contact sheets

Assessment Task 2 -Shutter Speed

Explore a concept by experimenting with subject matter and shutter speed

'Journey'

The first experiments to see what happened with changing shutter speed were using cars and water as the moving subject matter.

My first instinct was to use a fast shutter speed to capture the sharp edges and fascinating reflected patterns that exist with moving water....

I had a small session attempting to capture some surface water patterns... 

I tried capturing some fast moving mist on a blustery day...

After some rain warped reflections in pooled water sitting on a skylight at home had some potential for capturing  the blur of the wind-pushed fluid contrasted with the moving foliage above....

I moved my camera quickly sideways to see what the effect would be...

I liked the potential of the mark-making that the dragged light made and wondered what would happen if I set my camera on a tripod wedged between the passenger front door and the seat, with the window wound down..... I manually controlled the shutter speed and aperture on a low ISO with the focus on the distant landscape. The available light changed quickly when the roadside vegetation became dense and I made a quick change to a higher ISO to slow the shutter speed.  I was pleased with the results and was excited by the chance element involved in capturing the speeding landscape.

I was intrigued by the beautiful quality of the blur and was fascinated by the scratchiness of the speedily captured light marks.   Unfortunately I ran out of space on the memory card and deleted some of the images before I had saved them and produced a contact sheet.  The same thing happened when I tried the same experiment on a road trip to Triabunna and deleted many of the failed images to make room for more picture taking when I realised that the card had ran out of memory.  I bought a new spare card after this experience.

Besides the beautiful blur, I liked the story that the images told as a set, and decided to try experimenting taking random images when I had no driver, and wedged the camera firmly in position against the passenger door, set a nominal aperture and shutter speed and took completely random shots by pressing the shutter with an extended arm whilst driving.  Lucky I have an automatic! 

The images were either underexposed or overexposed because of changing light conditions.  I should have chosen to use automatic shutter speed control. 

I had begun to like the concept of capturing the concept of a journey from a beginning point to an ending point.  The blurring gave a sense of the speed but was also symbolic of how quickly time passes and how we often only get fleeting glimpses of what passes us by.  I wanted to get more images from which to choose to tell that story. 

These images were as not as successful as those where I had full control over the the settings, the framing and the shutter release.  A small number had potential, but I decided to use the images I had to date to express the idea of travelling from one place to another.

I was curious to see what light marks I could capture at night using the same technique of shooting out of a car window with the camera wedged on a tripod.....

 

Conclusion

After working through the various trials of using shutter speed in to express a concept I found the experiments taking images from a moving car had the most potential for developing a series.  I was very surprised to find that I found the loose and unpredictable mark-making of the speed-captured light to give me the most satisfying visual results from these experiments.  This was the total opposite to my love of form, light and deep shade and sharp, crisp edges.

I admire the mark-making skills of artists like Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams,  Cy Twombly and Cameron Robbins' wind drawings.  The part that chance plays in the spontaneous creation of art in the hands of skilled artists gives their work great power. The video work of Daniel Crooks has a powerful way of expressing time by splicing images.   I discovered the work of Narelle Autio, who captured her trip around Australia with some blurred images taken from car windows, and was inspired to go against my usual grain and use the not-so-perfect images made from the moving car to see how they could be adjusted and combined as a set to express the concept of travel.  I am also uncomfortable with excessively Photoshopped images.  They align with our modern obsession with perfection and control.

The blurred images were an exciting discovery and with them came a wonderful sense of release from control.  While Photoshop tools are wonderful devices for image making, I do not feel that I have developed expertise with them to date.  While I have learnt a lot and my skills have developed greatly from beginning with no knowledge at all with using the software, I now have basic skills that I was able to use to make minimal changes to the 'trip' images using Photoshop tools.  Finding this new attitude and developing these new technical skills  has been the value of this journey for me.

The texture, the horizontal and vertical construction of the landscape, the blurring of light at speed the and the sequences of the images had the potential to tell the visual story of a journey and I decided to combine images from several trips to create a suite of photographs with the concept of a journey.

Assessment Task 1 - Aperture
Explore a concept by experimenting with subject matter and aperture/focus

'Domestic Reflections' 

For this exercise we were required to chose a single subject and, keeping the camera in the same position, take a series of photographs using the full range of f stops that the camera is capable of.  The subject matter requires a foreground, middle ground and far distance to be able to see the effects of the changes to the depth of field.

As the aperture is changed from the lowest f stop to the next whole stop, the exposure must be balanced equally by increasing the shutter speed.  A larger aperture gives more exposure, and as the aperture is closed down the exposure diminishes, which is why the shutter speed has to be correspondingly slower to let more light onto the camera's sensor to compensate for less light through the aperture.   Depending on the light situation, the ISO or sensor speed should be taken into consideration.

