Digital Photography (WK1) - Exploring Composition

Hey everyone! I hope you had a great weekend!

Man, this assignment was more intensive than I expected. Yes, we were definitely warned that the first 5-10 photos would be easy and the rest wouldn't be...But I underestimated how many angles I would ACTUALLY need to figure out. I also didn't anticipate how terrible the lighting in my house is.

For this assignment, I tried to find something interesting in my house to use as a subject. I thought my octopus tentacle wet specimen would give some fun textures, different angles and shapes depending on which side I was photographing, and the glass orb would interestingly conduct the light. These were shot with a Nikon D3200 with a 35mm mirrorless fixed lens (it can't zoom in or out, and I have to manually focus the lens due to my camera being a little broken).

As I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to lean into darker compositions, but I tried to play with the aperture settings a bit (I'm still figuring it out, and finessing my camera is a minor struggle). These are slightly edited in Lightroom Classic to remove the glare on the glass from the sliding door/natural light or to slightly shift the perspective so that the photo was actually straight. I learned that changing the point of view can drastically change the overall feeling you get when looking at the subject. For example, the first photo, where the specimen is backlit by the door, is shot from a slightly upward angle. This obviously changes what the viewer can see of the specimen, but it also gives the inside of the orb an ethereal glow. Whereas the second photo, shot with no backlighting, gives the specimen a closer, creepier view. I learned that when it comes to composition, everything matters. The angle, the lighting, the background, and the foreground. What I thought was a good photo of the subject was sometimes ruined by the background or the way the light was interacting with it. A lot of my photos came out slightly tilted because of how I was holding the camera, which went unnoticed until I was trying to edit them. 

I'm excited to hear how these photos could be edited to look better! I had a lot of fun with this, despite the stress of trying to take 30 different photos (haha). 

Until next time!





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