Before I started to do photo shoots based on other photographers, I wanted to get a rough idea of what would be good to photograph to start me off on the theme of Journeys and Pathways. As an experimental photo shoot, I went out on multiple occasions and took pictures of what I thought could fit into the concept of the theme.
Contact sheets:
In these images I concentrated on getting images on which I thought could relate to the theme. I took images such as actual pathways, the water and waves coming in on the beach, pictures of my feet walking, pictures of the view from when I was on a plane, and footsteps on the beach.
Chosen images:
Final edited images:
In this image I decided to add more colour and to blur out the further steps to create more of a depth to the picture. To do this I first cropped the image to get out the unwanted parts in the background and then played around with the brightness and contrast, increasing them both equally to lighten the light areas and darken the shadows. I then went and increased the exposure a little bit, and increased the vibrance and saturation a significant amount, making the sand look more golden. I finished with changing the hues in the image.
What I like about this image is the neatness of it, the sand around the footsteps seem calm and natural, and then the footsteps in the sand bring some sort of chaos with them, messing the sand up as they go. This could portray the effects which the journey of someone can bring, making their imprint on the surroundings around them. I also like how the image becomes darker as it comes closer towards the camera, as it adds to the depth of the picture.
What I should have done to improve the picture was to maybe angle the camera more upwards, maybe getting more of the surrounding beach which would have added more to the image. I also think I should have maybe darkened the edges of the image when editing, which would have given it a nice effect and made the viewer focus more on the footsteps than the actual sand.
In this image I decided to edit it only a little bit. I first cropped the image so it was smaller and focused more on the moving leg, and then I went and increased the brightness and contrast in the picture. I then followed on by going straight onto the vibrance and increasing that only a little bit to give the image more of a colour to it, and then finished off by using the dodge tool to brighten the whites of the shoe, making it pop out against the dark background and rest of the shoe.
I like this image because it has a certain movement to it, as if the person in the image is in a rush to get to a certain destination, and I feel as if that’s clear in the image. While the surroundings are all blurred and moving, the foot in the middle of the image seems to be more focused than the rest of it, although it too was caught in the middle of movement like the rest of the image, and I feel like that gives it a nice affect.
However, I feel I could have done better with this image by getting it more focused on the foot and leg in the image. While it’s not as blurry as it’s surroundings, it’s still a bit out of focus and I think it would have been more successful if I had been able to get the camera to focus on it a bit more.
In this image, I wanted the viewer to focus more on the path and less on the beach surrounding it, so to do this I started editing this image by dropping it down to a point where the stone pathway was the only thing you can see in the middle of the image, removing the sky and most of the sea out of the photograph. I then blurred out the surroundings which were further out, and a little bit around the image to make it easier to focus on the pathway. And then, to add a bit of colour and light, I increased the brightness and contrast like i’ve done on my other images, and then increased the vibrance and played around with the hues until I got my desired outcome.
What I like about this image is that the stone pathway is right in the middle of the image and continues vertically until right to the end, which was the effect I was looking for. I also like how each side of the pathway are different, with one side being nice and sandy while the other side seems almost swamp-like and covered in seaweed, which could be interpreted in many different ways.
Although, what I don’t like about this image is the quality. Since I took it on my phone, it didn’t come out as good of quality as a digital camera would take it in, so I think i’ll be re-taking this image again but using my camera instead of my phone, and see what kind of results I get, and hope that it’s much higher quality then what the phone could give.
Above shows a contact sheet of the images I produced on the day of the photoshoot. As can be seen some of the photographs came out too dark when I began to adjust the light, however this was able to be fixed in the camera settings with some adjustments. Taking and thinking of the inspiration from Cindy Sherman I tried to have my subject embody and look at the original image a couple of times to try and recreate and represent the woman in the original photograph.
