365 Day 31 - Back to my OCA course

365 Day 31 - Back to my OCA course

I have now completed one month of my 365 project, only 11 left to go, or 334 days!

I said in an earlier post that I had some work to complete on the Open College of the Arts, Digital Photographic Practice course which needs to be submitted for assessment by 15th February. I got the assignment requirements for one unit totally round my neck first time round so need to redo some of that before it goes for assessed and that is what I have been working on tonight.

This particular unit required me to 'see like my camera' and photograph high contrast lighting situations with the correct exposure etc. so that as little post processing was possible was needed. Tonight I have been working on an indoor scene illuminated by a single high luminance artificial light source, i.e. my desk lamp. I needed to choose 3 scenes and I went for a still life marmalade set up, a piece of jewellery and a bunch of tulips. They all presented different problems, for example the ring is very reflective and I needed to get the exposure right without burning the highlights. The marmalade had a black background and I had to position the desk lamp carefully so that I didn't get a light flare on the background but without under-exposing the scene. I've photographed flowers many times as anyone can see from my portfolio, but it is quite tricky to avoid dark shadows when photographing a bunch as opposed to one flower. The second part of the exercise is to re-shoot the three scenes using whatever techniques I can to reduce the contrast. For the tulips I have gone to one flower rather than a whole bunch, diffused the light from the lamp which is coming from the above left and used a reflector to bounce the light back onto the right side. This is the result.