"Basket of Kumquats"
Not your average bowl of oranges. One morning the light was shining beautifully through the high windows of the produce department at my local grocery store. As it poured onto the fruits and veggies I went out to my car to get my camera. Originally my attention was on the apples, the unwaxed earthy tone contrasted against the dark wooden crate they were in and looked like a September morning in February. I set my camera on aperture priority and opened as far as the camera let me, mostly f/4. I must have looked a little funny, leaning over the displays while viewing only through the camera, bobbing up and down trying to catch just the right angle. This was the first shot, in fact a few frames later I tried to go back, convinced that I needed more than one attempt, but this image kept popping out at me in the thumbnails. I originally tweaked the exposure in lightroom, working out some washed out highlights and turning down the shadows, then opened it in Photoshop and played with painting filters- only to go back into lightroom, revert to the original and only apply minor adjustments.
Gwyn
Early on in the term we were given portraits as the focus for our contact sheets. That Thursday, I was sitting at my desk when the light started to spill everywhere after a mostly overcast day. I noticed that the kids would be getting off the bus soon, so I got suited up and waited. I met Gwyn halfway up the driveway, still in a transistional mode from school to home, and started talking to her about her day as I directed her around through my viewfinder and silently motioned which way to turn. The smile was real, rooted in not just happiness but a sort of laughing at the absurdity of being charged at by your camera-wielding father while getting off the bus. f/5.6 or 8, and highlights/shadows were toggled to make up for the abundant sunshine that was covering her forehead.
Tim
Nearly impossible. That is the chance of getting a non "picture face" out of Tim when he sees the camera. When he was little it was a fake squashed smile, and now it has progressed to a pretend vacant stare or some other standard teenage boy selfie pose but he is getting better at it... As I was walking up the driveway with him on a sledding run though, I caught him by complete surprise and managed to capture a rare, genuinely casual portrait shot of him. I played with the shadows and highlights, the quick one-off shot was slightly skewed exposure-wise because I had it set for bright snowy images, cropped a tad to make it more grid-friendly and left it at that.
Ali
We had an impressive run of consecutive snowstorms this winter. This was at the end of our still life week, and this sesion was anything but still. After being inside most of the week, I escaped to the driveway for a few sled runs with the kids. Knowing there would be gloves on my hands most of the time, I set the camera at f/8 in aperture priority (probably my new favorite camera mode after this class) and put the light meter at +1 for the snow, so from there it was just a matter of shooting. This shot came towards the end of any tolerance of the snow and cold, and I caught Ali basking in all the glory of being a kid in winter shortly before she ran inside to warm up. I made a few adjustments to the whites, highlights, and exposure with my favorite Photoshop tool- the Camera Raw Filter that saves you a trip into Lightroom, and added a black and white layer. This image starts to gain a neat abstraction when the blacks and whites are drastically adjusted, but I decided to go with a more classic approach.
Sway with Me
It was architecture week, and I was reading ahead to the next assignment which was motion. My camera was sitting on the edge of my desk, and as I was talking to my daughters about the next week's focus they started dancing in the kitchen. I had the camera on auto/no flash, and I quietly took the lens cap off and turned the camera towards them and pressed the shutter a few times. Indoors at night you are going to get blurs, and I did not think much would come from this until I noticed the outline of the two in this shot would probably highlight well in one of the filters for a motion shot. Previously and usually I do not care for the glowing edges stylizing filter, however this image showed up as I hoped, so I slid the bars around until satisfied.
Guillaume Le Conquerant
My mother-in-law has a statue on a table as you walk into the house. I stopped in for a visit one day during still life week and started taking pictures of various objects catching the light just right. This fellow has been a subject before, I even have one of him in a Santa hat. The base is enscribed with the name of the statue, William the Conquerer, which I never saw before until I opened the photo on my computer. One of the assignments we had this term was taking parts of one image and placing them into another, so the process was fresh in my mind. I found an image from the first week of class that fit well and had at it. Photoshop filters such as graphic pen have a really neat effect on this, it almost looks like a drawing, but for the final I went with the simple black and white version.
Purple Haze
Still life was my favorite week. I spent the day gathering random objects from the house and making them come to life. This was a combination of multiple weeks of this term. Using a setup from portrait week, with leftover props and ideas from still life week, I attempted to capture the motion of flourescent liquid being dropped into water. I knew the background would not be an issue, and went up to f/32 in full manual mode. After a few tries, exposures between twenty and thirty seconds worked out, with just a blacklight and some daylight through the tapestry curtain. This is one of the rare times I used a tool on Photoshop (invert) and made no further adjustments.
Cats on Mars
I have four cats- an old calico, a kitten, and two fluffy beasts in the middle. One winter morning, the sunlight was glistening profoundly on freshly fallen, wind-swept snow. The cats had gone out for their morning walk, begrudgingly crossing the snowdrift formerly known as the driveway. I had wanted to capture an early morning snowy landscape earlier in the term but the weather conditions never quite lined up right. This particular morning tough had all the elements going, and I went outside, crouched down to nearly ground level, and shot away. I used f/22 in aperture priority, pretty normal landscape settings, and was pleased to see all the sparkle that came through in the image. The edit was out of a random desire to make the frigid, tundra-like land look as foreign as it felt. Normally that would be a small driveway that led to the longer one marked by the horizontal ridge, with a garden swing to the left and grassy hillside towards the top of the frame. I adjusted a reddish-orange filter to resemble but not necessarily mimic Mars. The longer strides in the snow is from the excessive fluff of the middle cats, dredging through the snow with every other footstep, and the tiny ones on the left were left by a curious kitten in a giant wonderland of sparkling delight. If I could shot like Ansel Adams for a day, I would love to find a way to get this imagery as the foreground to a stark black moonscape background.
Snow Fairy
Having three daughters in the house, there is bound to be fairies. This one either came from one of their rooms or their grandmother, but eventually ended up on our garden wall. I was walking up the driveway on a sledding venture when this one just sort of happened. It was intended to be a break from school, but resulted in fantastic images- the Tim and Ali portraits came from this session as well as some awesome sledding pics including a foray into stop-motion with Gwyn. My oldest daughter, Ary, loved fairies the most, even nick-naming herself "Ary the Scary Fairy" with her friends. This is the second winter since she passed, and I swear when I have the camera sometimes she is whispering in my ear, and turning my eyes to see the beauty laying in front of me. This was one of those times.
f/8, chalk and charcoal filter
Onward
Our last contact sheet assignment was motion. It was the last day for shooting, and I was quite happy with what I already had. On my way home though the evening sun started shedding the last bits of the day's light over the landscape. I was slowly racing home to when I drove over the highway to see what I thought was a magnificent sight. I went over to the side and used the bridge railing for a tripod. If I could have planned this I may have been better prepared, and perhaps have stayed longer, but as it was I was crouched on a snowbank on a bridge, my van sitting on the other side of the road with the hazard lights on. I was hoping to not have any passerbys, and managed to get back on the road before anyone came. f/32 was as high as the camera would allow the aperture, and I tried a few shutter speeds before settling on 1/4. I liked the direction of the movement, heading forwards in to the hazy future, blazed in a golden light.
FAS-226. Professsor Jane Lindsay. Southern New Hampshire University 2015. All work by Chris Osborne.
