Main Shoot- Part One

The aim for this whole unit is to show that I can use my camera on manual settings. By this I mean that I can show I understand how to use shutter speeds with depth of field to take photographs with the correct light and colour. As I stated earlier on in my blog my theme is Rivers and what surround them. I decided to go down to the River Trent for my first part of the photo shoot. In this blog I will be showing some of my favourite pictures that I have taken and talk a little bit about what settings I had the camera set to and why I have chosen them. After this I will be going out again and choosing three more pictures and talking about them. In a previous blog I have talked about precautions I have taken for this task because it can be quite dangerous due to there being a River as the main subject.

The time was around twelve o clock ish, so I had some good light to take my photographs. I went to a place called the Washlands where the main river (River Trent) was situated.

1/320, F-Stop 7.1, ISO 400            

This is the first image I have chosen. Whilst looking through my images from the photo shoot this was one of the main ones that caught my eye. I managed to get the right light settings with a perfect picture of the river flowing. I also managed to get some nice surroundings in the background as well but the main focus is the River. I took a few shots exactly the same but used different settings. These settings that are labelled above were the ones that made the image look it's best. The shutter speed was set 1/320 due to how much light there was at the time. I tried having a 1/200 and 1/250 shutter speed but the pictures were way too bright. My main focus for the photograph was to have the picture bright but not too bright so even if I had a  slightly faster shutter speed the photograph would still have looked very good. I managed to time the shot purley out of luck to capture a bird flying past. Like I said this was pureley luck at the time I was taking the shots but it makes the image look even better. For this shot I also used my Tri-Pod. I used the Tri-Pod because I wanted this picture to be perfect and not tilted or blurred. I think that overall this photograph relates to my theme very well and the settings that I chose alongside exposure to light were perfect for the shot.

1/125, F Stop 6.3, ISO 400

This is the second photograph I have chosen. After many previous photographs I decided to go along the River a little bit to see if I could find any more different spots to take some nice photographs. I decided to try something a little different rather than just take a straight shot of the River. This was a complete bank shot as I didn't know what it would turn out like but I was quite surprised at the results. After looking through the shots of this area this was the one that I found stood out from the rest of them. I decided to go with the picture within a picture frame. I have lined up the two trees to create a frame with the river being the main subject in the centre. I decided to use a slower shutter speed for this picture because where I was standing there wasn't very much light so by using a slower shutter speed it brightened up the picture alot. I took two pictures of the same subject. The first photograph I took I used the flash so I could see the trees with all there colour. The second photograph I took was the one above without the flash. At first I was going to use the first picture I took with the flash but I decided that I liked the dark tree effect more because it makes the main subject (River) stand out a lot more. Again for this picutre I used my Tri-Pod so the image was completely stable. I feel that this image has turned out quite nice with the right exposure to light. I managed to get a nice reflection of the clouds and the sky from the river as well which stands out a lot more due the boldness of the trees.



1/320, F-Stop 7.1, ISO 400

This is the third photograph I have chosen as one of my favourites from the photo shoot. I had to take extra care when taking this shot as I was quite close to the river and there was a good chance of falling in if I had got any closer to the edge of the bank. I decided to choose this picture for my assaignment because it is what I like to call an all rounder. By this I mean it has a bit of everything in the shot alongside a nice colour set with the perfect brightness. The sun was just coming out when I was taking this shot so the original photograph I took didn't look that great because I had my camera set for the sun being cloudy with lowered light. So i increased the shutter speed from 1/200 to 1/320 to increase the speed of the shot and letting less light into it therefore getting a perfect picture with the right amount of brightness. At first I tried this shot with the tri-pod to see how it would go but I was worried that it might fall into the river and the practise shots I took didnt look great either so I decided not to use the tri-pod for this shot. My F-Stop was set to 7.1 with an ISO of 400 this enabled me to get the perfect sharpness for the picture with no blur what so ever. If I was to take this shot again I woujld proberbly try and not get the edge of the bank into the shot in the right hand corner of the shot. I would proberbly change a few settings on the camera aswell although this would not make much different to the current shot to make it better.

So these were the first three pictures that I have chosen and whhy I have chosen them. I think they are quite beautiful pictures of the River Trent and the surroundings of the River and it falls nicely into my theme which is Rivers. In my next photoshoot I will be returning to the same area but when the climate is alot different so there is a completely different feel to the photographs. This will be because of brightness and weather conditions.