Winter 2018/ 19

This is my second review of my top images and other work whilst learning photography in the winter, i.e., December 2017 through to February 2018 inclusive.  Most notably, it is the first quarterly review where I am able to compare the work done in the last quarter with that achieved during a full quarter the previous year before: “Winter Images 2017/ 18“.  This is because the “Second Review of Autumn” compared itself to the “Review of Autumn 2017” which only covered November 2017.

First observations of my top 10 images:

• 3 are monochrome
• 3 involve intentional camera movement
• 3 were shot indoors
• 3 or 4 benefit from the blurring effects of a long exposure
• 3 are composites made from more than one RAW file.

10 images in total, and I promise that these were not selected to fulfill the above, rather surprising, criteria.  From a year before, of the top 14 images there was only one monochrome (to avoid what would otherwise have been a horrendous colour clash), one composite (picture in picture), one deliberately out of focus abstract, and one colour processed cityscape shot from the Walkie-Talkie London.

 

 

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Initial Comparison with Previous Year

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The Winter 2018/ 19 images are more sophisticated in that they:

• are tidier, cleaner, simpler
• have a clear subject
• employ more advanced photographic techniques
• are better organised in the frame.

New Techniques Employed

Colour Toning

I have started using the Photoshop Color Balance tool to colour tone images, effectively adding colour contrast by setting different white balances for shadows, midtones and highlights.  On 3rd March I defined Photoshop actions which I assigned to the function keys F4 & F5, which warm or cool the shadows respectively, doing the reverse to the highlights, and leaving the midtones untouched.

Long Exposure

Although I bought a set of LEE filters back in 27th June 2018, I have not had much of a chance to use these until this winter.  The Big Stopper and a 0.6 ND Hard Grad Filter were used on a number of images shot in Anglesey such as the one below:

Polarising

LEE Polarising filter also purchased in June last year has been used to good effect on a number of woodland images where it helps create warmer colour tones.

Camera Handling

Now shoot primarily in Manual priority, particularly for landscape.  However, on the 25th January I defined the 3 quick memory modes on the camera to allow me to quickly move to shooting:

1. Street
2. Action – moving subjects
3. ICM: Intentional Camera Movement.

Although, it doesn’t matter because it can be corrected later, I have started setting the White Balance in-camera to either Sunny or Cloudy, rather than leaving it to auto to sort out.  This helps with the initial visualization of the image particularly during the selection/ culling, and initial post processing.

Style

Multiple Exposure

I have enjoyed creating composites of multiple exposures, usually at the Tate Modern, such as the image below which combines a number of images shot with a fairly slow shutter speed to give an increased impression of activity.  This is a technique employed by Andreas Gursky in his stock exchange images.

Diptych

I have continued to achieve success in competitions with my diptych format of images of different sizes linked together by a drop shadow that highlights one of the key colours that ties the two together.  See example below:

Notes:

• December 2018
• January 2019
• February 2019