Location Photography

Location photography which I did in Riga railway station.

I used Canon 550d camera with kit 18-55mm lens.

Only natural lighting were used, so it was important to place model in a right pose and shoot it from a proper angle to achieve good-loking photos.

I also followed the rule of thirds in composition, and did some photoshop editing such as cropping and color correction.

Studio photography

For this shoot I wanted to take pictures of girls that later can be used in magazines and advertising.

Safety tips for this shoot was to be careful with all studio equipment, watch out the wires on the floor and dont split any liquids on floor or equipment.

I am finding it difficult to achieve good lighting results using white background on the pictures, but here I tried my best, using 2 softboxes and a flashlight.

2 point lighting. One soft light from the left, another softlight from the right side.

 

Here I tried to use 3 point lighing setup. Keylight from the left side as a main light. Fill light from right side, little bit darker than keylight, to fill shadowed areas. And a backlight from behind, to get a nice shilouette around the hair. 

Here I cropped the picture that way to achieve abstract lines, that were made by backlight.

Here, I used simple 3 point light setup, but placed the backlight just away from behind the model, to get outline only on left side.

The good surprise for me was the lens flare, which was resulted by light facing directly to the lenses and reflecting inside of them.

Same photo, but without all stands being retouched.

For these photos I used Nikon D3000 camera and nearly all of them

were done using ISO 200, f/14 and 1/400 second exposure.

I edited them in Photoshop using many different technics including

curves, levels, working with channels and retouching them to remove unwanted artifacts.

EVALUATION

Looking back at what I did, I think I am able to achieve good results using 3 lights and black backdrop, but I find it rather difficult to achieve good results with white background. Although I think, that the darker skin tone looks better on lighter background, then light skin. Basicly because of the contrast.

Also surprisingly interesting results might been achieved by simple experiments, such as spectacular lighting effect.

HEALTH AND SAFETY.

While working in a studio I had to consider such dangerous things as

Wires on the floor, which should be carefuly watched, so noone would flip over.

All the lights and bulbs and stands - I should be carful, while moving them, as they might get broken.

Any liquids also should be watched, because of electric props all around.

Contact sheet:



Levitation photography

This was done using high shitter speed, about 1/200 to catch the moment without much motion blur.

Cally Whitham photography

Cally Whitham is a photographer from New Zeland.

He does very stylish animal portraits, which may look cool from the first sight, but when you look closely into them, you can notice, that this is not a softlight, he is using there. Photos are highly and badly photoshopped, and lighting is adjusted with soft brushes in photoshop, and this is highly notable when you look at the fur lighting, which is lit with a hardlight or daylight and overal lighting, which is trying to look like studio shoot with a softlight.

Apperture

The apperture is the hole in camera lens, wicth lets the light through. The bigger is the apperture stop, for example f32, the less light comes through it. The bigger it is - f1.8 - more light passes.




Shutter

A shutter is a device that allows light to pass for a determined period of time, for the purpose of exposing photographic film or a light-sensitive electronic sensor to light to capture a permanent image of a scene.
The slower shutter speed or exposure is - light comes through a lens for a longer time.

Histogram



An image histogram is a type of histogram that acts as a graphical representation of the tonal distribution in a digital image. It plots the number of pixels for each tonal value. By looking at the histogram for a specific image a viewer will be able to judge the entire tonal distribution at a glance

http://dmitriphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/histogram.html

Health and safety in a photographic studio.

Watch out wires under your legs. Stick them to the floor.

Be carful about the equipment. Watch your surroundings.

Dont eat or drink near any equipment.

Dont look directly at the flashlights, you may have eye problems later.

No food in the darkroom - toxic chemicals are very easy to transfer from your hands or surfaces, to your food.

No drinks in a darkroom - you may dismiss them with chemicals.

Chemicals in a darkroom can permanently stain your clothes - don't wear something that you care about.

Be careful in a darkroom - try not to run into stuff. Use safety lights (those red tinted lights)

Moment

I was lucky enough to be in a right time and right place to capture driver's emotions after accident. I used wide 18mm lens, to capture all the scene while beeing very close to it.