Stairs and escalators featured heavily at the QVB – it does have four floors after all.
I liked to photograph the curves – it made a change from always photographing straight lines.
And the colourful mosaic floors really brightened up things.
It made for interesting scenes of everyday life.
After class I made my way back to the city. I planned to find some places to shoot at but the weather wasn’t about to co-operate.
I headed under-cover into the Queen Victoria Building. Good old QVB, it really is a photographer’s paradise with all its Victorian charm, light spaces, and many interesting angles. It’s one of my favourite place to shoot.
We talked a lot about white balance in class, and how certain light conditions and different light sources can affect the colour of a photo, warm to cool. It’s basically what our eyes automatically do, but what needs to be applied by the camera when taking shots. Modern digital cameras have auto-white-balance that tries to mimic human eyes, but similarly it can get things rather wrong. This function can however be used creatively to give you some interesting moods.
For the last week of assignments we were free to do any project we wanted. I found it very hard to settle on a theme. Luckily near class I found Paddington Reservoir Gardens. What a magical space it was. On top was some interesting architecture.
But look down and I found a sunken garden.
And a library.
This shot became my project – the world from above.
More shutter speed work to capture movement, this time at my local railway station at peak hour. The commuters really did form a stream when captured at a slower shutter speed.
Slowing it down completely, with an exposure of one second, while zooming in, was great fun. This could be a scene out of a horror movie – a ghost is streaming out of the TV.
In class, we learned how to ‘paint with light’. All you need is a very dark room, a light source, and a very long exposure.
At home, I took my version of a ‘selfie’.
After the depth-of-field homework, we worked on experimenting with shutter speed. This was something I rarely did intentionally, so it was exciting to explore new or rarely used techniques. I soon found out that it was both fun and frustrating, in pretty much equal measures, but I agree with our teacher that the pictures do have more of an energy to them than the majority of ‘frozen moments’.
During class, we went out to Oxford Street to ‘play with traffic’ and pan passing vehicles. It took a lot of shots just to get something that worked well, like this cyclist.
And this close up of a car braking seemed like an accident in motion.
Static and Silence 