Like my previous photo shoot, I captured images throughout the day, however this time I decided to take pictures of the tide so the viewer can see the extreme change from low to high tide in Jersey. Jersey may be a small island, but it can boast some of the biggest tides in the world. When it recedes, the immense body of water seems to melt into the horizon, only to surge back onto shore with alarming speeds.
I planned this photo shoot by going on the website gov.je to know when there will be a high or low tide on Sunday the 24th of March. I found out that the tides will be high around 8:40 am and low at 3:20pm. This was a perfect day to take pictures of the tide changing since the difference from high to low would occur during daylight. I decided that I would take pictures every hour from 10am to 4pm. Taking pictures of the tide every hour meant that the viewer can see the gradual change from high to low tide.
I took pictures of the tide at Gorey beach since it’s only a 5 minute walk from my house. I made sure that the camera angle didn’t change drastically by having a fixed spot where I would take pictures from every hour. My spot was a bench on a hill overlooking the coast. Here I would be able to get some good shots of the tides.
The following images are my favourites from the second photo shoot; they have all been edited in varying amounts, from colour grading to applying colour masks and special effects.
I decided to use this photo because it has many aspects which make it effective and stand out. It has bold lines which attract the eye to them. It also has vibrant colours which make the photo pop more and attract the viewers attention.I really like the emphasised dark areas of this photo which create a dramatic effect I have chosen to use this photo because of its strong shapes and bold lines. Its repetiveness adds to this effect.
Some of my best images of the shoot were close up, almost macro photography and as such I have cropped them to emphasize the best qualities of the composition. I increased the exposure on most of the images as they were taken in the CR2 format and thus were rather dark. I also experimented with the color more than normal as I chose to carry out this photo shoot around noon with a grey sky, this resulted in images with flat lighting which allow colors to be easily adjusted. Individual colors had their hue, saturation and luminance manually adjusted. Other general edits include removing chromatic aberration and accounting for any distortion caused by the lens using light rooms lens correction filters.
These are the final images from this photo shoot. They aren’t as good as I wanted them to be, but I have learnt from this photoshoot so I won’t make the same mistakes in the next shoot.
To respond to journeys and pathways I decided to photograph the sky throughout the day every hour so I would be able to capture the different positions of the sun as well as the movement of the clouds and the colours of the sky. I set my camera onto a tripod and placed it near a window so I could capture several images of the sky from inside my house. The viewer can then see the gradual progression from day to night from one viewpoint.
This project relates to the theme since it’s the journey of the day from sunrise to sunset. I started taking images at 11:00 am and finished around 7:00pm. Once the time got closer to 5pm, I decided to capture more images frequently since this time of the day is when the sky changes the most in terms of colour.
I decided to create a gif with these images on the website GIPHY to show how the sky changes throughout the day in a quick video that continues in a loop. I decided to have each image show up for 0.2 seconds to create a slideshow.
Times when an image was taken
11:20 am
11:40 am
12:00 pm
2:50 pm
3:30 pm
4:00 pm
4:30 pm
5:20 pm
6:00 pm
6:20 pm
6:40 pm
6:50 pm
7:00 pm
7:10 pm
Evaluation
Creating a gif to present these images was a good idea since the viewer can rapidly see the movement of the sun and the clouds. The gif also turned out smooth when played since the images were all taken from one angle. Taking images through the window helped to frame the sky.
Future Photo Shoot Idea
An idea for a future photo shoot is to take several images throughout the day of the tides so the viewer can see the extreme change from low tide to high tide in Jersey. Jersey may be a small island, but it can boast some of the biggest tides in the world. When it recedes, the immense body of water seems to melt into the horizon, only to surge back to shore with alarming speed.
The photography work of the Boyle Family that I’m responding to typically examines the surface of the earth, road markings and manhole covers.
I walked around the urban area of St. Helier. I wanted my images to have the same style as the Boyle’s photographs by capturing pictures of the ground from my viewpoint. This displays the view that everyone sees on a day to day basis but never looks at twice.
When taking pictures, I made sure to show the various different qualities on the ground. Like the Boyle family, I wanted to capture images of street corners, roads with yellow markings, different textures of tarmac and cobbles.
Once I had enough photos, I made a contact sheet to help me select the best images. There is no editing on their images so I kept it minimalistic by slightly adjusting the contrast, brightness etc. I also cropped the images into a square since they had unwanted space around them.
I wanted to focus on Le Hocq beach as I lived nearby and I wanted to be able to take pictures throughout the day. I wanted to capture the journey in which the sun, clouds, water takes on a typical day in Winter. I was lucky to have enough that the weather was good and the sky was clear, but that did mean I had to ensure my pictures weren’t over exposed due the harshness of the sun, this was difficult. I started taking pictures at 1 pm and took pictures every hour until 7 pm. I held my camera for the post part but for several photos I put my camera on the wall. The picture below aren’t of every hour but are the best to represent the movement of the sun and change in brightness. I aimed to create a timeline for an afternoon at the beach, to show the true beauty of one of my favourite beaches in Jersey.
trees 2pm
trees 4pm
trees 5pm
trees 7pm
front 4pm
Analysis
Overall I found my first experiment to be reasonably successful. If I were to do it again I would have used a tripod and kept it in the same place for the duration of the shoot in order to have more emphasis on the change in just one particular part of the beach, but this is useful to know for my next photo shoot. I feel like my photos are pretty self explanatory, as they are just a timeline of Le Hocq beach, I used a medium to large lens for my photos as I wanted to focus in on specific parts of the beach but also capture the full atmosphere. I edited my photos in Photoshop by lowering the brightness, increasing contrast and lowering the exposure for the pictures I took earlier in the day. These pictures are personal to me as they are the view I having being seeing for the last 8 years, day in day out, so for me it’s nothing special in day light, but when the sun goes down it creates a different scene for me, something familiar yet exciting. I wanted to empathize how repetitive views don’t always have to be boring, the weather changes, the sun position changes, the sky is never the same, clouds are always moving, they change shape, the sun is always moving.
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.
