Assignment #7 - Composition - Leading Lines (Part 2)

This is part two of the assignment, leading lines.

While I was decently confident in the rule of thirds, in leading lines I wasn't anywhere near as confident. 

Leading lines is when various objects are in a row and might lead towards either a scene or a person.

Here is the first of three photos I'll be putting forward as my attempt at leading lines.

In this one I took a photo of the wooden poles, that of which I have no idea what functionality they serve. Also while taking it, an older man kept looking at me like I was losing my mind or something. Or perhaps we was suspicious that I might take photos of the children playing at the playground behind me, I have no idea.

I like this photo though, perhaps one of my favourite.

Here was another attempt of mine.

While I don't exactly know the specifics of what make a photo follow under the guidelines of 'leading lines' (other than repetition) I'd guess that curves qualify. Maybe.

While the plants are pretty, I'm not fond of where they lead to. The trash can and the rather grey unattractive background. Also the sky is quite washed out and I'd rather it wasn't, but I'm not exactly a photographer with years of experience under my belt am I?

This isn't one of the three photos I'm posting for the assignment.

I'm just posting this one for fun, seeing as the snails were there and almost in a line.

Kinda cute.

Here is my third photo I'm posting for my attempts at leading lines.

It was brought to my attention that this one would have been better taken if the bridge was more visible but I thought that maybe if it was more at the side it might not have been quite the same effect. I still very much so like the look of this photo.

And that's that.

Assignment #7 - Composition - Rule of Thirds (Part 1)

The rule of thirds is a method of taking a photo in which objects or people cover a line in a grid of three, hence thirds (because the photo can be divided in splits of three).

These are my attempts at taking photos with rule of thirds.

Here is one of my attempts and the first of three photos I'll be showing for this assignment.

In this photo I took a photo of the ship that was open as a sort of playground. Out of all the photos I took in attempt to follow the rule of thirds, I'd say that this one might just be my favourite. I like the sky and the ship, just how they look together. While it is my favourite, I'm not exactly fond of the building in the background. I'd also like it to be a little bit brighter, but considering that I live no where near the place where I took this photo it's not exactly easy to retake it. 

This is the second photo I'll be showing for part one. 

This one was taken from the inside of the boat. I tried to go for a framing effect using the windows of the boat. While the painted killer whale is curved, it is, to some extent, on a third. I'm not a huge fan of my job getting the photo framed in that it wasn't exactly even, but I can't exactly move the boat so that the windows will be even and that the killer whale will still be on a third.

Here is my third and final photo I'll be showing for my rule of thirds attempts.

Now this one has a lot I wasn't exactly fond of, but I couldn't exactly alter them. I do wish I took the photo while the sky train (a method of transportation that tends to go above ground, for those unfamiliar) was passing along but I didn't exactly manage to get my timing right. I also wish there weren't people in the corner but I can't exactly tell them to bug off so I can take a photo. Also it's a little dark, and I'm not too fond of that. What I am fond of is that two lines of thirds are being covered, the left and the bottom ones. I also like the clouds.

This was part one of assignment number 7.

Assignment #6 - White Balance



In order from left to right, top to bottom, the photos had the white balance setttings of automatic, flourescent, shade, automatic, cloudy, and sunny.

With the first row of photos I noticed that shade gave the photo a high amount of yellow and the reflection that the apple gives off was no longer visible. Auto (if I remember correctly) was closer to how I saw the white in the phone and the booklet than flourescent was.

With the second set of photos I noticed that with the cloudy setting everything was slightly darker but the white was still quite white. The apple also was no longer visible. Auto was quite accurate or similar to how I saw the white like cloudy. Sunny oddly had a blue shade, but thinking about it sunny would make things darker so things would be more visible.

Assignment #5 - Exposure Composition

Before I get into the actual assignment I just wanted to throw it out there that, yes, I did without realizing it delete the original photos from my camera so I had to take several new ones.

I should also mention that everything was very fickle and extremely slow (such as five hours to upload the photos only for it to tell me when 'done' that the file was too large) so I had to end up reducing the photo size by 50% before it would deem them acceptable and upload them.

Now to the assignment itself. 

With this assignment we went and took pictures of various settings, two light and two dark, with us end up having to choose one of each setting, one light and one dark. The photos were taken with various different exposure values, -2 to +2, ending up with five different photos that were to be put together in a collage of sorts like above.

I noticed that the lighter photo setting (the one on the right) was still rather clear even on +2 EV, while I had a very hard time trying to get the camera to focus on a dark EV +2.

While taking the dark -2 EV picture my camera still had a hard time focusing and would only focus with a decent amount of light. Even with 0 there was still a slight challenge. I also noticed that while having the same shutter speed throughout all the photos +1 and +2 of the darker photos (the ones on the left) were blurry and not as in focus as the others.

Assignment #4 - Discovering "Your" Type of Photography

http://visionwidget.com/fashion-photographs-iain-crawford.html

I would say that in general I gravitate towards photographs that involve liquid or the colours blue and/or green. I enjoy liquid textures because it makes its own boundaries and it looks appealing. The fascinating thing about liquid is that it can be manipulated to show many shades of a colour based on the lighting the photographer uses. I enjoy the colours green and blue because they occur naturally in various shades and can be especially vivid.

This photograph in particular grabbed my attention because the colours really pop and the plastic around her head turns into liquid around her body, which makes for a very striking texture. The photographer was able to capture various shades of yellow through use of lighting and the blues of her eye shadow create a contrast. When I first noticed the picture I noticed the use of colours and how bold they are compared to the rest of the scene.