Portraits!

I went and knocked on my neighbors door in my apartment and asked him, Marcus, if I could take some pictures of you for a photo assignment. He said, "sure I can help you with it." He loves to play video games on his Nintendo Switch so I thought that's a good idea, so I posed him in his gaming chair, snapped a couple pictures. For the second set, I wanted something with depth, I had him stand on the stairs in a stairway with his arms crossed and the stair rail leading you to him and creating depth. I then had him go down the stairs and pose in front of the window to create more of a soft box look plus a white backdrop for him to stand out more. For the last set of images, I wanted something more outdoors look and had him sit on the guardrail on First Ave with the river and bridge out of focus in the background.

 All about Movement!

I think I missed this assignment post, but none the less, I saw the buildings in the reflection moving and thought thats odd but my creative side went, "take the picture!" The clouds in the sky were moving and had an interesting pattern to them too.

All about Depth of Field!

Depth of Field (or DOF) is the best part of being able to control the camera yourself. I get to control what the viewer sees first and what is the most important about the image. The first image is of a church cemetery in downtown Pittsburgh. I wanted to show all of the graves and to give you a better perspective on it. So I changed lenses to my 10-20mm and at 10mm I took this photograph. The 2nd image is of one of the doors on the church, I again took this on my 10-20mm lens. The 3rd image is my favorite out of the whole shoot, sometimes you have to take a second and "look up"  and find new angles. I enjoy the blue sky with the clouds and the buildings "touching" the sky! The 4th image is of a plant in a flower pot and wanted to get close to the subject to get it in focus and the rest of the other building in the background out of focus. The 5th image I got creative, wanted to have something in the foreground (the fence) to draw you into the background, which is the Coke truck as the subject. The last and final image is of an alley way as we walked a bit farther into downtown Pittsburgh, I chose to make this one black and white because these really no emotions you can get from this in color. In B&W, I get the deep dark and texture from the bricks that makeup the buildings. I chose this one to have the viewer keep looking into the image and with having natural leading lines, makes them wanting more.

All about Motion!

The experience I had taking these photos on a photowalk I was apart of going through downtown Pittsburgh, PA was a great time from finding these images in the wild and seeing them in your mind before you press that shutter button. Images I think of would be cool, I need to execute them fast to get the moment I want to be captured in the right place. This requires me to know what settings to use and what kind of composition I need to be in to get the winner image. Do I want to capture this in landscape or portrait, do I want a shallow depth of field (f/2) or everything in focus (f/22).

What research went into the shoot? Not so much the research but the most important part of this photowalk was the weather, it was a nice sunny, overcast day with some clouds in the sky. What drew you to the subject(s)? What drew me to the subjects were my eyes that saw an image and thought that, that would be an interesting photograph. In that moment, I think of what my settings are and if that would be appropriate to be at f/3.5 for a picture or another f/stop. Then my shutter speed, is 1/30th of a sec. good or should I be at 1/125th of a sec. (subjective) to freeze the motion. Next, I move onto my ISO, is it in a bright area, if so move my ISO to around 100. Finally, I think of composition, is my image composed right, should I use the Rule of Thirds, should I capture it with more of the background in the frame, or a tighter shot?

For the past couple of days, I wanted to walk around downtown Pittsburgh and create images. This is one of the images I created and am using for this particular post. This image is looking into Market Square. I decided to take this picture because it shows depth in the image to lead you though.