Complementary Studies

During my time in complementary studies, I have learnt a variety of skill and techniques in Photography.

I instantly learnt the fundamentals required for photography, these were lighting, medium, aperture and composition.

In order to take a photograph, we need a light source to give us an image. The light source and be natural which the sun is or it can be artificial lighting which can be anything from a lamp to a studio light.

The medium is what the photograph is being displayed upon when taking an image. If you are using an older camera which uses film, then you would need to ensure you have the correct film for you camera and type of shooting. Photographs taken using film would need to be developed so you would have to wait to see you images. Now, most people use digital cameras so we don’t need to wait ages to see our images. With digital cameras, this means we can use programs such as Photoshop to edit our images.

The aperture allows you to adjust how much light is reaching the sensor or the film of the camera. The higher the number setting for the aperture, the less light gets through. These settings are referred to as f-stop. The aperture affects the depth of field, so the lower the f number, the more blur it will have on the background.

Getting the correct composition for your image can make your image be more successful. It all depends on what it is we want to photograph for use to know how to shoot it. It can be based on the rule of thirds where we would align the scene within the grid displayed.

The exposure of an image will affect the outcome of an image. We can allow the camera to do the work for us in the fully automatic mode or, we can adjust the Aperture, shutter speed and the ISO manually to allow us to achieve the image we are trying to create.

How the image comes out is down to how we then focus it, we need to make sure the camera is in focus so that we get a clear image. We can adjust this manually or set it to automatic and let the camera focus for us.

 

 Highly exposed images create a grainy affect as it is taking too much light. When the image has less exposure, the image is at a greater quality but might not have the right amount of light for the image.

 Looking at lighting and focusing on the point to understand the fundamentals of these.

 An example of how aperture can bring a depth of field to the image when focusing on the foreground more instead of capturing at a higher f number which would show everything in the images clearly.

 Adjusting the shutter speed can give you a still image or give the affect of time passing in an image. We can adjust it to have 4 seconds worth or 8 thousandths of a second.

 The higher you set the shutter speed, the more movement it will capture.

 Using a smaller f number for the aperture, this gives greate depth of field to the image whilst also looking at composition.

 The lower exposure in this image means that the quality will be good but I would need good lighting. Here I was relying on the light sources from natural and artificial lights.

If we have an overexposed image, we can using editing software to adjust the levels of an image to make sure the image has an even amount of black and white in the image.

Continuing withdigital software, we look at photoshop and how we can use it to manipulate images. We took three images of different faces and manipulated them together. This exercise allowed us to understand the capabilities of photoshop.

 Within Photoshop, I used the gaussian blur to blur the background to focus more on the person in the image. I also looked at enhancing the colours and darkening the aspects which were a little bit too light.

With this image, I feel that the composition was good, but the lighting wasn't great so that meant it had to be edited.

 The background was a little bright so it had to be darkened slightly using the burn tool. I also looked at editing the main focus of the image being the man. His face was very dark on the left side as the light was passing through windows on the right. I used the dodge which lightened the face up. I then used the burn tool to create some darker areas where shadows were lacking to give more depth to the image.

 Another image with good composition but there is not much colour in the imge. I started off by using the gaussian blur to give depth to the image and I then adjusted the hue and saturation to bring a bit more life into the image.

Working in the studio allowed me to gain a greater understanding for lighting in an image and adjusting th camera to the correct settings for the lighting.

With these first 3 images, I was using too low an ISO setting which created a good affect, but didn't capture a lot of the scene.

 Once I increased the ISO I was capturing images which had good shadows and detail in thr images.

 I looked at HDR images which stands for High Dynamic Range. To create HDR images, I had to take an image of a normally exposed image, high exposed image and a low exposed image of the same object of scene without moving the camera. Once you have the 3 images, you can bring them into Photoshop or other prgrams which will put them together for you and you can adjust the settings.

 Throughout this process, I have learnt a great deal of knowledge for different techniques and settings to create the best images possible. From learning more about photography, I feel more confident in going out and taking more images with the knowledge I have gained from this. Understanding the setting to a higher level has allowed confidently adjust the camera to my requirements instead of relying on the automatic settings from the camera. I have also learn't new techniques and processes in Photoshop which has enabled me to edit with greater efficiency. All these techniques gained can be used for a game environment render and editing images for games in the future.

Final Six Images

 This image has been enhanced by adjusting hue & saturation to bring out the components more and make the machine in the background stand out. This photo was taken to look at the driving mechanical components of a motorcycle.

This image has been copy and pasted into a new layer. Bottom layer has been made black and white whilst the top layer has a layer mask to reveal the exhaust and fumes.The top layer has been enhanced with the hue & saturation as well as increasing the vibrancy. I took this image with a drity background because the bike is creating pollution.

The image has been copied and pasted, the top layer having a gaussian blur and by using a layer mask, I was able to paint the bike to come through clearly. I also lowered the hue & saturation of the environment to make the bike stand out more.

This image used a longer shutter speed to help spread the light and reflections on the bike spread.

With this frontal shot, I had to adjust it's position as it wasn't as central as I wanted it to be. Also the background wasn't fully black so I had to paint that through to match the backround. I then adjusted the hue & saturation to bring the colours out a bit more.

 The original image has been copy and pasted into a new layer. Bottom layer has been made black and white whilst the top layer has a layer mask to show the red bike.