Lets give it a go !!!

Inspired by Eric William Curry's photographs, it was time to give it a go.

My Photoshop skills with layers are not anywhere as good as Eric Curry's, so for a first off attempt I decided it was a "lets just take a single shot of a particular scene and see what happens".

The above image was taken at a local children's  play area.

The idea was to set the camera on long exposure in darkness and light the scene with a torch.

This shot was a pre-cursor to the main trials, just to get a feel of what was required to produce a good shot.

Camera settings were ~ Shutter Speed of 30 seconds, an Aperture of f3.5, ISO set at 100 and a focal length of 30mm

I actually like this shot, it is well lit and quite sharp.

What I dislike about the image is that it is quite bright on the white board, probably a bit to bright and toning down of this area would be more preferable.

Attempt two......

This time I decided to try for a more technically challenging scene. A scene with more than one element and hopefully a chance to get a better composition.

Blaenavon has a local railway that's open for visitors on the weekends for steam train trips.

I decided to go to the train station and try to illuminate it at night with the tracks illuminated as well to produce a more compositionally pleasing image.

I took a number of images and then chose what I felt was the best one.

Below is the contact sheet for the images taken.

 

I decided that image DSC _1891 was the best one and converted it into a JPEG.

 

 

The final image can be seen below.

 



I think that compositionally this image works, it is well lit and bright.

The image was taken at F5.6 for 30 seconds at an ISO of 200. The lens used was a Tokina 11-16mm wide angle lens @ 16mm.

I personally think that the colours have been re-produced well with the correct white balance.

Can the image be improved?

Well the answer is yes, I think that I could have used a smaller aperture to bring more of the image in focus. Probably used a f stop of about f/11. I also think that including less sky would have helped.

I have decided that working with light may be the theme for my photo book, I have started reviewing other photographers that work or paint with light and I have many more ideas on what to do with both light and subject matter.