For my first photoshoot I have taken a variety of shots at Val De La Mare, a reservoir. Specifically I looked at the dam, a huge manmade structure constructed to hold all the water the reservoir collects. I wanted to use this location as it is a great way of showing people how agriculture has impacted the land. Before the dam was built it would have been untouched land but as the population increased the need for water did so the dam was built to hold 938 megalitres of water. This is a huge volume of water with 1 megalitre being 10,000 litres and the dam itself is equally as impressive and vast, almost incomprehensible as you get closer to it.

Contact Sheet

For this shoot I took a variety of shots from different angles and building different compositions. I used red for photos I didn’t think were suitable for the editing style I will use, green for the photos I do like and yellow for photos I can use if they would be suitable more so than the ones already highlighted in green.

Best Shots Before Editing

I picked these as my best shots due to the composition I have used a wide angle lens at roughly 15mm to take these shots so it has been really effective in expressing the vastness of the dam and the impact it has on the overall land around it.

Editing

I will now go onto edit a mixture of these shots and my other photoshoots. I will go onto make a series of photos I edit, for my first editing experiments I will look into how to highlight the unnatural parts in the natural world.

For my virtual gallery, I took my final images from Anthropocene and placed them onto a virtual gallery.

For this photoshoot I wanted to capture nature at its best and how people are placing rubbish/objects and how this can affect the envoirment

Landscape

I chose these images because I like the way they look and how they are presented. The background and way the photo is styled is what makes the image stand out – with all the nature and how the photograph focuses on the nature rather than the background buildings.

Mandy Barker Inspired

My Strongest image selection:

For these images, I have laid them in a grid format to present them all together as I feel as though when presented next to each other, it it more eye-catching rather than one alone. This way, the bright colours also draw attention to themselves especially against the black background. When editing these images, I cropped them into a square to get a closer look and remove some negative space and then I adjusted the exposure and contrast to make sure the background was all dark and that only the individual pieces of litter were the focal points.

A closer composition:

Editing in the style of Vince Brun:

My closer compositions provided more of an abstract outcome which I am going to experiment with further. I intend to use the style of Vince Brun’s creative mirror images to inspire the development of my own photos:

For my first edit, I used a cropped close up image of the rope and extended the layer to be able to copy the image and duplicate it to then flip it horizontally and move beside the first one. Then I did the same thing but flipping it vertically and placed that underneath along with the final duplicate to complete the square. My first attempt:

My first attempt turned out well, however I found that there was too much negative space and wanted to try to enclose the area. So I then cropped the original photo even closer and then repeated the process.

I found that this worked a lot better as it is more abstract and appealing to the eye. Also, the lines and curves of the ropes all lead to the centre of the image For the future photos I them continue ensuring the cropped image didn’t have too much negative space to start off with.