Shoot 6 - Living Room

Living Room

Plans for shoot -  My plan for this shoot was to try another camera obscura set-up but this time in my living room as a change of scenery.  I decided for this shoot I wanted to experiment with the different placements of my subject. As the shutter speed for these shoots was quite long I wanted to try have my subject move around a little bit so that in the end image they would appear multiple times.

Research Influence - My influence for this shoot comes from the photographer Mirja Pirila. Her work is based around the camera obscura concept whereby a room in transformed by the outside, however it isn't the main subject of the image. Most of her work includes a person or multiple people in a room with the landscape on the wall. Upon looking at her work the people are more evident than the landscape itself however it is this subtle extra that makes her work so aesthetically pleasing and very gentle. These are some examples -

AO1 - My photography from shoot 6 reflects this photographers because I have experimented using my sister within my camera obscura images. This is what Marja does in her work and I think it looks really good as it adds extra context compared to the work of Abelardo Morell who concentrates mostly on the landscape. I believe I will be taking this idea forward as it will work well in my last shoots where I am aiming to have a narrative. 

Contact Sheet 

Best Images 

AO2 - For this shoot I decided to keep my aperture on F22 as this ensures that the images I take are the sharpest they can be with every aspect in focus. The ISO for this shoot varied between images due to the changing amounts of light needed within the different shots, it varied between ISO3200 and ISO6400. Although these ISO's are high so may add graininess to my images this is thee amount of light sensitivity I needed to ensure the images were correctly exposed. The most important camera setting for this shoot was my shutter speed as this determines how much of the landscape I get in the image, in clouding the amount of colour seen in the result. The last shoot I done on camera obscura I used a shutter speed of 30secs however this time I used the 'time' setting allowing me to determine how long I wanted the exposure to go on for. As you can see from the camera setting about I experimented with both 1 and 2 minutes to what worked better. I would say from the results that 1 minute looks clearer and has a lot more sharpness to it.

For the editing process I kept it quite simple as I am not experimenting with these images yet, just correctly their temperature, saturation and exposure. You can see the process below -

The first step I took was to increase the exposure, saturation and change around the highlights and shadows to add the depth I was lacking in my images due to the limited amount of light I get to work with. 

Secondly I adjusted the curves to bring some of the shadow back that I had lost previously. Due to increasing the whites a lot this can make the image look washed out and two-dimensional therefore the curve tones that down slightly. 

AO3 & AO4 - I do not think that this shoot went as well as my first one perhaps because the living room is much bigger and the window os bigger it was hard to work with the light. However unlike my first shoot I managed to work with the 'time' setting on my camera so that I was in charge of the shutter speed rather than being tied to the maximum of 30seconds, I think this will really work in my favour in my future shoots. One criticism I would have of my work here is that I had some issues with graininess that I didn't experience in the previous shoot. I will need to look into this on my next shoot and compare what I have changed. The next shoot I will be working with a slightly smaller and brighter room, this will hopefully improve the quality of my images.