Sunday 6 January 2013

Unit 30 Location Photography - Exterior

When deciding what subject to photograph for my exterior brief, I went for a few walks around my local area of Stalybridge and around Manchester City Centre before finally deciding on photographing the Manchester Ship Canal and the Bridgewater Canal in Manchester.  There are a number of bridges along the way and I decided to take my pictures using them as a vantage point and also as a subject in my compositions.

My Final 10 Images

Beetham Tower

I really like the image of Beetham Tower and as it was the only one in  portrait I decided to use that one first, I then noticed that it was also the image with the most daylight  so I arranged my images in order of light to dark, day to night and I think they work really well together.

Castlefield

All of my images have been composed with water and a bridge somewhere in the image.

Castle Quay Bridge

Canal Street

Cathedral View

Trinity Bridge

Albert Bridge

Spinningfield

Irwell Street Bridge

View from Irwell Street Bridge
When packing my bag for the shoot I included camera, lens and tripod   I used my Canon 500D for which I only have the 18-55mm kit lens but this was more than suitable for the job.

I set up the tripod on a suspension bridge to take a picture of the opposite bridge but found that the slightest move caused a blur on my image so I hand held for this image which is the Cathedral View shot.  Also on other shots the bridge walls were too high for my tripod so I improvised by sitting my camera on the walls.  On another image the bridge had tubular metal railings so again I had to improvise and move off the bridge and shoot at another vantage point.  

Two of my images have slight camera shake, this is due to me either holding the camera or balancing on something unsteady, it also could be that my shutter speed was open for too long. I will in future keep my shutter speed to 1/6 if I am holding the camera.

To get the starlight feature on some of my images I had to keep the shutter speed open for longer, when doing this I did rest the camera on the bridge wall.  I still had a bit of camera shake on one of these images so will in future use the exposure delay mode setting in my camera to reduce the camera shake due to the mirror releasing.

I conclude that I am happy with my final images and I would say they are all composed in a similar way and have been presented in a way that flows.

If I were to take the images again I would watch my shutter speed and make more use of my camera's programs.

1 comment:

  1. You have identified the problems well ad suggested remedies, this gives te impression that you know what you are doing, just what we are looking for in an appraisal.

    ReplyDelete