In these Art School courtyard contact sheets it is easy to see the distance come into focus as the aperture is closed down an fstop and the shutter speed is halved to maintain exposure balance, the depth of field increases.

The glasses arrangement better shows the reflected foreground and the distant background coming into focus as the aperture is closed down and the shutter speed slowed to give continuous depth of field from the foreground, middle ground and background.

Although my Domestic Reflection idea began with a still life of a cup arrangement, I did not feel I achieved a successful result with this subject. The composition was uninspired and would benefit with some more thought applied to the idea.

I did however learn in the process that I needed to under-expose images with high reflective surfaces by increasing the shutter speed by two and three stops to achieved a tonally balanced photograph.  Chasing light and shade in dramatically changing light conditions with the sun darting behind clouds altered made it difficult to retain a correct (middle) exposure reading on the light meter.  Having stable lighting would have given made the task easier, but I did discover that by underexposing the high shadow/high light situation gave a better result than the washed out result that a more even light gave.

The composite black stone bench was a beautiful surface on which to set up different objects to capture the play of light on different objects made of a variety of materials. The reflection of the trees in the bench top merges with the light reflection of the teapot and becomes a liquid refection, like water reflection pouring around the object.

I took more photographs in the bathroom than anywhere else in the house, trying to find an interesting composition and angle with attempts at photorealism.  I was trying to achieve sharp focus with good depth of field, but I found the low view on level with the wash basin with the background reflection in the mirror captured the feeling of I was after better.

The second photograph I chose because the focus of the composition is the reflections in the pooled water and gives an unsettling inverted view of the objects....although I wonder whether this cutting them out of the frame gives an unbalanced tension to the image.  

I was playing with pattern using different surface materials, shadows and reflection to make an interesting composition but did not include one in the final image selection.

I was not clear on the process of converting and saving the images to grayscale and seem to have permanently converted three of them.  The final choice of the top left decanter photo was made because the balance seemed more comfortable seeing the whole tumbler floating on the glass shelf, the contrast was good and the internal line of the cupboard parallel to the bottom of the photograph contains the image within the frame.  The images with the glasses cut off at the stems seems more uncomfortable, although the clarity of the reflections in these two is better......but looking at the contact sheet again the last decanter image may have been worthy of consideration. 

The black bench top allows beautiful black areas to be used in a composition, and I set this still life up with some pieces of ageing fruit combined with some pieces from my 'dead food' collection (food that has been forgotten and becomes well preserved in the process of passing its use by date).  In this photo I was trying to see how well I could capture subtle reflections as well as create some mystery in a staged composition.

This jug had a 'hands on the hips' arrogance like a star in the limelight.  Like the single vase it was another photograph that had a nice contrast of velvety dark shade and bright highlights.  The photograph I chose felt as though the streak of reflected light was balanced by the  suggested V of the highlighted shapes of light on the bench...although I am drawn to the photograph with the streak of light disecting the corner of the image.

I liked the symmetrical rhythm of the washing up and reflection composition and felt that the photograph that did not crop the pot out of the picture worked better as a whole.  With the final photograph I chose I successfully used the photoshop tools to straighten the dark line to the right of the frame to make it parallel with the edge, as well as the cloning tool to change the tone of the tiny white shape at the top of the pot.  This was the first time I had used these tools.

I very much liked the velvety black shadows that highlighted the form of the single tapering glass vase and how the light circular rim is suspended in that dark space.  The hint of the circular reflected pattern around the base of the vase adds a flicker of movement to the abstract areas of the photograph I chose.  This photograph also had the sharpest focus.

The dancing light reflected through the glass in these studies provided many opportunities for compositions, which made it difficult to chose final images.  The choice was made based on the composition balance of light and shade combined with pattern and focal point.  Again I may have chosen differently had I made these contact sheets before choosing, which has consolidated my understanding for why this is an important step in the process of image making.

Conclusion:

The process of working through this first assessment task endeavouring to bring an idea together while learning how to process in Bridge and Photoshop (which I had never used before) resulted in some confusion on my part with how to process, file and save my final images.  I omitted to create contact sheets of each series of images before I made my final choice for the portfolio to present.    Except for the cups, these were done retrospectively.  After speaking with Ruth Frost, the lecturer, I understood much better the saving process and formats to use, as well as the significance of the xmp files. 

Seeing the a series of photographs as contact sheets greatly enhances your ability to look at the photographs more objectively.  Adopting this process, understanding how to save and organise photographs in the correct file type will help to improve my processes with the next assignment.  I feel that I have learnt a lot with this exercise, which began with no experience of using the manual controls on the camera.

Ruth's suggestion of thinking more about a photograph before taking it is good advice.  It certainly eliminates having too many similar photographs to choose between and avoids the process of elimination.