Photo2Q2.5: Light Painting

ISO 200, f/10, 10s

ISO 200, f/13, 4s

ISO 200, f/10, 5s

ISO 100, f/10, 8s

ISO 200, f/10, 8s

I tend to shy away from slow shutter simply because most of the images that I take don't need to utilize a slow shutter. In addition, it creates unattractive images (at least to me) when it's fiddled with, especially in portrait settings. You can usually fix brightness and grain in post production, but you can't really fix motion blur. Still, I am fascinated with some experienced slow shutter concepts, especially when utilized with fluids or star trails, etc.

Final image discussion: The last concept we tried was actually developed as a result of me wrapping my fairy lights around this ruler Mrs. Takemoto gave us. It was pretty interesting, and we tried different things like making as if Noah was running (3rd image) or using it as a unique background (1st image). In the final image, we had Noah stand as still as possible while I circled him with the light stick to create a transporter-esque effect. In retrospect, it looked quite cool, but after looking at the image, I just wish there was a way to minimize the blur from Noah moving despite him trying to stay as still as possible.

This in-class experience brings about two primary lessons: Light is important, and ensure that the subject you're photographing is either incredibly still, or you're on an incredibly still surface (that is, unless your subject needs to move). Slow shutter is a lot more reliant on how objects in the frame are moving and the amount of light allotted to you.

Working with peers was interesting. I have nothing against my peers, but for helping me understand slow shutter or inspiring an idea in slow shutter, this was pretty "eh". Yes, it was a new experience, but I just didn't find the exposures to be super compelling. Thus, this in-school practice was a 6-7 on a scale of 1-10. It helped, but not dramatically. Perhaps further independent manipulation of slow shutter will help widen the range of knowledge I have in this field.

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Photo2Q2.4: Bokeh Tasks 2-4

Bokeh Daytime

I felt that I was most comfortable doing portrait shots for this bokeh task. It was easier and recognizable to me, as I enjoy shooting candid portraits over simple objects. At the very least, I would want the object to manipulate with a subject somehow, so that's why I asked Reynaldo to balance his shoe on his hand (as shown above). Ensuring bokeh was in the background was quite easy as I was using a f/1.8 50mm lens. I left it wide open (smaller numbers) and adjusted accordingly. I needed the light to pass through some objects to get that circular blur as seen in the trees in the background of both photos, so I attempted various angles to include all of the necessary elements. I enjoy both of these shots for task 2 because of the obvious reason (candid), but also because they best reflect my knowledge on bokeh. Balanced lighting, wide aperture, sufficient lighting, etc.

Bokeh Artificial

I just played around with fairy lights for this concept and observed what kinda shots I could get out of using them when wrapping it around my camera. The challenge was mainly getting the lights to properly "align" and not interfere with the subject, while remaining an important part of the photo. Evening lighting was especially difficult, but a higher ISO adjustment seemed to do the trick, as I am able to remove some of the chromatic noise in post (and reintroduce some artificial noise to prevent the image from appearing unsharpened). 

Bokeh Custom

The primary struggle here was creativity and time constraints. I attempted to use the custom shaped lightning bolt as a metaphor for "flash photography" and stuck my film camera on the table, though I feel that I could've done much better (and actually do two concepts for this and artificial bokeh). I used an overlaying LED desk lamp for some lighting, but I think that some post-production work would've been ideal here (though it wasn't used).

These extra bokeh photos were from a last-minute shoot I did before attending the orchestra concert to kill some time. This shoot was the first in a while of portraits as my photography has indeed grown quite stagnant in interest, and I thought that this was a nice way to practice and to get back into the grind.

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