Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Tulips & Kitty Cats

Tulips
Today I picked up my camera
My day has been pretty average today, so when I got home I decided I would pick up my camera and take some photos. I found these beautiful tulips and decided I would shoot them (not literally). The sun was still shining and was getting low so the light was good. I've decided I need to tell you more about the decisions I made while taking photos so I'll have a go at discussing positioning of objects in the frame. I will use the picture of the three tulips I took today to do this (to the right, I changed this picture as I thought the light was wrong so hope it is still inderstandable). I have this funny thing where I always off centre everything, even in my drawing. I use to take art lessons and here I was taught about positioning of objects on the paper etc. Its all about leading the persons eyes around the page and picture. This technique I learnt a while ago and its a little like second nature to me. I'm reminded of the comments my brother made about picture I took of him and his girlfriend, without realizing they were off centred and I had partially cut her out of the picture. (I personally think it is also okay to leave part of the object out of the frame). He was a little annoyed about this and said you should put things in the centre! Obviously our preferences are a bit different! Any way, so in regards to the picture of the tulips you can see that there is no main object in the very centre of the page, just little bits of leaf maybe. Also, it also has part of the top tulip not in the frame and ever so slightly the white tulip. So when I'm taking pictures that's part of what I do, I cut people out of pictures! I put things off to the side and off centre things too.

"If the focal point is placed in the centre of the frame, the viewer's eye may not move around the whole image and this often leads to static and uninteresting composition." (Galer, M. 2007. pg. 8) 

Clyde
Shutter: 1/3200 sec
Aperture: f/5
I didn't just take pictures of tulips today, I also took pictures of Clyde the Cat. He was lying on the floor inside bathing in the sun so I thought I would join him, along with my camera of course! In taking pictures of Clyde I decided to change the shutter speed so as to decrease the amount of light coming into the lens. It was very bright and I thought it was too much. You can also see how the cats face is not really in focus but his paws are. That's because I actually wanted the paws to be the main point of the picture. To do this I adjusted the aperature. Mark Galer (2007) says that "if you change the aperture, the final appearnace of the photograph will differ greatly." It might be good to add that I was shooting in full manual at this point rather than auto where all the settings a chosen for you.

Mark Galer (2007) discusses framing the subject in his book Photography foundations for art & design. He mentions that a mistake alot of amerture photographers make is that they "stand too far away from their subject matter, in a desire to include everything and their photographs become too busy, unstructured and cluttered with unwwanted detail." (pg. 4) He also discusses filling the frame and how it is okay to "miss out some detail" (pg. 6). 

Depth of field is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear sharp in an image. This can be influenced by aperture and focal distance. Larger apertures (smaller f/stop number) and closer focusing distances produce a smaller depth of field. So how much of the background you will see. As you can see in the picture of Clyde above the aperture is f/5, a small number, so the farthest obecject, his face, does not appear in sharp focus.

So I hope that's given you more of an insight as to some of the decisions I make while taking pictures.


Reference
Galer, M. (2007). Photography foundations for art & design: The creative photography handbook. (4th ed.). Oxford: Elsevier Ltd.

3 comments:

  1. Lovely pictures Rachael! :)
    It's great to hear a bit more about how you set up the photos. Just wondering whether you could explain some of the terms such as "aperature."

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  2. Really cool pictures Rachael! I don't know much about photography so was good to find out a bit about what makes a good picture. Are you able to employ all the same techniques with moving objects?

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  3. Really cool pictures Rachael! I don't know much about photography so was good to find out a bit about what makes a good picture. Are you able to employ all the same techniques with moving objects? Maybe you could include something about this for us uneducated folk?

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