Studio – Shoe photography

In the first picture the lighting is very flat on the shoe to produce a level light and to make the shoe stand out as much as possible. There is a white backdrop being used to focus the viewers attention on the product. Photoshop has clearly been used to produce a shadow underneath the shoe, this hints to how the shoe is poised and the position of it.

I like how the photograph is lit and the composition of the image, however my shoot is a lowkey lighting setup, I chose to go with lowkey because i think it make the subject pop out and stand out more.
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This is my final image from my shoot. I decided to go with photographing bright coloured shoes so it stands out from the black backdrop. I decided to have composition slightly to the left to consist with the rule of thirds and to make the photograph generally more interesting.

I had a black backdrop and a table to place the shoes on, there was also a cloth on the table which was very dark so it did not interrupt with the subject. I used post production on the photograph to have the scene totally blacked out and i took the shoes from the original scene and place it onto a black background to create maximum effect on the shoe. I think it has worked because where the background is completely black the viewers are drawn straight to the subject.

For this photograph I used a tungsten light to solely focus on the subject and to have a specific spot lighting, the shutter speed was set to 1/250S, I had it set to this because if I had set the shutter speed any lower the photograph would of come out over exposed and i wanted perfect lighting for my shoot. I also used an aperture of F8. I had this aperture of F8 because it worked perfectly with the tungsten lights and also because I wanted the shoe to be in focus but not too much, I wanted this because altough the plan was to have a completely black background and wanted the original to be not as dark so i could play around with it in Photoshop and tweek some aspects.

Studio – Self portrait research

The photographer I have chosen for this project is Vivian Maier. I chose this photographer and image because I think that Vivian is an amazing photographer because of her technique, I like how her self portraits are not straight forward photographs, they are taken from reflections of herself, I like this approach because it shows are scene around her and I also love the fact that they are in black and white, it really brings out the age and feeling in the photographs.

Vivian Dorothea Maier was born February 1^st 1926 and sadly died April 21^st 2009. She was a very special American photographer who was born in New York City but was raised in France, Vivian was an nanny in Chicago for round about 40 years and in that time she had taken over one hundred thousand photographs primarily of people and cityscapes in Chicago. Her photographs were unknown and mostly undeveloped until a local historian John Maloof founded her. Vivian’s work has been exhibited in the U.S, England, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Belgium.

Studio – Self portrait

We have been given a new brief for the studio and the first project was on self portraits. We had to take our own pictures for this unit these are what I produced.
For my first photograph i decided to do a Rembrandt lighting setup. I chose this because in my opinion I think it is the best lighting setup because it highlights all the features of your face but with lighting from one side and from the back left.

For the shoot I used my camera which is a Canon 100D, 2 tungsten lights, a tripod and a black backdrop. With the lighting setup there was one light at a 45 degree angle a bit above head height, I did this so the light is shining down on me and if my head was looking toward the lens you would see something called the butterfly effect, this is where when the light is above your head it creates shadows under your knows which looks like a ‘butterfly’. With the ‘self portrait’ we was put into groups so it wasn’t entirely a self portrait, me and my partner both took turns at taking pictures and experimenting with different lighting setups. When it was my turn I had directed the lights into the position |I had wanted and the camera setting, my partner simply pressed the shutter for me. The ideal situation would be to have a sync lead from my camera allowing me to press the shutter from where i was.

After shooting I had imported the images I had wanted into Photoshop to tweak certain aspects, with this photograph I had lowered the temp creating the soft blue effect, I did this because I thought it looked better with the jumper I was wearing making it blend into the background more and just giving a more interesting feel to the image. I used the raw file, I prefer using raw to JPEG because of the quality, however if I wasn’t going to edit the image I would used the JPEG because of the colour.

With the second photograph I used 1 tungsten light

File compression

RAW – A Raw image is named raw because it contains no image compression so you get maximum information that is recorded on the image sensor from the camera.
Raw image files are sometimes called digital negatives because the fulfil the same role as negatives in film photography, raw images cannot be directly used as an image because it saves as a file but has all the information that is needed to create an image.

JPEG – JPEG images are also known as a lossy compression files, this means that with raw files you can open and save them as many times as you want within an editing software however JPEG files compress themselves everytime you open and save them losing information and eventually the image becomes pixelated and loses quality.

TIFF – TIFF stands for ‘Tagged image file format’ they are used for storing very large high quality images. It is prefered to used either tiff or raw files for manipulation programs such as Photoshop & Lightroom. If your printing TIFF is the best files to print from because there is no compression and printers generally read TIFF files the best.

PSD – A PSD is a Photoshop Document, it allows you to come back to your editing that you have done keeping all the files and layers, A PSD is a lossless file because it does not lose any information when you save and keeps it there for you to come back to at anytime.

Experiments

Selection tool

The selection tool allows you to pick what section from an image you wish to take away or add to. It’s great because it means you can take your selection away from the image and add it to another allowing you to merge pictures together. The selection too also allows you to select one brick or multiple bricks at a time. This is the tool i used, I went about this by clicking the selection tool and slowly selecting the image to be able to pick it out and move it onto a different image.

Unit 27: Parallel Universe

• Be able to capture images
• Be able to process digital images
• Know about legal requirements and ethical issues

In this unit i wish to:

• Get more knowledge about Photoshop and other editing software’s
• Be able to print digital imagery
• Get knowledge about legal requirements and ethical issues

 

Fireworks night

 

Unit 16 – Final postcard – 2nd draft

Front cover:

Back cover:

Unit 16 – Final postcard – 1st draft

Front:

Back: