These are my underwater shots that I took in response to Tanja Deman’s images. In this shoot, I wanted to follow up on the idea of photographing nature in a way that isn’t normally looked at by other people. This is because I wanted to capture elements that are considered invisible or irrelevant but really have not only a spiritual significance, but also scientific evidence as well. By taking images of elements that arn’t always seen by people, this also further explores the how and evolutionist stance as by identifying the nature of individual elements we learn more about their charectistics. Therefore by learning more about these charecteristics this can also be related to the spiritual creationist side of the story as because we are continoulsy learning about the nature of change, we can essentially use the scientific side in order to understand the spiritual creationist side.
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After completing my first four shoots with my models, I have gathered all the images and collated a final selection of my best ones which I would be happy to use in the final product.
After each shoot, I looked through all my photos and selected the best ones and then narrowed these down even further to my best 10-20 and edited these with the intention that they would all have the potential to be published in the magazine.
From my shoot with Lucy, Peter, Max and Jasper, here are all the best edits that I will be using in the magazine and I aim to produce at least one more shoot to bring my total of shoots up to 5 and provide me with around 25-30 images overall with about 5-6 images from each shoot/character.
On the 18th of April I drove to St Ouens bay to do my shoot three for the wabi sabi film. The aim of the shoot was to capture more images of nature and the landscape with the sun setting because that was the time of day that I had decided to focus on. I wanted to capture the different colours and the different ways the sun can effect nature. I also wanted to capture the sense of movement within the film to replicate the movement of the sun while it sets. The different things I managed to capture was the way the sun hits on leaves and flowers such as the clip below.
Another way I wanted to replicate the movement was by simply moving my camera while I was filming. I used this method mainly for far away clips such as the sea and the sky. I really like this clip because of the colours and shapes that are captured.
Another way I was able to show movement was by filming the sea and the waves by the shore in St Ouen. I wanted to capture clips of the sea because Its the last thing the sun touches before it sets. I also love the expressive movement it naturally creates. The pal blue and green colours also work really well with my wabi sabi project because there is a lot of use of colour, mainly pale colours.
This was a shoot that I took waves and wave motion. I was interested, following on from my previous post, in photographing the random and unexplainable reasons for the forces of wave motion. These images I believe strongly link to the idea that nature is not just a powerful force, but one that is stimulated and controlled by nature. I believe I have captured a sense of spirituality in these images because I like the harsh, white tones but also the movements and the close shots. In doing this, we can see individual details of the elements of the water and also see how they move collectively. This links back to the theory of creationism and the idea of continuous evolution, adding spirituality to the scientific processes of origin, because it presents the water as moving all in one direction, to go somewhere or achieve something figuratively speaking.
This is a set of images taken at Queen’s Valley Reservoir. The images were taken during my film shoot. I didn’t take many images because I was mainly aiming to take film rather then images. However, when I saw something interesting and worth taking I did. I edited the best images to put into the photo book. I am very happy with the set of images that I managed to take. I edited the images using photoshop. I love the pale, pastel green that occurs throughout the images. It makes the set work really well together.
EXPERIMENTAL EDITS
As well as some simple edits I wanted to experiment with my images to make more artistic fine art edits. For one of the experimental edits I used one of my sky images as a background. I wanted to incorporate my sky image with my image of the water drop on the blade of grass. They are both really good images by themselves, but I wanted to combine them to see what It would look like.
For the second experimental edit I wanted to incorporate my idea of using film as a backdrop for an image. I used my film clip of the flowers because It works well with image of the flower. I edited both of the clips into black and white because I think it makes the clip much more powerful. The shapes and the tones become much more highlighted without the colour.
COMPARISON
After doing this photo shoot I came across this image by Rinko Kawauchi that has a very similar theme to this series by me. Within the image she is focusing on two blades of grass with a spiders web hanging from them. On the blade’s of grass there’s also water drops on them which creates an extra dimension to the scene which makes it more interesting, and visually pleasing….
The point of this photo shoot was to manipulate and focus on turning a persons body into shapes and shades making each part unrecognizable. This worked in some cases and in other you can clear see what it is. However I like the final product so that’s why I included it.
As well as images of nature I wanted my film to have a subject. The film is about the sun setting and what happens before it. I decided to include a subject because It made the film more interesting and easier to relate to and understand. I wanted my subject to be immersed into the different scenes I planed to capture, such as the grass and by the sea. I wanted the subject to be interacting with the nature such as playing with the grass.
I wanted to mainly focus on close ups of the subject because I wanted most of her identity to remain hidden. I tried capturing the particular important features though such as the lips and the eyes. The day that I choose to capture clips of the subject was poor because the sky got cloudy which meant the lighting wasn’t as good as I hoped. This meant that some of the clips where to dark. If I have time I may try to redo the shoot on a better day to get a better image quality. Some of the shots have a lot of noise because of the high ISO. However, overall I am happy with the outcome of the shoot.
For the last part of the film I want to create a link with the subject and the sun. As the sun disappears and sets behind the sea I also want to replicate this with my subject. I aim to do this by showing the subject running towards the sea, similar to how the sun seems to disappear.
During the easter holiday I decided to start my wabi sabi film project. It was difficult to find a good time to take the film clips and images because the weather wasn’t that good. I needed a day where the sky was clear so I could capture the different colours and the sunset. I decided to base my film during the evening when the sun is setting because that’s when the light is at its best because of the colours that are created.
I needed to get more images of specific things such as flowers and nature so I decided to use the natural light to capture some image of flowers in my garden. I used a macro lens to capture these because It highlights much more detail and I can get a lot closer to the object. My aim was to capture different shapes and textures within nature, and I think Ive managed to so this within the shoot. I used a very small focal point because I wanted the background to be blurry so that the main focus was the flower.
On the 27th after school I conducted my second photoshoot using the body as the subject. I used the same model as the first body photoshoot because I wanted to keep a theme going. I also choose to stick with this model because its my mum and therefore could have deeper connotations relating to the theme of spiritual images and growth and decay. I used a micro lens so that I could zoom closer into certain details I wanted to highlight such as the creases in the skin. I photographed the models hands and face because I believe them to be the most important aspects of the human body. The shoot was done at day time so I used the daylight from outside to revel most of the details. However for some of the images I also used a flash because I wanted to illuminate the image more. I focused on particular shapes and textures in the skin because my project is about the insignificant things. Overall I am very happy with the result of this shoot.
I used photoshop to edit the images because I only wanted to edit them very simply because I had already used the camera settings to capture the image I wanted. I improved the image slightly by changing the brightness, the contrast and the vibrance of the image.
