Black and White photographers

Ansel Adams is a very famous landscape photographer. I have decided to research him because I would like to photograph cityscapes for my black and white photography.

Here is some of Ansel's work:

Ansel's images are very interesting because he has something in the foreground and in the background so it gives his photographs a bit of depth which is what i have tried to do with my photographs.

Terragalleria.com has some cityscape pictures which I liked but as they are from quite a high angle i dont think i can replicate them exactly.

Here are some other images that also interested me:

Script

For this video we had to produce a set of images for a video based story. The influence for this video was a film called La Jetee.
La Jetee is about a man who is a prisoner in WW2 in an abandoned Paris where survivors live in underground galleries. Scientists are researching time travel on test subjects living underground but not many people can handle the shock and either die or become crazy. They find a man who can withstand the shock and has a vague past but an obsessive memory. The man's memory was obsessed with a woman he had met on a train platform before witnessing an incident he did not understand, but remembered someone dying on the platform. The scientists manage to make his memory reach the time in the past when he met the woman and they develop and relationship. The scientists send the man to the future next where he meets some people who show him a destroyed society.  Then he returns to the present time where the people he met in the future help him escape to the future but he asks to return to the pre war time in hope to find the mysterious woman. which he does and realizes that an agent is about to kill him. It is then when he is about to die that he realizes the incident he witnessed was his own death. 
The film is made from still images in black and white. For me the film was confusing at times but the technique it was made in was very clever and seemed impossible when we had to recreate it but turned out to be quite easy. It was a lot of fun to make.

Location Photography: experiment for final photoshoot

For my final project I want to create my own strobist photography using a flash gun to photograph:

* Ballerina in a theatre with the flash guns but also the lip lighting effect from the red head lamps

*Hyde park- photographing the skaters using flash guns.

I have decided to go for the skaters photoshoot although I really like both ideas and find they would both work really well. If I have some time left I will try to photograph the Ballerina. 

Here are some test shots from class when we were being taught how to use the flash gun:

 These two photographs are of trying the flash gun outside:

These photographs I made the flash gun brighter from the lowest setting to the highest:

These photographs are around Leeds which were still experimental shots but worked well.

Experimental Photography - Planets

To create these little planets you need to take multiple photographs in landscape format on a tripod to make sure your images are aligned this will make it easier to merge them together in Photoshop.

You do this by creating an oblong shape in Photoshop so it can hold all the images you choose to include. It does take a few tries to find the right size. After you have found the right size then you need to start dropping your images onto the layer you have created and scaling them down to size and overlapping the images together. Then with the eraser tool you can clean up the edges of the photograph to blend them together better. Then you need to change the image size so the width and the height are both the same e.g 2000, after the image has resized you then need to rotate the image 180 degrees then select polar coordinates on the filter tab. This will create this type of image:

But if you want your planet to look like this then don't rotate the image.

Here is one that i made differently using photo merge that didn't go as planned:

Opposites