Wednesday 25 February 2015

Frankie The Cockatiel

I absolutely adore my pet bird but he really doesn't adore the camera at 9 in the morning. This morning I decided to do a photo shoot with him and the results were beautiful. With the sun shining through the windows, I felt this was a good opportunity to create shadows and also highlight the outline of the bird against the window. This then caused Frankie to be black and the white background then contrasted with this. I was experimenting with depth of field, shadows and highlights in this photo shoot and the colours and tones worked really well within the images. There is a soft tone throughout the images and the soft and pastel colours add to this style of tone. I was trying to make sure I was keeping a clean and one toned background without it being busy because it would have then not emphasised Frankie as much so I wanted to make sure it was a one coloured background. I did some macro shots of his feathers and features and then I also did some wide angle shots of his full face or body but I only managed to keep him still for about 10 minutes a time so it was a really tense shoot.
 















Sunday 22 February 2015

Images From Fairburn Ings (05-05-14)

I thought since I haven't posted in a while, I would post some of my older images that I had taken last year at Fairburn Ings. I've uploaded a range of different subjects that I had taken at the nature reserve just to show you the different images you can take even though it's a nature reserve. With the top image I decided to fade it in Photoshop so it had a frosted effect across the image and with the sharp pinks and yellows in the flowers, this brings it all out really well. All these images are mainly macro images and get really close with the subject so that the main focus is the subject and that the viewers eyes are drawn to the subject. I feel that the images of the ducks are my strongest images of the lot. I had my camera on a faster shutter speed so that the water is frozen when the duck is throwing it around and this creates a more interesting image from this. I've only uploaded a few images but if you want to see more comment below and I'll upload some more in another blog post.
 














Monday 9 February 2015

Plastic Optic Lens (from Lensbaby)

When it was Christmas, i got a set of optic lenses from Lensbaby which all have different effects that you can control by using them. You need to attach the different lenses to a different piece of kit that then attaches onto your camera and you can get a range of different lenses to swap around with. With it being clear on a morning and quite frosty, i wanted to go out and use one of the lenses to see what i would get. I used the one which is called the Plastic Optic and this gave the images a really soft tone and exaggerated the colours throughout the image and i felt this was a really successful shoot. I tired minimal subjects to various and made the images simple and busy to experiment with the lens and to see how they came out and i was really pleased with the outcome. I have started a new project in my photography course and this is something i'm going to be using a lot more in it so expect a lot more images that are similar to this. I will also try the other three lenses i got with the kit and upload the results i get from this. If anyone has any comments or criticism from these images i would be happy to hear them as i'm willing to really experiment with this lens and try out a range of different subjects with it. 


















Thursday 5 February 2015

Night Time Images

After looking outside tonight and seeing how clear the sky was, I decided to go and take some images of the moon and stars. I was using a new lens that I got (70-300mm) so I could really zoom into the moon and get some really interesting shots. I got this one image of the moon that I cropped to make it a little tighter. I then got on to taking images of the stars which was amazing to see because there was only a few stars that I could see, but after leaving the exposure on for around 30 seconds there was hundreds of stars that showed up. This led me to take about 30 images of just the stars on such a clear night and for some you could see them moving ever so slightly with the slight motion blur after the star. After that I decided to try out taking images with a long exposure on of the scenery. From what was pitch black, led to the images showing a blue sky as if it was a sunset. It was incredible to see such a different view on the same bit of scenery and it has such a soft tone to them with them being slightly out of focus. Then after that I turned to look at light trails as it wasn't too busy so it wouldn't make the images too bright but there was enough so that I had a decent amount of light trails across the image. The images show just the lights from the cars and not the cars themselves and you can also see where the cars have turned themselves. With these only being my first attempts, I will take it on board and progress from these but it was a really good night for experimenting.
 
 













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