkempt house.

Assignment 4: Applying lighting techniques

This assignment pulls together elements of lighting and colour from the exercises in part four. We should now be able to use light to demonstrate properties of our subject such as shape, form, texture and colour. We are required to use a portable subject and take about eight photographs that best show these properties.

Prior to taking the photographs I made some notes on each property which are as follows:

Shape: I am not worried about detail here. Shape is well represented by an outline which could be achieved by exposing the camera for a strong back light. This could be from a flash unit or as the subject is portable, we could take this outside and simply use the sky as a light source.

Form: For form I need to show the 'volume' of the object. For this I need the show the object with good detail and overall lighting. Here I need shadows to show the shape but with some detail in the dark area's - unlike texture. Detail in the shadows calls for some control over lighting and the ability to influence how dark the shadows are. This may call for a two light set-up or some form of reflector to bounce light back into the subject.

Texture: We should know from our experiment with a single light source that shadows can be made to be very strong if we have a single un-diffused light coming from one side. Strong shadows will be ideal to show the texture of our subject so this may be a good approach here.

Colour: From our light throughout the day and other natural light exercises I think I will try to represent the colour of the object with natural light.

In addition to this any other interesting light sources can be photographed. Here are the exercises.

Shape
To show the shape of the object I have concentrated on showing the curvy outline of the statue. The first method I have used is to set the exposure of the camera for the sky. The statue was then photographed against the sky the result being an underexposed object allowing us to concentrate on the shape . When I took this image the day was quite overcast which has resulted in a slightly more balanced shot (less contrast) but I think that this is alright. The level of detail we can see is not too distracting from the shape.

I then tried the same thing with a different approach. I wanted to light this with my off camera flash. In a previous exercise I had shot against a diffused light sitting behind the subject so for this shot I used  the light off to the right of the subject aimed at the background. I had to place a piece of card between the flash and the subject to stop light spilling onto the subject. I metered with a flash meter and deliberately over exposed the background.

Form
To show the form of our subject I am trying to capture all the curves and angles in such a way as to get an overall impression of it's three dimensionality. The information our brain needs to build this picture is some reference to depth which we can provide by way of shadows. I have approached  'form' two different ways.

The first is with a natural light rendering where I have used a reflector to lighten the shadows a little. This was to give a better idea of depth on the back curve of the statue's legs and around the arms. The subject is standing on a piece of black velvet to minimise distractions from the background. As the light is diffused, it is coming from all around but in this instance with a slight bias towards high and on the left. The reflector, which is silver, is placed to the right of the subject.

For the second shot I have used a totally different approach inspired by the exercise with traffic at night. Here the subject has been placed on the velvet in a completely dark environment. The camera, which is tripod mounted, has been set to the smallest aperture and slowest shutter speed. I have tripped the shutter and then 'painted' the statue with light from a small LED torch. I did many of these shots as it is difficult to know what the outcome will be as you are painting. Below is the one I best feel shows form.

As an interesting foot note, I did not have a white balance setting for LED on my camera so I shot in auto. When I edited the RAW a did a quick lookup on the internet and found the colour temperature for LED. There were a couple of ranges but I set the white balance by using colour temperature and found a temperature of around 9500k to be a fairly close match.


Texture

Home made cardboard snoot.

From our previous experiments we know that strong side lighting is good to show up texture. Here I have used the cardboard snoot I made for the 'Concentrating light' exercise as a sidelight for the subject. The snoot is fixed to a camera flash to the left of the subject and at approximately the same hight. The flash is then fired by radio trigger. I have made no effort to fill in any of the shadows as the shadows actually help to show the texture of this object. The camera was set to manual and I used flash photography settings (shown below the image). This helped to eliminate the background.

The second image was taken in natural diffused light with a little light bounced back with a silver reflector. The background is a piece of black velvet. The location is my conservatory which I have used before due to it's semi transparent roof which really diffuses the light nicely. In one respect this image goes against what we have learnt as the light is diffused and not very strong but this shot still shows good texture detail. When you look at the image closely you can see why it still works. The first image is using shadow to highlight the texture but the one below is working in the opposite way. The light is reflecting off of the highlights thereby accentuating them which is giving the texture some relief, particularly in the chest area of the statue.

Colour
From the exercises we should know that a good way to show the colour of an object is by natural light from roughly mid day. We also know that colour can be made stronger by exposing a stop or so below the actual light reading of the subject. In the following image I have used natural light from a window with a piece of white paper just reflecting a tiny amount of light back into the shadows. The exposure is dropped about half a stop lower than it metered. White balance is set to sunlight.

This is the more accurate colour representation of the subject.

The second shot was taken in the shade in my garden early afternoon with the white balance set to auto. At first I thought this image had the better colour reproduction but looking at the statue again I can see that this is actually not the case. I believe that the addition of a slight blue cast has cooled the colours down.

Initially this was perceived to be the more accurate colour representation

Conclusion
The chapter on light was quite an extensive chapter which I guess makes sense as without light there would be no photography! The main lesson to take away from this is that to have some control over light gives a great deal of control over your photography. If you do not have control over the light source such as in the case of natural light, understanding how light works will still give you more choices about how you wish to make your photo.Finally, there is a link between light and colour that must be understood to give us more control. over what we create.


Finally, some of the other results I had when experimenting for this exercise.

Concentrating light

For this exercise I am going to concentrate light on a subject. I decided to go a bit 'blue peter' here and make a snoot for my flashgun from a cereal packet and some black gaffer tape. Within ten minutes this is what I had...

Snoot made from cereal packet and black tape.

I then used this with the camera set to standard manual settings for flash photography to take the photo below. I didn't have an awful lot of room indoors so I set this up on our garden table and took the photo after dark. I am pretty pleased with my makeshift light modifier and have already made a couple more of different lengths!