Shoot 2 - Landscape at Kew Gardens

Landscape at Kew Gardens 

Plans for shoot- 

My plans for shoot 2 are to photograph landscapes at Kew Gardens. These landscape images are the ones I am going to use with images of interiors to produce a camera obscura effect in Photoshop. I aim to gather a wide range of landscapes so that I can work with them properly when editing. 

Photographers Influence - Abelardo Morell 

For this shoot I have been inspired by the work of Abelardo Morell as he photographs camera obscura. This is a difficult technique to achieve therefore for my first attempt at this effect I am taking  pictures of rooms and landscapes separately then composing them together in Photoshop. I really enjoy Abelardo's work as its very original, it is something that I haven't seen before and something many photographers don't attempt. Below are some examples of his camera obscura work - 

AO1 - At this stage my work from this shoot doesn't represent that of Abelardo Morell. This is due to the fact that I am trying to achieve the camera obscura look in a different way to how he achieves it. This is through taking pictures of landscapes and interiors separately then putting them together in Photoshop. Therefore this shoot shows the landscape images I have taken for this idea, I have tried to take images that will look good and work well when I try to edit them in photoshop, using photographs that are mainly sky or that have detail which will stand out on a wall. 

Image Bank - 

Below are some landscape images that can be seen at Kew Gardens. I wanted to have this as my image bank as I think it gives me an idea of the kinds of landscapes I will have the opportunity to work with when I'm there. 

Contact Sheet - 

Best Images (Edited) - 

AO2 - In this shoot my camera settings changed quite a lot depending on the area I was in this means that my ISO and Aperture varied. However I tried to keep my shutter speed at a relatively fast setting so that I didn't get any blur in my photo's.  I needed to do this as I didn't have a tripod in this shoot due to having to walk round Kew Gardens in a limited amount of time. 

When it came to editing these images I just done slight adjustments on them such as the exposure and the saturation. Another aspect I wanted to change was the contrast so I used curves to do this, this made the images have a bit more depth which will look good when I edit them onto interiors. I wanted to make these images slightly lighter exposure wise as they will have to just cover the interiors but be slightly opaque making it look more realistic. 

AO3 & AO4 - As mentioned before, taking this shoot forward will mean editing the landscape images onto an interior to represent a camera obscura. I think the photographs were successful as they will work well in this editing. However I would say that if I was to shoot these again I would have liked to go on a day where there was clouds not a grey sky, this would add more detail onto the image and make it appear much brighter changing the mood of the photographs. 

Experimentation 

As mentioned above these images from this shoot will be merged with shoot 4 to create a camera obscura effect using Photoshop. I have selected the best interior images that I took and matched them with the best suited landscapes that were taken at Kew Gardens. 

Below are my results - 

I decide to stick with the same landscape as it worked the best due to me taking it from a high vantage point, therefore creating a lot of space above the trees for me to work with. I like the way these turned out as they accurately reflect a camera obscura and are a good indication of how the rest of my work will go if I decide to use this approach. 

I have shown how I achieved this outcome in the blog post 'computer experiments', this hows a step by step guide to how these were made.