Shoot One - Work Record

For this shoot, I plan to capture macro close up images of the objects in my bedroom. I am going to be shooting handheld and will use natural lighting to light my objects. I hope to achieve surreal closeups which present the objects in my house as larger than life, as well as presenting them as obscured and making it unclear what they really are.

Here is one of my straight images from the shoot, which was shot at 1/30 with an aperture of f5.6 and an ISO of 640. Despite turning the lights on in the room and opening the curtains fully, the lighting was still not very strong, meaning the shutter speed had to be put to 1/30 and the ISO I moved up to 640 in order to increase the sensor's sensitivity to light. The shutter speed being so slow while I was shooting handheld meant there was some camerashake, which was something I had to fix in editing. To do this, I used the shake reduction filter, which is located under filter>sharpen. Once you select the shake reduction filter, you are given an adjustments screen.

I played around with adjusting the blur trace bounds for a little while, as the motion blur in the image was small and a large blur trace bound would create blur itself. I eventually settled with 26px. The difference in sharpness of the background, where I focused my shot, can be seen below
Before

After

As you can see, the image is clearly sharper, particularly in the top of the composition where the gold tin and pins are.

My image made clear use of colour prominently in its composition. The foreground, which is out of focus, makes heavy use of a muted shade of purple; purple is a symbol of wealth, therefore this being present in the composition could represent the economic struggle of my household. We try to work to get enough money to live nicely, however, this doesn't always become a reality. A muted shade of brown is also present in the focal point in the background, shown in the sand inside the teddy bear shaped bottle. Brown can represent nature, and it being a muted shade rather than a saturated shade creates a sense of nature being tamed and, in a way domesticated, by literally being trapped into a bottle.



Shot at 1/15, with an aperture of f5.6 and an ISO 640. This image was captured on my desk, on which there were a number of objects that had gathered there over time. I took the image from a high angle, pointing down on my phone that was left on the desk, and taking it from a perspective in that there is a message shown in the reflection which is unreadable apart from the words "Hi Reece!" This message creates some context to the scene, as it implies that the desk in which this was taken on belongs to Reece, which is me. I decided to convert this image to black and white after shooting, as I felt it would remove the distraction made by the bright green colour on the side of the phone. To convert this image, I opened it in Photoshop, then went into the adjustments panel and selected black and white. I chose the "Darker" preset, as I thought it would bring out some of the dark tones shown in the phone screen more. The black and white filter created a wide tonal contrast, in which there are some very dark tones shown in the phone screen, which are contrasted by the light tones of the side of the phone. The image being composed of mainly dark tones creates a mysterious mood, which is supported by the unreadable cursive handwriting shown on the note; the whole mood could suggest that the message could have either positive or negative and this is where the mystery is created.

For my next shoot, I want to keep to my close-up macro format, however, I feel I need to focus more on presenting texture and reflection, as these help to push the documentary and narrative side of my images. I also feel that I could develop my framing, capturing different items together in order to create a sense of contrasting ideas or moods.