Rachel O'Donnell

Final Project Feedback

In the black and white portrait of Jonny that I shot last minute, the background I shot on is dark whilst the photo is light, some people said that this took away from the picture but others said that the contrast was a good thing.
The photo I took of my sister in the woods has been badly post produced, I should have lightened the figure more so that she stands out more from the background and made the colour of the picture more green in tone than orange/yellow.
Although I didn’t have a 50mm lens for the close up portrait, the lens I used makes it soft enough and a couple people have said that they like my picture better being slightly less soft than the one I was trying to copy because it makes it more dramatic.
The hands photo has the same problem with the black background when it should have been light, but although the composition of the image is quite different, the lighting is similar enough for it to be okay.
The final picture of my friend Sophie in the basketball court is the one that everyone thought was the best. Although the original was taken from a slightly higher angle so that there was no sky showing in the background, the composition is almost exactly the same other than that. Also the fact that my photo was shot on a cloudy day rather than a sunny one doesn’t really take much away from the picture.

This photo was really hard to work with because of the bad lighting in it, I would have liked to have been able to re-shoot it but I didn’t have time. The screenshots here are the adjustments that I made to the image in attempt to improve it, the first thing I did was colour correct, and then I started to dodge and burn in parts of the image so that it was more balanced. I then desaturated the image slightly, leaving the person with the colour they already had and taking a bit away from the rest of the image so she stands out more. I then used another curves layer to just make her stand out a bit more against the background and the window behind her and I’m happy with the result of that.

“Cowboys” 2012

This is a portrait of my best friend Sophie, the thing that I was trying to convey in this photo is grief, the photos that I have put in the corner of the photo are of her Mum who died in February, and ever since Sophie has been a different person. The bottles of alcohol I’ve put in the photo are to show that the turns to drinking to make her feel better, as you can see she has a lot of tattoos all over her which have all been for her Mum and her family. She has a really hard life and living at home is hard for her cause it just reminds her of when she was happier and I hope that this photo shows all of this, how she’s trying to rebel and she really struggles.

This third photo was taken inside the building that the stairs lead up to in the last picture. The place was horrible and dirty and you could tell that there were people that had been there taking drugs and there were bottles of alcohol all over the ground, as well as a tent bag that you could see at the bottom of the picture. The island was used during the second world war to protect the water but now it’s deserted, one of the very few uninhabited places in the UK.

Practical Exercise 1

I have done a project very similar to this when I started college and was just learning how to use my camera and now that I have done this before I feel like this is another chance I have to do it better now I am completely sure what I am doing.

1 - small aperture

I was thinking about taking a photo like a landscape with a tree in it so there is a foreground and a background but they are still integral to eachother.

2 - large aperture

I’m not sure what to do for this one yet, I’ll probably take a photo of someone holding something up in front of them

3 - slow shutter speed

I was thinking for this picture to take a photo of someone on a slow shutter speed of about one or two seconds using a torch to make a halo around their head like a halo or something, and if that doesn’t work I might try and find a waterfall somewhere to get a photo of movement with filters

4 - frozen movement

For this I will probably take a photo of something like dropping an apple into a bowl of milk or something like that so I can freeze the splash