You may have read my previous post about me doing a photography class. Well I enjoyed it so much and wanted to keep up the skills that I learned, so did the next course. It’s split into 8 weeks and we had to do projects each week.
Week 1 – Fifteen minutes, fifteen strangers.
I found this extremely difficult as I am a very shy person to people I don’t know and find it hard to just walk up to folk and start a conversation, never mind taking a photo of them. I wasn’t really happy with most of the images I took for this project, however this is my favourite picture and more can be seen on Picasa.
Week 2 – freezing movement.
The next weeks home work was focusing on freezing movement. I quickly realised that you need really good natural light as the first couple of images were really dark, even in a well lit room. I had to take images with a really fast shutter speed of 1/500 +.
Week 3 – Shlomo
This week there were 3 different aspects to the project by using slow shutter speeds.I experimented quite a lot with this one and took quite a few photos before I got the desired effect. Check out the others on Picasa.
1. We had to use slow shutter speeds to capture a sense of movement by utilising blur within the frame. Here is what I shot. It looks as if Alan doesn’t have arms and his face is ghost like because he was moving his arms and head while the image was being exposed.
2. Writing your name with lights. This was another fun one to do and took a few shots before I realised that I had to write my name backwards! This was done using a small torch.
3. Turn night into day – This was my favourite part of this weeks project as I have found out that I love night photography. It was actually quite dark at this point and the scene was really mundane with not much colour. I was amazed with the outcome that the long 30 second shutter speed managed to capture. There’s so much colour. This is the natural way the image came out, I didn’t tweak it on photoshop, I don’t know how!
Week 4 – Shadows and Silhouettes
This was another fun project here are my two favourites and others can be seen in Picasa.
Week 5 and 6 – Before and After
This week was quite difficult to grasp and get my head around. We had to show or document a real life happening or event without showing the actual event. Ie. Before and After it happens. We had to do 3 different scenarios with 2 images each.
Here’s my favourite. The other’s can be seen in Picasa.
Week 7-8 favourites and prints
Some people were catching up on other homework from previous weeks so the last two weeks were to select your favourite images taken during the 8 weeks of the class and put onto a disc or pen drive, then we were to print and frame our favourite image. The printing aspect was quite scary as I didn’t think my images were good enough to frame. We also had to consider what frame to use to compliment the image, what type of paper to use and what size to print it.
My favourite image from the class was my night into day image taken on week 3. It is printed in glossy paper, 8″ x6″, in a black frame approximately 12″ x 10″ and sits in my living room.
During the last week we had to bring in the framed prints and say why we chose it. It was really great to see everyone’s finished images and hear about what inspired them.
The next block of 8 week classes starts on Mon 16 Jan 6:30pm–9pm at the DCA, Dundee.