What is ISO?

ISO controls the brightness of your photos and controls the cameras sensitivity to light. Put simply, it will lighten or darken your photos. As you increase your ISO, your cameras sensitivity will increase and therefore photos brightness will increase.

Advantages

It means you could have more flexibility in your aperture and shutter speed settings. For example, if you’re indoors with poor lighting and you’re photographing a sports even where people are moving fast, then you would be able to use a fast shutter speed without the photo being under exposed.

Disadvantages

When using high ISO you can start to get more grain/noise.

Throughout the past two decades, Uta Barth has made visual perception the subject of her work. Regarded for her “empty” images that border on painterly abstraction, the artist carefully renders blurred backgrounds, cropped frames and the natural qualities of light to capture incidental and fleeting moments, those which exist almost exclusively within our periphery. With a deliberate disregard for both the conventional photographic subject and point-and-shoot role of the camera, Barth’s work delicately deconstructs conventions of visual representation by calling our attention to the limits of the human eye.

A 2012 McArthur Fellow, Barth was born in Berlin in 1958 and currently resides in Los Angeles. She received a B.A. from the University of California, Davis in 1982 and an M.F.A from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1985.

Since then, Barth’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide. Notable solo presentations include to draw with light at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA (2013), … and to draw a bright, white line with light at The Art Institute of Chicago (2011), Henry Art

Experimentation

In photography, shutter speed or exposure time is the length of time when the film or digital sensor inside the camera is exposed to light, also when a camera's shutter is open when taking a photograph. The amount of light that reaches the film or image sensor is proportional to the exposure time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_speed

Here is a mood board:

Here are my experimentations.  I learnt the slower the shutter speed, the higher the exposure, so I had to do a lot of adjusting to the ISO and apeture. This is my first time experimenting with shutter speed, so therefore my images aren't amazing because I was constantly learning how much I should adjust my ISO and apeture to.

I like the photos of Imani shaking her head because it appears she has multiple faces. To create this image I slowed the shutter speed and because the image was taken inside in a dark area, I adjusted my ISO and apeture a little higher then the photos I took outside where they were very low.  I believe next time that I can adjust the white balance because the images have an orange tone to them. My mistake of taking photos of tom rubbing his faca and moving his glasses is that I didn't focus of the backgrounf. If I made him sit the other side of the table then the background wouldn't be so light and distract the image.

Here are some examples of the images I manipulated:

I feel that the images look a lot better in black and white. I used adobe lightroom and applied a black and white preset to my images. I then adjusted the clarity, exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows of the image until I was satisfied with how the image looked. The last image is an experimentation because I wanted to see what the image would look like if the white balance was corrected. I used the white balance correcter tool to balance out the background. I then adjusted the contrast, exposure, highlights, shadows, clarity and saturation of the image until I was happy with the results. Personally I prefer the black and white images because I find that it is easier to focus on what's going on in the images, the colours distort and distract the image too much. However, I am glad that I had adjusted the final image and fixed the white balance issue.

In this blog post I’m going to be showing the use of the solid colour effect to help do Conceal and Reveal on Photoshop.

First we need to choose a photo. I’ll use this one as an example.

First on Photoshop we need to duplicate the layer.

After doing that we need to change the new duplicated layer to a solid colour. Lets use blue.

Then using the paintbrush tool and the circle shape, In random places start to remove the top layer. If you want, lower the opacity so that you can see the photo below. Remember to have the colour of the paintbrush on BLACK!!

After you’re done, remember to flatten the image and Save it.

These next few are ones which I have already completed previously.

Mood Board

Keld Helmer-Peterson

Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who achieved widespread international recognition in the 1940s and 1950s for his abstract photographs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keld_Helmer-Petersen

Peterson typically uses natural daylight in his photographs. However the vast contrast on the subects and the backgrounds in his images gives off the impression that he uses the threshold tool in photoshop, even though that wasnt physically possible because the first personal computer was invented in 1975. Petersons work has a strong tone, with both the light and dark contrasting eachother. Peterson was thought to have an obsession with line as it is often a major feature in his work. Also many patterns appear in his work, especially phoyographs involving buildings and structures.
Here is an example of Peterson's work:

My Interperatation:

These are screenshots of some of the photos I took in my shoot. I went to both indoor and outdoor locations and took photos of images I thought looked interesting and aesthetically pleasing.

Here are the images I selected for manipulation and my final image:

I then manipulated these images using photoshop. I cropped them into squares then applied the threshold tool and adjusted them until I got the result I wanted. I also rotates some of the images to distort the feeling of the final piece. I feel these images are both a reflection of Peterson's work, however there is an obvious indication that I have also inputted my own creativity into these images. Here is my final image:

Threshold Experiment

Keld Helmer-Petersen:

• Started taking photographs in 1938 when he got a camera as a graduation present.
• Interested in German inter-war photography and the new objectivity movement.
• inspired by Albert Renger-Patzsch.
• 1948 – Published 122 Colour Photographs. 
• Began to experiment with the contrast in graphic black and white expression influenced by constructivist artists and their fascination with industry’s machines.
• Pushed limits of the media
• Throughout his career he worked with “cameraless” photography (a darkroom technique in which objects are placed directly on light-sensitive photographic paper).

Original images:

Editing Process:

Edited Images:

Mirroring

Original Image

Editing Process

Final Image

PROCESS/AIMS: For this photography skills photo shoot, we concentrated on capturing different photos relating to shutter speed, exposure and white balance. Trying out different setting, at different intensities (i.e 1/20, 1/8, 1/4 for shutter speed) in order to see what effect this will have on the final photos.

SHUTTER SPEED:

In order to capture the effects of decreasing the shutter speed, we had a person walk across a white backdrop. The motion blur seen by the subject shows us that a slow shutter speed has been used meaning that a crisp image was not take. It is also clear that the shutter speed was very slow due to the overexposed background, as more light is let in the longer the shutter is open. The effect is caused by the relative motion between the camera, and the objects and scene, motion blur may be avoided by panning the camera to track those moving objects.

WHITE BALANCE:

White balance is a setting on your camera which is used to control how colors are captured in different types of light. When you correctly set your white balance, you are taking into account the “color temperature” of the light in your scene. Color temperatures range from cool (blue tint) to warm (orange tint). In these next photos I experimented with changing  the white balance of the images. I firstly set my camera to the daylight setting which in effect made the images slightly warmer in appearance. the white walls of the school clearly shows this when compared to the image below. I set my camera to the auto white balance setting which in turn made the white very neutral, not overly warm or cool toned.

EXPOSURE:

ISO in Digital Photography. In Digital Photography ISO measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. The same principles apply as in film photography – the lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain. In these next couple of images, the changing of ISO can clearly be seen. It was an extremely bright and sunny day therefore I knew that turning up the ISO to a higher setting (such as 800 or 1600) would result in very over exposed images with little potential. Setting the camera down to ISO 200 resulted in a more manageable image that is well exposed.