Photo Assignment Week 4

No assignment last week as I’ve been concentrating on essays. It’s no fun being back at school at my age! 😉
So onto this week’s assignment – workflow. This was an open assignment – take any photo in RAW format and convert it to JPG via Photoshop. Well I cheated, using GIMP instead of Photoshop, but it was enough to show I can manage a workflow.

I decided to shoot some of the leaves that are now starting to fall to the ground. There are some wonderful colours, especially under streetlight.

This was the raw file. It was shot at ISO 3200, and I was really pushing hand-holding so it’s not sharp. Even though it’s a little clichéd, I thought it would be the kind of image where I could keep the leaf in colour and convert the rest to black and white.

I didn’t really like the colour cast of the original either and I like the end result. Not the greatest picture, but it served its purpose.

To Colour or not to Colour

Essay time is fast approaching and I have a choice of things to consider, but I’ve plumped for how photographer’s use colour. I thought it would be nice to reference some of the great photographers that present their work on the blogosphere.

If you feel like you can spare a couple of minutes it would be great to get opinions on why you choose colour or black and white for a particular image, or your particular style? What kind of colour do you like in your images – saturated, desaturated or natural?

If you feel you can contribute, just leave a comment below, if not, no worries. For those who comment and that I can use in my essay, I’ll reference your blogs in the bibliography.

Photo Assignment Week 1

Well, it’s been a hectic couple of weeks, but it’s what you’d expect after starting a degree. I must have hit a mid life crisis or something, but I guess it’s also the age to make a change before I get buried in a rut, let alone stuck in one, so I’m now a student at the University of Leeds studying Cinema and Photography.

It’s the perfect course as it combines cinema, photography and writing, (three things I love). There’ll be some changes to the blog as well. (I had tried to keep a second blog for my writing, but it proved too much, so that content will gradually move over here.) For this semester though, the focus (no pun intended) is on photography, and so on to today’s post. Each week we get an assignment and this weeks was to mess around with depth of field and shutter speeds.

First up is Otley Bridge. I’ve seen these padlocks for ages and always wondered why they are there. They are gradually growing in numbers too. The best theory I’ve heard is that they are love-locks – an Eastern European tradition. They look interesting anyway.

And here’s a wider view of the footpath.

Next up is an attempt at levitation, based on some fantastic stuff on yowayowacamera.

This was 1/250 and the D90 was on high speed to catch this. Certainly harder than it looks.

Not bad for a first attempt.

Last up is a 1 second shot of my eldest son walking past a window. When I converted this to black and white he became very ghostly, so I kept it mono.

A fun assignment, making me consider things I wouldn’t normally do, but I’ve caught the bug for converting people into ghostly apparitions crossing the frame. An excuse to buy some more ND filters anyway. 😉