Olivia Grain

23/9/15

In yesterday’s workshop with our instructor Victoria, a photographer who has had her work published in magazines, newspapers and even vogue. We started learning about photography, and how to use cameras correctly. We learnt keywords such as;

 Depth of field; meaning the distance between the nearest and the furthest objects giving a focused image, which means that the background is blurred out.

 High key lighting; meaning that more light is being let into the camera.

 Low key lighting; meaning that the image will be more dull as there isn’t as much light being let in.

Exposure; how dark or light image/ photo is after being taken, however if you are wanting to make the image lighter you can use equipment such as Reflectors or if you want to capture a darker image, you can lower the settings on the lighting equipment.

Aperture; meaning the hole/ opening in the camera. For example, F20 the aperture would be quite small, however if the camera was set to F10 the aperture would be quite wide, so the image taken would be very bright.

ISO; meaning the intensity and the quality of light. The sensitivity depends on how high the ISO is; if it is quite high, the photo will be brighter, however if the ISO is low, then the image will be darker.

In our first activity, after we learnt how to use the camera’s correctly and learning some keywords on a PowerPoint, we got put in to pairs and started experimenting with some photos. Eve and I went outside into the corridor, where it was brighter, changed the settings on the camera to Monochrome and tried taking some images to see how they turned out. I quite enjoyed this as it we were able to try different things out on our own. Whilst doing this, we took turns in taking photos of each other’s hands, then after about half an hour we had our first break.

After our first break, we started using different materials around the class room and had interpret them into an image to try and show what kind of person we were. However, I found this quite hard as I couldn’t come up with any ideas to create the images with. We then got showed how to use all the equipment after dinner and started experimenting in the studio with the lighting. We started testing out low and high key lighting, and we all took turns on different equipment; I was first to use the camera, whilst Eve modelled, Amy jo did lighting and Nick was in charge of how everything was set out. I found this quite difficult as I couldn’t figure out how to move the camera correctly, as it was attached to a tripod, however I did enjoy it. We also tried using long exposure, which meant we could merge two different images together, I had to sit in front of the camera for 30 seconds without moving and after 12 seconds place my hands over my eyes to see what would happen, and it worked quite well. After this, we then did light writing when Eve and Amy jo held their hands in front of the camera whilst I stood behind them moving around my torch so that it looked like a ball of light was behind them.

Finally, after we cleared all equipment away in the studio, we went onto the computers and started working on photo shop. This I enjoyed as I thought my work turned out really well. We had to choose 2 images, an image we had taken during the day to use as the main photo, and a background image from the internet, which we used to merge into the first image. This was quite hard at first, but I found it easier as I went along. I had to change different properties of the images such as saturation, hue and the brightness to see what would happen to the image. We did this a few times to see which worked the best. This has been my favourite activity so far.