Assignment 3

[Trishul]

For this Assignment I used a shutter speed of 5 seconds to capture the motion of water on my dresser fountain. I also show shallow depth of field in this shot a flower.

[Duncan Rawlinson]

Very good. Right from the start I can see that both of these photographs have good compositional structure to them. They abide by the rule of thirds, their edges are predominantly clean of clutter or distracting elements, you’ve organized your colors well and your focus is obvious. Congratulations.

The first shot (the flower photograph) is great because you show your technical abilities with your camera by isolating the main subject while slightly blurring the background. Even your choice of background and the colors and shapes within it help enhance your main object in this picture.

In your second picture the most visually appealing element is the way the light hits the falling water. In fact, I feel that the lighting on the waterfall could have been more of a primary focus of yours.

However, my biggest concern with this photograph is that you’ve “blow out” your whites. “blowing out” means completely overexposing certain parts of your photograph. In digital photography it’s very common because digital cameras have a more difficult time than film cameras handling contrast and therefore they often overexpose the light areas of the pictures. You can see it often in the skies of digital photographs. Part of the sky will be pure white and not representative of how the sky looked at all.

This also happened on the right side of your photograph. It seems like it is caused by the light source itself, but the consequence is that you’ve blown out some of your objects. The result is a complete loss of detail in your higher white tones. They just look like a white background. There is no detail, no texture, no object. Hence it looks “burnt out”.

Generally people don’t like seeing this as it looks unintentional and highlights the limitations of the camera you’re working with. However, it could be solved by repositioning yourself as to not include so much lighting contrast in the shot.

The hardest part is, that it’s hard to tell what is being blown out in a photograph if you’re only looking off a little LCD screen. Some cameras have a “zebra” setting where it will alert you if you’re overexposing certain parts of your photograph (i.e. bright lights or bright skies).

I hope this helps! Keep up the good work.

[Trishul]

Thank you for your feed back. So I wanted to get a better idea of avoiding the “blown out” look. This is an area I have struggled with prior to taking this course. So you mentioned that I should reposition myself. In this particular photograph where would recommend I position myself? Also on landscape pictures that include the sky how do avoid that white look? Do I just crop the out bright areas of the sky? Thanks.

Trishul

[Author]

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