Evaluation.

For this project we where asked to pick a location, take a series of images and create a book. For the project I was hoping to achieve 10 or more images to create a small a5 book and print it. I managed to achieve this and more by doing multiple locations and taking a huge amount of images and having a large pool of images to choose from. I decided to choose these images because of the control I had, originally I chose to take street images at Preston Market but due to the difficulties I had and the small frames of time that I could shoot effectively I decided to change to urban decay and graffiti art. The reason I chose this is because of the control I had over the environment, I could use on camera flash, off camera flash and even tripods, whereas with street you couldn't use any of those extra equipment. 

Technical

The technical aspects to street photography in comparison to the urban exploring was totally different. 
With street photography I was limited to fast shutter speeds, high iso's and wide open apertures to let as much light in while keeping the shutter speeds high. An example of why I found this subject difficult shown here:

Although this is a well composed image it is a little underexposed and there's a tiny amount of motion blur (even at 1/80th of a second) because everything is so fast moving. If you where to zoom in you would probably see a certain amount of grain in the image.




Whereas if you have a look at this image from one of my urbex shoots you can see the image is well exposed (in the area's highlighted by the flash) and because I could really take my time composing the image and selecting where I could put the flash to highlight what I wanted. Due to my flash being at 1/64 I could choose my shutter speed to be at something like 1/60 with 100 iso and I could close my aperture a little to get a bit more crisp images. This was an effective decision because 
I decided to shoot all my images in raw and post processing them in Photoshop. I did this because it meant i could bring out any details that may have been blown out by the flash or bring out a certain amount of detail in the shadows. 

The research I did involving Marchand Meffre's work really helped with the final images because it showed that a lot of people use natural lighting while urban exploring and I wanted something different, by using the flash guns i think this was effective in creating a different image style. 

The strengths of my final images is that they generally fit into one section or category of images. The images I took work really well with the flash I believe because some of the shots with the flash really highlights the graffiti (which is one of the main subjects of the book) the detail in my images are quite highly detailed and with slight boosting of the clarity I get a slight HDR look without overdoing it. 

Location Book

contact sheet from the shoot.
i have decided on these images because they best show the building.

location 3

This shoot was in an abandoned warehouse called Sheppard Security. I was mainly focussing on the graffiti in the building and capturing what people have done in the building since it's abandonment. How we got in took quite a bit of effort, we had to climb up onto a roof and then climb through a window on the first floor. Once inside we found a way downstairs into the main room straight away because that's where the biggest room was and could get some wide angle shots. once inside though, navigating the building was totally fine. There was a lot of graffiti in the rooms which I focused on mainly.  There was a lot of interesting things in there too, like ties left behind and old security jackets. There where a couple old computers that where stripped apart and broken. There where certain limitations to the shoot like how dark certain area's where but I did bring an off camera flash for the shoot because I knew that it wouldn't be light.

Location 2

This location was quite challenging as was very in the decisive moment, as with all street photography. the environment was very busy and also quite dark, this meant high shutter speeds, wide open lenses and a high iso as to not capture any movement blur. I really like some of the images but the poor lighting tends to ruin the images a little too. I did shoot all the images in raw too but even with raw processing some of the images either where too dark either from lighting change (clouds changing the ambient light) or movement blur from the people.

Dancers studio

I really enjoyed photographing the dancers. There where some certain limitations to the shoot due to the poor lighting and the backlighting making the subject of the image hard to correctly expose without blowing out the background.

With theses images there was only capturing images in the decisive moments, which was quite difficult as there was a lot of movement across the whole studio so capturing with the correct focal length and not being too wide or cutting out an arm or a leg etc.

Contact sheet

I have chosen theses images because of the colours that where created because the images where taken at sunset time all the images looked very warm and not as harsh, with all the images I have edited them differently, some desaturating the images and some over saturated (because of hair colour) I decided to do this because I thought it was very contrasting to the black coat.)