Work Diary - Second Shoot - Urban Life (Tripod)

For this session, I repeated my Urban Life shoot but I used a tripod this time as agreed by me and my tutor. At first, I didn't expect to see a big difference in the way my pictures would turn out but as the session progressed, I began to notice more structure to my images. I also noticed that I spent more time before actually capturing a scene so that I can frame it and include exactly what I wanted to in it. This allowed me to pay more attention to my work and think about the settings of my camera more that I did in the first shoot. It enabled me to manipulate my images to a large extent, where I was able to look at the lighting and make a judgement call on which angle would most compliment the lighting in the picture. I experimented with the aperture quite a lot so that I could see the different in lighting as I went along. However, I found this harder at night rather than when I shot during daytime for my culture shoots - this is because of the limited lights from lamposts, the aperture could not be too high or the pictures would not come out as clear. The aim of this shoot was to experiment with a tripod on the same location as my previous shoot so that I can explore the differences and learn how to produce even better images by spending time to frame them.

This particular picture is one of the best ones from this shoot - I think the lighting effect in the top corners of the picture give it an edited look when it was not. This allows the picture to feel surreal and brings more mystery to the alley way. The angle of the picture took me a while to get; after examining the scene, I decided to make it look dodgy and creepy, I figured that the best way to do that was to limit the viewer's view by setting a higher aperture so less light is entering the lens and by adjusting the angle so that the alley looks unsafe and unclear to the viewer. This made my picture evoke feelings of adventure and mystery in the viewer by making them wonder what this alley leads to, making this image more exciting.

Out of my final edits from this shoot, I think this one could have been better - I experimented with the aperture a bit here but it didn't quite turn out how I wanted it to. I was aiming to show the element of reflection in the puddle of water from the cars driving past, however, I didn't anticipate how limited the light source from the lamppost was or how muddy the puddle was. If I has the chance to take this image again, I would think about the angle that's been used and figure out a better one, where a reflection can actually be shown, or perhaps use a lower aperture in order to allow more light to enter the lens and make the picture brighter. On the other hand, by doing this, I may be contradicting my work as this shoot consists of dark and mysterious photographs.

In the future, I would like to use a tripod a lot more. After this shoot, I can see a big difference in the style of work and the thought processes before taking a picture allows me to think way more about the settings on my camera and the angle I am using for each picture. It also produces variety in my work as the angles change often and I adjust the lighting in each picture.