Measuring exposure - Bracketing

Measuring exposure

The shot of the door was deliberately under exposed by one stop to saturate the colours in the door and surroundings. The shot of the rock with seaweed was also under exposed by one stop to bring out the detail in the seaweed. On an automatic setting the detail of the seaweed was blown out perhaps due to the light sensors in my camera over compensating for the brightness of the sand around the rock. The shot of the trees was also under exposed by one stop to bring out details in the trees. As the light shining through the trees was fairly bright I think on an automatic setting the details in the trees would have been blown out.

Sea scapes

Last Wenesday I was lucky enough to visit two local beaches, Tyninghame and Seacliffe when there was a large swell. I took most of my photos using a fast shutter speed as the light was so bright. In an ideal world if I had had an ND Filter and used my tripod it would have been nice to take some photographs with a slow shutter speed too. None the less I am quite pleased with some of the shots.

Talk by Laurie Campbell

On Tuesday 18 October I went to see a talk in the Borders by Laurie Campbell, a Scottish natural history and landscape photographer.
It was a fascinating talk as he regularly revisits the same areas to gain indepth coverage of species such as golden eagles. I had no idea so much backgroud work and patience was required to gain such superb wildlife photographs. He also photographs common place subjuects such as flora/fauna, insects in a creative way.
He is dedicated to photographing subjects as they are with minimal digital enhancement which I found refreshing in this digital age.
Overall it was a very inspiring talk and definitely made me want to take more photographs noticing creativity in everyday subjects wwhich are near at hand.

Colour into tones in black and white

This was an interesting exercise. Unfortunately I could not find the colour sliders in photoshop under image/adjustments. Perhaps I have an older version of photoshop. Instead I used "enhance" to convert the photograph I took to black and white. I then adjusted the black and white photo to have more blue, more red and more green. Unfortunately there was no adjustment for yellow. There are very subtle differences in the photographs but in retrospect I might have been better to adjust the intensity setting when making these changes. None the less I can see from the course work that a black and white image can be adjusted by understanding colour.

Marville

On my tutor's suggestion I read a chapter titled "Marville" in Graham Robb's book entitled Parisians.

I very much enjoyed reading the chapter and as my tutor indicated it did give a very good insight into how early photography was used as a recording medium.

Marville was a french landscape and architecture photographer who was especially well known for taking pictures of ancient Parisian scenes before they were destroyed and the city was rebuilt under Baron Haussmann's new plan for the modernisation of Paris. A decade later Marville also took photographs of the new roads.

I thought the comparison the author made of Marville's photograph of Place-Saint-Andre-des-Art in 1865 with the one taken thirty three years later was interesting. As the author says "so much information is contained in that split-second burst of photons". It is fascinating that a photograph of that nature can reveal so much. A lot of information can especially be deduced from the different advertisements show in the photographs at the time.

I also found Robb's description of Marville's early experience of being a photographer and his meticulous printing and probable delight at the process evocative.

David Octavius Hill

David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) was a painter/lithographer who became interested in photography and joined forces in the mid 1840's for four years with Robert Adamson who was a photographer using the calotype photographic process invented by Fox Talbot. Hill and Adamson produced over 3000 paper negatives consisting of portraits, landscapes and scenes of everyday life which were considered the best paper photography of that time.
I particularly loved the photographs of children and families such as "sisters, the misses Griersons" and "Sandy (or James) Linton, his boat and bairns". The documentary quality of the photos such as the "oyster woman" and the photos depicting fishermen and fisherwoman give a clear insight into a different era. I think these photos really demonstrate the art of photography in their "story telling" and I can see why Hill and Adamson were credited as true artists in their field. Having lived in Edinburgh I was also interested in the early photographs of Edinburgh such as "Mons Meg, Edinburgh Castle", "Greyfriar's churchyard" and "The Scots Monument".