Specialist Session: Photography

In the specialist session, we were looking at Portraits/Self Portraits and although I am making a sketchbook for this as well I will write up here the work so that I can share this. I will not do this each week as I am using the sketchbook but as an example this is my first session on the blog.

In the session I was explaining ISO (light sensitivity), exposure compensation, Aperture priority and the aperture (F-Stops) - here is a great article from Cambridge in Colour which Photography students will find useful:

Cambridge in Colour: Camera Exposure

I concentrated on making self-portraits using the camera timer/remote and I wanted to just express who I was through the image and things that I love - since I enjoy the fact you can be anything you want in the image I used a wig and sat in my favourite place - the bath!.  I bought a set of Photography books to the bath with me and set up the camera.  I was using my old Olympus E-3.

Here are the contact sheets from the shoot - I made around 170 images in total.

I then chose my test prints and printed these to check quality.  

EXIF Details: 

ISO: 500

F/5.1

+0.3

1/5

24mm

ISO: 500

F/5

1/6

+0.3

24mm

The images I shot were slightly overexposed which is how I wanted then to look to emphasise the whiteness of the bath and skin.  These two above have a very slow shutter but as I was shooting using tripod/remote this reduced the chance of blur however they are perhaps slightly soft but I personally like the outcome as a set of prints they work well and express conceptually what I was after. 

ISO 500

F5

1/5

+0.3

24mm

I like the joke in the shot of aking more of colour and shooting in Black and White.  however, I did shoot in Raw and jpeg so that I would have the RAW print if I wanted to make editing decisions later.  All these shots are straight from the camera and no Photoshop, no cropping or editing of any kind.