Project
Summary
The camera I used
was a Canon EOS 40 D, I got a 10-22 mm lens and a 50mm lens, and I use my
tripod when the shutter speed is slow. My photo materials are all taken at
Snapper Rocks Beach in Coolangatta and Currumbin Beach in Currumbin. I named my
project “Life At The Shore”, it presents the activities we do at the shore, like
surfing, people playing with their dogs, kids jumping into the sea. But that’s
not enough, the project is also about other creatures’ life at the shore,
crabs, shells and my favorite model seagulls. We can see all these activities
and creatures almost everyday on the beach or rocks at the shore, I collected
the segments and put them together to present the beauty of life at the shore.
The first picture
is a panorama of Snapper Rocks Beach, I took 7 pictures that covers 180 degrees
and put them together using the photomerge function in Photoshop.
The next couple
of pictures are basically all about people surfing except the one about kids
jumping into the water. To capture the moment properly, I used very fast
shutter speed. During the daytime, because there is sufficient light, I used
shutter speed of 500 a second and 100 on ISO. When it’s getting a little bit
darker I reduced my shutter speed to about 125 to 250 a second and used a
slightly higher ISO.
I got the
inspiration of 8th picture from the Rodchenko style, I pushed the
saturation of the images to their extremities to create a strange but unique
looking.
My second last
picture is a montage image, the elements in that photo is actually from 5
different pictures and Photoshoped together to create a theme.
Critique
Generally I am
happy with the project I have made, I used variety of skills I have learned in
this unit and took about 200 to 300 pictures, and I used Photoshop to create
different themes. 12 images were finally selected for my project, and I think
they all looks good and there are some fancy ones like the seagull spreadsheet and
the photomontage. But I am aware that there are some problems with my works.
First I think I
was not carefully enough in choose the background and the right angle to take
the shot, in some of the pictures the character that I want to highlight does
not standout ideally like in the 7th picture of my project, the sky
in the background is a little bit over exposed and the surfer in the front does
not really stand out from the surfers at the back. If I get another chance, I
would first choose a good angle so that the whole image can be exposed
properly, and maybe it is a good idea to use a longer focal lens to highlight
my main character.
Secondly, I found
some pictures are not ideally focused, it made it hard for me to choose a good
picture, I will try to focus my pictures more carefully in the future and try
to take more shots to give myself more options. I also noticed that some
pictures that I have been taken during twilight was not exposed very properly,
and they still don’t look as good as the other ones after I adjust them in
Photoshop. I guess I need a lot more experiment in taking photos in non-ideal
light situation to find out the right setting of shutter speed, ISO and
aperture.
And one big
problem occurred when I was creating my photomontage, which was the contrast
between some characters I wanted fetch out of a picture and its background is
not very sharp, it really gave me a hard time in selecting the characters and
copy them to my new background image, and consequently the quality of the
montage image was not as good as I expected. So next time I would choose the background,
angle and light very carefully to make sure the characters standout so I can
easily select them and create a new photo.
Moreover, to
create my panorama of the Snapper Rocks Beach, I only took two series of shots.
And when I try to do the photomerge in Photoshop, one series of shots end up
making a panorama that have malposition elements. Fortunately, the other series
works well, but next time I would definitely take more shots to minimize the
possibilities for such problem to occur.
Artistically, I think
the richness of theme in my project is not enough, there seems to be too much
pictures about surfing in my project. The reason was surfing looks kind of cool
so I got a little bit of tunnel vision and took a lot of pictures about
surfers. To create a better project, I really need to open my vision and try to
capture the moment of more characters and activities. To be able to do that, I
guess I will need to put more time to think about the subject of my project and
engaging into the photo shooting process, and maybe I should spend more time
looking into the works of other photographer, especially the classic pictures
relating to the project I want to do. That would bring me a better
understanding of photography and may provide me more inspiration.
To conclude, I am
actually still new to photography even after finish the unit Digital
Photography 1, so inevitably I have a lot of problems in taking photos and
adjusting them in Photoshop. But I spent a lot of time taking photo during the
session and I think many of them actually looks good, and this project is the
gallery of the best of them. Therefore, I tried my best to create this project
and I am happy with my work, but I clearly understand that there is a lot more
for me to learn, and a long way to go before I can become a good photographer.
