This week I began to try out some different lighting strategies. I've never really used a serious light set up but have seen how many photographers have utilized lighting to create some pretty incredible images. Because I dont own any lights besides my flash I decided to play around with a smaller subject and smaller lights. For this I used an elefant model and chess pieces along with some tiny finger lights that I hope to use for more light painting in the future. This allowed me to create a scaled down version of what a photographer's studio might look like. I spent quite a while trying out different lighting angles and avoided using my flash so that I could focus on the placement of the smaller lights.
I wasn't able to take any truly great shots simply because I was experimenting and don't quite have the equipment needed for taking studio lit quality photos. I also focused less on the subject and more on how different lighting angles affected the image. Overall I thought this experiment was successful, even If I did only got a couple decent shots. Once I have a few real lights and a backdrop I'm sure that this experiment will help me. This also forced me to be a little more creative and gave me a bit of a challenge which makes things more fun.
Also, I'm not sure how many people consistently check my blog but If anyone who reads this has a suggestion for any photos to take or something interesting to film or even simply to experiment with something related to cameras, just comment and I will try it out and post it one week.
For this documentary project, my group members and I
created a short film about The Shoe Game. This is a community of people who buy
and sell the latest, most rare shoes, most of which are Jordans and Nikes. This
was always an interesting thing to me as I’ve seen kids at school who wear a
different pair of shoes every day and have collections worth thousands of
dollars. I still find it very interesting although the amount of drama within
our school shoe game was less than I first expected. This however, did not
affect the quality of our film. I don’t think we could go too much further with
our topic but I don’t regret choosing it. I thought having the freedom to
choose our own topic was vital, otherwise I don't think we would have been as
interested and this would have made the final result not as strong.
Throughout
the process of making this film, I discovered that documentary filmmaking is
much different than other forms of film. I found it to be much more difficult
than creating a film where there are actors or just something experimental. In
other types of films, lines can be changed and you are delivering something
from your own imagination and can be creative, while with documentaries you
must stick to the truth and not stretch facts to make the film more
interesting. I also learned about editing a documentary and all the possible
ways to format it. This allowed me to get more creative with how to edit it.
One of the most challenging aspects of the process
was planning how the final result would look. Once you have all of your
footage, information and even script for a voice over, it can be very difficult
to see what the final product will look like. You may have a plan but it will
always change until there is a stable rough cut on the computer. One of the
ways I overcame this was to edit our interviews and parts that I knew would
fit, and then recorded voice-overs. As soon as the voice-overs are added in, it
becomes much easier to put in other b-roll. I under estimated how challenging
this process would be but I found it very rewarding in the end.
If
I were to do this again, I would probably focus less on what the final product
would look like and plan out what information would go into the film first. I
also would not write a script until all of our interviews were done because I
found that what the kids had to say compared to what they did say had a huge
affect on how the film turned out. Besides these few things I think we made a
pretty strong documentary for our first attempt.
I
think that it went generally smoothly for this first year. I thought that it
was good to show us examples of other short documentaries but maybe you could
also give more general ideas of how to structure the film. Also I think there
could have been a bit more individual guidance throughout the process. Instead
of going over some things with the whole class you could have weekly meetings
with each group to go through what they need to work on and what’s going well.
Overall what we needed was simply work time, which you did give us and truly
helped. At first I was slightly stressed and felt rushed but once you gave us a
bunch of full classes to work I was able to overcome some challenges and that’s
what allowed us to finish.
Overall
I think this project went smoothly and we were able to come out with a fairly
solid documentary that I think captures The Shoe Game quite well. The deadline
extensions helped a lot and without them we would have rushed and that would
have affected the final product. I think showing some of our films to next
year’s class would help them greatly. At least from our group’s point of view I
thought this documentary project was a success.
Today I tried something a little bit different and a little abstract. I took pictures of water. At first you may think that pictures of water aren't very interesting but I discovered some pretty cool things to do with it. First I set up my camera on a tripod with weight attached so that my heavy and expensive dslr wouldn't tip over. I also attached and external flash. Then I set a dish of water with paper around it to prevent shadows under the lens. I first started by practicing my timing and played around with plain water but found it difficult to make look very interesting so I wanted to addd some other color. For this I turned to food coloring.
As I added drops of food coloring to the dish of water, mini splashes would occur and I tried to freeze these moments. It is very difficult to time but eventually I got it down and took some good shots. What I find awesome about these pictures is that they are of something as simple as water but remain abstract and interesting with the use of colors. Some of the pictures even appear more like solid figures than liquid.
I wasn't quite sure what I was going for when I first started but ideas began developing and I think I got some very nice photos out of the water drops. If I were to do this again, I would probably use additional lights to create a more stable, shadow free pool of water. Also I would use a cleaner white dish because I noticed that even the smallest amount of dust will appear with the use of the flash. I hope you enjoy the pictures. I originally took about fifty but these are the ones I think came out best.
