Experimenting With Different Camera's and Equipment

For most of this Module i have used a Canon 50D with the zoom lens i bought with it (17-85mm).

I have also purchased a fixed focal 50mm standard lens as this offers a wider aperture which gives more scope for creativity in both the studio and location and offers a more shallow depth of field especially useful for portraits but also for objects and in some cases places.

I wanted to experiment with different camera’s such as a 35mm film camera, but unfortunately my working hours haven’t allowed me to attend any of the dark room sessions and it would have been very difficult for me to start this so late in the semester.

I decided instead to focus some of my efforts on practising HDR and have shown several examples of this throughout my blog on both my People and Places projects.

I have also spent a lot of time expanding my Photoshop skills and I think this can be seen through the improvement in the post production of my images on the blog, especially noticeable on the photographs for my people brief.

After deciding this wasn’t enough I bought an old Polaroid Land Camera- given that the film is instant it would solve the problem with me having to develop the images and I had an image in mind that I wanted to use the Polaroid camera for.

For my Places brief I chose to call my series of images- Childhood, it is a series of 6 photographs that show a glimpse of the places I grew up and played as a child, I thought about using a Polaroid camera to produce the images although this would have a fairly low quality I would give this a try and observe the results. I thought that the Polaroid format would be appropriate as the camera is about the same age as me and is something that i had as a child.

I decided to use the Polaroid for the cover image that would go on the front of my print box as if it were the front of a book it would be the first and introducing photograph. For this i used brightly coloured paper and wrote CHILDHOOD in individual letters on each piece, i layed this on the ground outside my house as this was something i would have done as a child, everything was done on the floor for some reason! I took several shots as i didn't understand why nothing was developing, in the end i decided it wasnt going to work. Polaroid discontinued film for these cameras some years ago so the film i was using was 20 years old! All film for this camera is now very expensive and i had no way of knowing whether or not it would work. I am assuming that with the expiration being so old this has affected the film too much.

I decided i could still create the same feel of the Polaroid by taking the photo on my digital camera, cropping it to square format then cutting the photo paper out of the white Polaroid frame and inserting my own image in its place.

This has been placed on the front of my folder, i now feel i should have scanned this first then i could have illustrated this here but its too late now.

Lighting Equipment

One of my first experiments was to go into a local cave, i wanted to use the studio lighting to illuminate this then take lots of images to either stitch together or produce a Hockney style joiner, this wasnt easy as the cave entrance was very steep and involved carrying heavy equipment then setting it up in a damp and uneven area, i took a few test shots but then decided this wasn't what i wanted to do.

I also went to a tunnel with the studio lights, i took quite a few shots from different angles inside the tunnel as i planned to use this to create a joiner also, but after looking at the images properly i decided they were quite banal and didnt interest me, here is the best, edited shot from outside the cave using a light on either side to illuminate the mouth of the tunnel.