Welcome to Dan Haycocks' AS Photography

Dan Haycocks Photography Blog

Hello and welcome to Dan Haycocks' blog, please feel free to look around my blog and look at any of my photos i have on the blog.

The blog is ordered so that the units we were set are at the end and then all of the testing and experimenting is near the end. Right at the end i have included some photos i have taken for personal enjoyment and just to show how i have put techniques i have learnt into practise.

My blog order goes as follows

Texture Photography

Portrait Photography

Macro Photography

Urban Landscape Photography

Movement Photography

Three Point lighting

Shutter Speed Exercise

Aperture Exercise

Photos Taken In My Spare Time

Snow Photos

Thanks for viewing my blog

Texture Photography

Texture Photography

This part of my course was the hardest for me, this is because i found it hard to make the textures interesting to the eye. To try and make them more appealing i used strange camera angles and tried to use the rule of thirds creatively in my photos, as well as i think i also had a try useing different types of flash to try and get the desired effect.

My first photo i have taken is of a wooden table, for this shot i switched off all the lights and used only the light from my flash to illuminate the table. My flash was set so that it would fire straight up to the roof but i then put in a bounce card so that i could angle the flash to the table. By doing this it made the centre more brighter while its slowly fading off to the side into darkness. To help with this i also used a low aperture to create a nice depth of field. Round the edges of this i added a slight vignette to again make it look nicer to the eye. This photo in the dark areas may look slightly noisy this is because i had to bump up the ISO to 400 to be able to achieve a good amount of light.

My second image i have taken is of carpet, this is slightly different to the first in that i have allowed more light to go further on, this was done in a similar way but this time the flash was bounced to the wall behind me on the right. For this i also made my camera go on a slight angle, this made the frame more exciting and is a unusual angle. This shot again used the aperture right down, this was again to create a interesting depth of field were only a small part of the frame was in focus.

My last photo i decided to do was of bricks, with this i had the idea of as the longer the brick go on the more it is out of focus. To do this again i set the aperture low but this time i stood quite a bit back from the wall. This photo was again lit with the flash but this time i was pointing exactly at the wall but with the power turned down to 1/8.

Portrait Photography

Portrait Photography

After researching about portrait photography i found that there was 2 different main types of this photography, the first of this was posed photography this is usually done in a studio envrioment with usually a white background but this sometimes maybe another colour such as black or using a green screen so that any image can be put behind people. The other type is candid photography, this is were you use a longer lens and capture people doing there natural day to day thing, while this may sound boring it is surprising what people get up to when they think there not being watched.

I found this section perticaulary hard as nobody i really knew would model, because of this and also because i liked the natural style better i decided to focus on more candid shots but did try to get some out of studio . My first photo for this is one of the queens guards in london, every time i have been to london i have been amassed at these and how they manage to keep so still all day. To get this photo i had to go later on in the day due to them being a tourist hotspot and people having photos next to them. To get the shot i decided to take the shot about 10 meters away from the guard, this allowed me to get some of the background in . For this shot i also composed it so that the guard was in the centre of the frame, after taking the picture i edited it by cropping i to remove some of the foreground and also the colour splash effect to make the guard in full colour and the background black and white.

The next shot i have is a example of candid, to do this i was out of view of the man and then took a image while he was in flow of giving out his papers, after doing this i then asked him if he was ok with me taking the image of which he said was fine and was a regular occurrence. When i got back home to my desk i edited the image, i decided to follow the "lensbaby" effect that is used mainly by wedding photographers using a device called a lensbaby but this effect can easily be duplicated in photoshop. To do this i made the man and his paper his own layer and then blurred the background, after this i then added some blur by the man to make him blend in better.

Macro photography

Macro Photography

Macro is the name for close up photography this is usually of things sutch as flowers and insects. Macro photography sometimes is images that represent 1:1 scale meaning that images when developed of the film is the same size as the actual object.

All of that my images that i have taken i have used both natural light as well as flash's the reason for this is because you need to get close in on subjects it can sometimes mean that light is a issue and requires more light to be able to take the image well.

My first shot that i have taken is of a tulip slower this was taken at a 1:2 ratio, the reason i like this image is because of the shallow depth of field the image has, this means that the flower is in focus while everything around it is blurred and out of focus. I like this as it brings more attention to the tulip.

My second image for this is a photo of a rose and other flowers from a bunch, this one was done alot differently than my other as this was done in a fully dark room using a off camera flash to the right of the camera. To do this i used a Flashgun to the right and connected to my camera using a TTL cord. I had the flash on it set manually at 1/8 the focus point i had set for this image was the rose and i used a low aperture to blur the others around the rose.

My final Image i have taken for macro is of another tulip in the garden, i took this while the weather was raining because of this the tulip was closed and the tulip had water on it, I like this as it gives it more character and gives something more for the viewer to look at. To take this image i set the aperture as low as possible and then adjusted ISO and shutter speed so that the image was exposed properly.

