Unit 4 Photography - Katie Mould: March 2014

Preparation

For this shoot I need to make sure that I can take pictures of a variety of signs, obviously focusing on the close - up idea. I am making sure my camera my camera is charged and that I have my telephoto lens for the signs that might be too far away for me to capture with a normal lens. I also have to make sure that I have enough signs to actually take photographs of, so I am heading up to London, due to the abundance of signs.

What I Hope To Achieve

For this shoot I am hoping that I am going to be able to get a good variety of close up photographs of signs that show what I am trying to get across. I am aiming to get a lot of very bright and colourful signs, showing both traffic and signal signs, but also interesting and informative signs. I am also going to be looking at shop signs as well, as I think that some of them are very unique and would be interesting to capture. Also I am going to try and take pictures of big billboards to show the close up of interesting posters in London. I think that I am going to make the majority of the signs that I take photos of be traffic and signal signs. Something like this is what I am aiming for.

What I Actually Achieved

I managed to get a lot of different photographs of many different signs, mainly consisting of traffic and signal signs, which is what I wanted to do. I think that through specifically deciding what I was going to take photographs, helped me a lot when it came to actually shooting. I think that this is partly the reason that I managed to get such a variety of photographs. I spent a lot of the time looking around at what I could actually take photographs of and what would look the most interesting. It worked out really well using my telephoto lens as well as it allowed me to take photographs of things that were really far away. It also allowed me to get a greater depth of field when it came to take photographs of subjects that were fairly close to the actual lens, which added to the effect in the photos. These are two of my favourite photographs from the shoot.

This is one of my favourite shots due to the fact that you can see movement in the background, which is something that I wanted to capture in at least one of my shoots. I also like that the sign/signal in this photographs is in red, which is designed to indicate a warning. I like that it stands out to the rest of the image. This was my main thought when taking this photograph and it has turned out exactly as I expected. I decided to increase the saturation a little in photoshop, just to make it stand out even more.

This was another one of my favourites due to the fact that the angle in the image is not directly face on. THe slight angle facing in from the right hand side adds more to the sense of direction that the sign is actually giving off. I also like the colour theme in this image, with the red, white and black and I think that it makes certain aspects stand out a lot more. I particularly like the wall that the sign is actually placed on as it has a lot of detail and dimension that makes the sign look more 3D.

What I Am Going To Do Next

In regards to this shoot, I am going to create some computer experiments too look more at the type of photographs that I can actually get from the shoot. I think that this would be interesting to look at due to the fact that some of the sign images look a little bit basic. In regards to my next shoot, I am going to look at the close-up idea of many different people's eyes. I think that this will be an interesting development from this shoot due to the fact that the eyes are what we use to see these signs and everything around us. I am going to look at a number of people's eyes, both female and male, young and old, to get a good variety of images so that I can place them all together to show the differences.