Shoot Five - Work Diary

For my Fifth shoot, I decided I wanted to try another new technique. I wanted to attempt to create some High Dynamic Range images. After researching techniques to creating these images, I decided
to shoot using a Camera RAW format, which doesn't compress files and therefore allows for more detail to be captured in the image. The technique involves both photoshop editing as well as advanced camera settings, both of which I felt I needed to experiment more with.

I set my camera to auto bracketing mode, setting the bracketing to two stops so that it would take an image overexposed by two stops and underexposed by two stops as well as a correctly exposed one. My main exposure was set to 1/160 and I set my aperture to f8 for the majority of my shoot, meaning I had a fairly wide depth of field.

Here is the before image for a HDR process. The image was shot on a camera raw format to avoid the image compression that you get when shooting using a JPEG format. To create the final HDR image, you need to go into file>automate>merge for HDR Pro. It then merged the original three auto bracketed images into one HDR image, before giving me a HDR processing menu. I set the mode to 16 bit and local adaption, and checked to the remove ghosts setting, which makes sure there are no objects that only appeared in one shot being processed into the final image. 

However, this image was shot using an exposure of 1/50 and an aperture of f3.5 as the area in which I took this image in was fairly dark. However, I shot all my images using a tripod, therefore they did not suffer from camera shake. The use of HDR was effective in this image I felt, as the location I shot in had both light and dark parts to it, meaning there is a fairly wide tonal range to be used for the HDR process. There are some darker tones in the foreground, shown in the walls surrounding the stairs, as well as some lighter tones shown in the sky far into the background. The HDR processing that helped create this image has widened the tonal range further, making the darker tones darker and more rich as well as increasing the intensity of the light tones of the sky. This wide tonal range creates connotations of the rough and gritty sides of urban life existing alongside the positive sides such as work opportunities and the availability of consumer goods. As I shot this on f3.5, the image has a fairly narrow depth of field; the focus is on the stairs in the midground, therefore the wall in the foreground is out of focus. The camera being focussed on the stairs could link to urban areas being built with a focus on human movement and ease of access to all buildings in the area. Harlow was built during the 1960s, during which 'Brutalist' architecture was common in newly urbanised areas. This particular area in Harlow Town was definitely inspired by the brutalist movement, and the heavy use of grey concrete creates a menacing mood.



This is another one of my HDR processed images. I used the same process for creating this image, processing it in 16 bit and selecting remove ghosts. Because there was more natural light in this location than in the previous image, therefore I was able to shoot using 1/200. I still shot on f3.5, meaning the image has a narrow depth of field. I focussed on the middle of the stairs, meaning that the mid ground is the section in focus. I feel that I could have used a higher f stop in order to create a wider depth of field and have the foreground and background in focus too, which would create more sharp detail that could be processed into a HDR image. The final HDR image, shown above, has a wide tonal range. There are some dark tones shown in along the roof of the concrete stairs in the background, as well as some very light tones shown in the foreground along the stairs. The railings to the stairs act as leading lines, leading the viewer towards the square exit to the stairs, through which light can be seen through. This small square patch of light could be seen as a symbol of hope; a light at the end of a tunnel, almost literally, as the stairs begin to close into a tunnel towards the top. On the concrete stairs are some very rough and bumpy textures, which create connotations of urban decay and the rough and gritty side of urban life. This creates a clear contrast to the square of light shown in the background, which creates connotations of hope. This image also shows clear influences from the Brutalist movement, and therefore creates a gritty and menacing atmosphere. The one problem with this image is that despite shooting using a tripod, the image wasn't entirely straight. This is something I later fixed in Photoshop.

Here is the straightened image. To straighten the image, I used the crop tool in photoshop. However, instead of using it to crop the image, I selected "Straighten" on the options bar above the image.



With this selected, I drew a line from the bottom left corner along at the angle I wanted the image to move by, which was 0.8° in my case. This straightened the image so that the stairs lined up with the frame of the image. I also noticed a slight lens distortion, as I shot with my lens on a very wide angle. I fixed this by going into filters and using the lens correction filter.

I selected custom rather than autocorrection, as this meant I could manually adjust the distortion level myself. I set the remove distortion slider to -8, which corrected my lens distortion.