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Photography 101 Seminar: More students’ photos

July 19, 2010 by Brad 

Last week, we worked a lot on showing motion through the use of shutter speed. Since we had already hit upon lot’s of accidental instances of fast shutter speeds freezing motion that the eye usually misses (mouths frozen mid-syllable, eyelids half shut, you know – real flattering stuff!), we worked mostly on slow shutter speeds creating motion blur. I’ll spare you the many images of my feet and let you see the students’ work that was aimed at Miss Nikki’s much more presentable peds. Nikki brought along some shoes and a few other items she had been doing photo homework with, in hopes of creating original images to populate her own shoe blog.

Even after we wore her out from walking back and forth for us, we worked on using available light to make some impromptu “product shot” images that might suit her blog needs. My goal was to explain how we could use household scenes and common light fixtures to come up with something beyond a snapshot. What goes into real commercial product shots is overwhelmingly painstaking, time-consuming, technical, and complex. It’s also really not suited to the level of class that we’ve got going on here. So we had fun, we made it fast, and we wound up with just what Nikki wanted!

Here’s the motion, captured by Bethany. Nikki, struttin’ her bad self…

After all that walking, we had Nikki stand just so, and worked on composition, filling the frame, depth of field, and low-tech lighting.

This is the behind the scenes view of the photo above. It’s really quite simple, which is what this first series of classes is geared toward.

This one has a story. I don’t normally like selective color (where the color is dropped out of everything except, say, the flowers in a bride’s bouquet) because it’s getting a bit tied to a particular time period (which is pretty much behind us now). But this is an image that Nikki first thought was going to be a throw-away, one we could just delete in camera. But I suggested that she consider its unorthodox composition as viable for alternate uses. I see it as a practical template or background for a webpage/blog-page that would have text (maybe slanted text, hmm?) in the empty space that grows from the top-left to the bottom-center. I dropped out the color entirely to further my point. Then, in an effort to suggest just how vast the possibilities were with this “throw-away” original, I clicked a pre-set in my software and brought back only the reds. She loved it! So here it is.

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