Urban Landscape Photography

Urban Landscape

Urban landscape as it suggests in the name is photography that is a landscape but in a urban area, this is different because most photography is done in the country side in wide open spaces. This type of photography was very new to me as i have never done any type of landscape photography never mind urban landscape. Through my research i found that photographers for landscape use very wide lenses such as 10mm lenses. Because these are also very expensive i did not have any of these after researching again what lens would be best to use i found my default kit lens of 18-55 was perfectly acceptable for urban landscape shots.

The next issue i had is because we live in a very rural area it was hard to get anything urban, to do this it meant that i had to travel to get to a destination that was more suitable.

The first location i went to is a more urban area just outside were i live and is the most urban area i can think of near us. After researching on the internet i found that most urban landscapes are quite dull and very grungy. To get this effect on my photos i slightly under exposed the picture leaving the sky to be perfectly exposed, this showed a grungy look on the steps and on the buildings while making the sky look a nice place. The other thing i did was try and find the most urban area i could, i decided to use this area because of the green steps showing were a founting had once been and had now dried up, this again because of the green makes the place feel very grungy.

This photo was shot with my 18-55 lens with no filters attached to it and using only natural light.

For my 2nd urban landscape photo i decided to do this at night, the reason i did this was to show on even at night urban areas are still as busy. This shot was taken while i was in london, i like this photo because it shows the row of streetlights going into the tunnel as well as all the light trains from the cars. For this i used a low shutter speed and rested the camera on some railings as i did not have a tripod as well as showing the light trials it also lightened up the scene.

My last shot is again of london, here i took the picture over the river, this showed all of the city and showed how it is a urban area, for this i used a polarising filter, this cut down on reflections and also brought out the colour of the sky. In post processing i edited the image by cropping some of the image were the wall was by the river.

Movement Photography

Movement Photography

For another one of our topics we were asked to take shots of movement. For this i decided i would focus my project on water dropping. This process is extremely hit and mis as usually only one of every 20 shots actually contains any sort of water droplet.

After looking at other peoples photos on the internet and looked round other peoples setups for this type of photography i decided that i would need a external flash for my camara for it to work best. For this i used a Jessops 360AFD flashgun, this allowed me more control over my flash.

Once i had my setup perfected i then went about trying different types of water dropping, from simple water drops using water all the way to doing the effect using coffee and milk. For all of these shots i used around 1/200 for this as well as a aperture of around 14. I also set my flash to 1/16 so that the photo was not over exposed. As well as all of these measures i also shot everything in RAW, this allowed me to not have to worry as much about things such as white balance as this could be corrected in post processing, to do this i used Adobes Lightroom and Photoshop software.

Below are some of my different attempts at this type of photography.

To do the photo above, i used a variation of the water technique. Instead of just using water i used water with flour to add thickness and then food colouring for both of the dropping water and also the base water.

This photo was done using the traditional water dropping technique using water dropping onto more water in a baking tray. For this i used 2 flashes, the onboard flash and a external flash. This was then put into Adobe Lightroom were it was cropped and also had the exposure lowered slightly as the photo was slightly over exposed. This was easily done because of shooting in RAW.

This photo is using another type of movement, instead of using a high shutter to freeze the action like above i used a low shutter speed to blur the action to show movement. To do this i set my focus point on the car and panned the camera as the car moved this made the car to be in focus while the background was blurred to show movement. For this shot i used a zoom lens (18-105) this ideally could have been done with a telephone lens or a long prime to get the car more sharper but i did not have these available to me.

For the shot below i used a shutter speed of 1/80 and a aperture of F13 the reason for this was 1 so that the image was not over exposed because it was a sunny day and 2 so that most of the car as possible would be in focus. No fill flash was used on this shot and was all natural light.

I like this shot because of how the way the shot has been taken by the house it looks like the driver was going really fast when in reality he was going quite slow. The shot is also framed like it is a long straight so would reiterate the sense of speed when really just off camera there was a large bridge and drivers were only coming of it slowly.

Three Point Lighting

After learning about how the different sort of light kits and how they work we had a go ourseles using objects around the room and using the portable lighting kit and a black pice of sugar paper as our background.

The setup we were creating was the 3 point lighting setup as we learned in our previous lesson, we then did a practical exercise testing how we could change the appearance of the image by putting it in different places.

While doing this we used many different setups for the lights so that we could see what it did when we moved the lighting as well as show how when we moved the lights it changed the way the pictures looked. Some of the photos i took i really liked as i thought they were quite professional looking and for my first try using a flash kit i thought they turned out well. Others of my photos though did not look good as the flash was to close or in a place were the camera caught the lights.

Here are some of my photos

This photo was my favourite one i took, i like this because of the background and how it is so dark making the colours from the bottle stand out. To do this i lowered the ISO as well as the aperture.

This was another photo i liked, the reason i liked this is i could see this being used on a website to do with photography due to the way the light shines onto the nikon logo making it a good photo for advertising nikon products. The shadows are also long and produce a very strong effect.