Shoot Three - Work Record

For my final exam shoot, I have decided to shoot in the second bedroom in my house as while similar size to my bedroom, it's organised in a very different way, with less space being taken up by wardrobes and chests of drawers, meaning there are less objects scattered around. I'm taking this as an opportunity to focus on composition, perhaps only capturing one or two objects throughout the frame of the shot. I hope to capture macro photographs which incorporate composition rules such as rule of thirds and leading lines.


This image was shot with a shutter speed of 1/25 and an aperture of F8 and an ISO 640. I shot this on the desk that's positioned in the room, and the image depicts a figurine hanging between some cards and a deodorant can. The depth of field was narrow, meaning the figurine is in focus but the deodorant can and the cards are not. This image makes strong use of texture, with the figurine being mostly smooth, however, having some rough and worn textures shown around it; further rough textures are shown on the deodorant cans in the background. The presence of both rough and smooth textures on the same object could represent that while they have been there for a long period of time and have suffered heavy use, they still have use and are in one piece.

Since the lighting in the room was dim, I had to make adjustments to the image to get the final image seen above. Once I opened it in Photoshop, I decided to add an exposure adjustment layer and increase the exposure to +90, which added some light exposure to the image that the camera failed to capture. I added to this by increasing the brightness of the image by 30, meaning the image now appeared correctly exposed. However, I noticed the low lighting had created a blue cast over my image, which I decided to fix. I used this method to correct the white balance of the image, and the above image has much warmer tones to it as a result. Below is the original image as a reference of how my editing affects the image.

Here is another of the images from my set of straight images. The image was shot on 1/25 with an aperture of F6.3 and an ISO of 640. Like the previous image, this was shot on the desk in the second bedroom of my house, however, I tried to move my shot to somewhere in the centre of the desk where there were more objects concentrated to one area. I focused my camera on the small brass diving helmet keyring that can be seen in the mid ground, and my use of a narrow aperture meant that everything outside of the keyring is out of focus. I tried to use leading lines in the photo, with the edge of the stack of notes and the pen leading the viewer to the focus point of the image. There are some clear contrast in textures in the image; the keyring is smooth and shiny in texture yet also has some grimy, stained marks on it to contrast it, which I feel could be a representation of the resilience of household objects through heavy use and wear, and how they are still functional after this.

To create the straight image shot shown above, I edited the original image (shown below)through  Photoshop in a number of ways

The first thing I noticed about the image is that it was underexposed; this was due to my reluctance to bring the shutter speed too slow as I was shooting handheld and this would create camerashake. The first thing I did to the image was create a brightness/contrast layer and increase the brightness by 40 and the contrast by 20, which meant the image was better exposed, as well as having a wider tonal range. Since the depth of field was so narrow, I felt like adding a vignette would mean this depth is further used to remove background distractions and make the viewer focus on the keyring, which is the focus point of the image.

The first step in this is was adding an ellipsis marquee to cover most of my image. I set the feathering to 150px in order to avoid my vignette having hard edges.

The next step was to inverse this selection using select>inverse. This meant that the area selected was the surrounding areas outside the marquee, which was where my vignette would be.

The final step is creating the vignette itself. To create this, I added a brightness/contrast layer and moved the brightness to -50. Because the area surrounding the ellipsis was selected, it only adjusted this area, achieving the vignette effect seen above.

This is my final exam shoot. I feel like throughout this exam period, I have developed my concept of capturing macro style close-ups of household objects, successfully incorporating documentary photography into this technique to create narratives through these objects.