A Sequence of Composition

I choose to take a number of photographs for this exercise whist on holiday spending a day at Madeira. Being self conscious of people watching me with my camera in my hand, I felt more at ease being a tourist.

I wanted to capture people going about there everyday business. The shop keeper in her doorway, diners sitting having lunch, musicians entertaining in the square and a guy sitting enjoying a cool glass of beer.

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 I was most happy with the one photo showing four men. They are standing next to a taxi and look like they could be cab drivers waiting for their next fare. The picture is framed with a tree to the left, a lamp towards the right and a sign post in the middle. The yellow on the post is balanced by the colour on the car, and the blue on the car with the trousers and shirt worn by two of the men. Three men are looking towards a man who has a smile on his face. Altogether I felt this is a well balanced shot of a picture that could tell a story. 

Object in Different Positions in the Frame

 I took the same look of the rice farmer set in a large plain back ground from the course work for my subject for this exercise. Placing a ceramic fairy in the slightly overgrown grass in my garden I took a selection of photographs of the fairy in different positions in the frame. My first was central and small then concentrating on the viewfinder I was drawn to the object being on the right hand side.  

My preference in reverse order is as follows:

5.         The subject is to the left. This didn’t sit well in the frame for me as the fairy’s body is facing the left making the picture feel unbalanced. 

4.         Fairy in the centre of the frame and seems a bit small for my liking, although it does seem to show how small the statue is and says it is a photograph of a fairy in the grass.

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3.         As number 4, the fairy is in the centre of the frame but this time a little larger taking away some of the element of scale. 

2.         This shot was better for me giving the sense of the fairy leaning over from the right into the never ending expanse of grass.

1.         The better shot in my opinion. The fairy is on the right but large enough to be a photography of the fairy not of the grass. I like the balance of the statue being contained with in a third of the photograph. I would have still liked to have taken another shot after looking at the results on screen or cropped this frame in Photoshop to have the fairy nearer the edge of the picture and large to fill the third of the frame whilst still being contained in the section. 

Fitting the Frame to the Subject

This section surprised me in a couple of ways. Firstly it was difficult to find an object of interest to focus on without any background interference. I took a sequence of photographs of an old wall, now with railings around and protected and a very large tree trunk in a clearing. Neither of these seemed suitable and the safe option of the car seemed more appealing. (Hope the owner don't mind.)

When cropping the picture I found many other options that I would have not considered before when looking through the viewfinder. 

Photographing Movement-Panning with different shutter speeds

With the help of my willing volunteer, (he was will for the first half hour anyway) I took a series of photos with him riding a bike whilst I panned to show back ground movement. I used a tripod with the camera loose so that I could follow the bike as it past me, hoping to show background movement or freezing it depending on the camera setting.

The first thing I discovered was that I'm not very good at panning and need a lot more practice. 

With shutter priority and slowly increasing the shutter speeds the results were as follows.

The slower the shutter speed the more movement in the photograph which would be very appropriate if used to photograph at the race track. The faster the shutter speed the more details were show in the picture freezing the frame.

I couldn’t choose between my pictures. I want loads more practice and I’m looking forward to planning a day at Silverstone race track. 

Photographing Movement-Shutter Speeds

On this set of photographs I set my camera on shutter priority, changing the shutter speed and allowed the camera to select the appropriate aperture. I needed to show movement and wanted to use the local park and its waterfall over the rock, but the pipes were frozen and I returned home with an empty camera.

My second choice was a running tap. I set the tap to run at a fairly fast speed into an empty glass and took a selection of pictures changing the shutter speeds.

For the fast shutter speeds of 1.80 or less the camera selected an aperture of f5.6. At 1.25 the frame was frozen and the bubbles are very clear to see. As the speed decreases so does the clarity until the shutter speed hits 6.00 and above, the water shows as a foggy kind of mist with a speed of 30.00 giving a ghostly glow to the water. The three pictures to the right of my selection show the slowest shutter speeds to its optimum with apertures of f32 and smaller. 

Focus at Different Apertures

For this exercise I used my garden to take several photographs at different apertures, with the camera set to aperture priority. The plant in the pot in the centre was my focus point.

The first photo was taken at f8 and the auto shutter speed was 1/100, the second f11 with 1/50, the third f16 with 1/30 and the forth and last f22 with 1/30.

I printed the four pictures on a single sheet of A4 paper but I was unable to see any clear difference in the focus. I printed each photo on its own A4 sheet to examine them again but I’m still unable to see any clear difference in the focus down the garden and they all seem as sharp as each other.

Having failed to show the expected results I will retake this set at a later date.    

Waiting for books

Having limited experience in photography using a DSLR camera and settings other than automatic, I, sometime ago purchased a couple of books. Whilst I am waiting for my books from the book list to arrive by post, I started reading one of my book on my bookcase.
The Digital Photography Book, Volume 1 by Scott Kelby. Started reading it today and it seems exactly what I need. It seems to be aimed at the beginner and isn't full of detailed concepts but gives advise on what button to press and when. So far so good and it has helped grasp some basics which I should have already known and somehow forgotten. One example is a photo I took contained a bit of noise. I had failed to realise my ISO setting was too high, far too simple!