Week 11: Playing with Light

Week 11: In our Photography II Class, we are focusing on taking photographs using the idea of long shutter speeds and "painting" with light. Here are the results.

Craft: The Craft of this assignment is the following: Digital SLR Camera (Canon E05 Rebel T5i), phone camera, a flashlight, a computer, and Adobe Photoshop. After taking the photos with a slow shutter speed, I transferred the photos into Photoshop to crop and touch them up.

Composition: For this project, we were tasked with playing with the concept of light in our photos. Specifically, we were painting lights to create abstract shapes or other oddities. The main focus was altering our shutter speeds to capture more light and to see how motion would play into our compositions. For myself, I chose to use a flashlight and see how the light would affect the image. I also played with moving the camera around a stationary light such as a lamp post or laundry displays to see what kind of interesting photos I could make. First, I set my shutter speed to 8" meaning it was very slow, giving 8 seconds to capture all the light and images before the shutter closed. The images with the branches I set t 15". The ISO I kept constant at 100 throughout all my lighting situations, mostly at night or dusk. After that, I imported them into my computer, editing them in Photoshop and cropping them to get a good composition.

Concept: In this project, we were tasked with creating ten images with the mechanical process of constant ISO, "painting with light" and slow shutter speed. As we were painting with light, I found that trying to create a story with the light moving from one point to the next an interesting concept. However, when in practice, it all became one strange object of moving light with no clear beginning and end. Instead, I decided to create abstractions with the light for this assignment, seeing if there were ways to have the object forming the light remain the focal point while abstracting the light and having it make shapes. This was most successfully done with the lamp photo.