Seeing Red

A 5 minute walk from my house is our local market, i set myself a task of photographing anything along the way coloured red, being a City supporter i'm not sure why i choose red, but hey ho!

This wasn't a walk of technical photography, everything i shot was done point and shoot with only 1 image shot of each item.

What i wanted to do was challenge myself to look at the street i walk down every single day from a different angle.


What this excercise taught me is:-

You don't see 80 percent of stuff unless you look for it!

People are genuinely afraid of cameras!

People are intrigued by cameras!

A lot of litter is Red!

Drunks have a lot to say for themselves at 11.30 in the morning

And......im not very tolerent of drug addicts who abuse me in the street for doing nothing more than taking a photo of a discarded cigarette packet, although i was tempted to take a photo of the angry red scabs on his face!!

So as you can see, i saw "RED" in more ways than one.

 

Photographer Research - Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi's use of 8 x10 large format camera and extremely long exposures have gathered him a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability.

He photographed movie theatre's, exposing a film for the total length of the film using only the light from the projector.

In 1980 he started an ongoing series of seascapes using an old fashioned large format camera to make exposures of varying duration, some of them upto 3 hours!


Very Conceptual & philosophical...........

A sharp horizon line and a cloudless sky - here began my consciousness. From there my thoughts race to the origins of human consciousness. The sea reminds me that within my blood remain traces of human evolution over hundreds of thousands of years. Humans outstripped other species intellectually, developed civilization, art, religion and science, spinning out the strands of history. It seems to me that seascapes have the latent power to reawaken an awareness of the origins of consciousness in this present day.

Seascapes

Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention―and yet they vouchsafe our very existence.
The beginnings of life are shrouded in myth: Let there water and air. Living phenomena
spontaneously generated from water and air in the presence of light, though that could
just as easily suggest random coincidence as a Deity. Let's just say that there happened
to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right
distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly
inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe,
we search in vain for another similar example.
Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view
the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a
voyage of seeing.

- Hiroshi Sugimoto

Chamber Of Horrors The above images are The Chamber Of Horror Wax Works he photographed at Madame Tussaud's in London!

Day 1 Depth Of Field

Depth of Field

Depth of field is basically what will be in or out of focus in your picture. There are 3 basic factors that determine how much or how little depth of field. Firstly aperture, the smaller the aperture, the more extensive the depth-of-field. If you want to keep as much as possible sharp, you should set as small an aperture as possible. If, however, you want to concentrate attention on just one part of the scene, and throw the rest out-of-focus, you should select a large aperture. Exactly how large this can be depends on the maximum aperture of the lens you're using. On a 50mm standard lens it will be f/1.7, f/1.8 or f/2, but on a standard zoom it will typically be f/3.5 or f/4.5. Secondly, the shorter the focal length (the wider the lens) the greater the depth of field is at any given aperture. Thirdly, the further away the main point of focus is from the camera, the greater the d-o-f will be for any given lens and aperture setting. One thing to remember is a low f stop (number) eg F2.8 gives a large aperture, while an high number eg F8 gives a smaller aperture.

The most common use for shallow depth of field is portraiture where you want to emphasise the subject.

Deep dof is more flexible but a good example of when to use it would be landscapes photos.

source Wikipedia Source digital photography school

Here are the first random photo's i took!!! As you can see, some worked and some didn't!

Full Depth Of Field

Shallow DOF 12/10/12