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.