Shoot Six - Work Diary

For my Sixth Shoot, I wanted to capture some more open urban areas, therefore I decided to capture some Urban landscape images. I took a tripod out to the town and tried to find areas that were much more open than in my previous shoot.

Shot on 1/80, f18, ISO 800

I shot using a high f stop, as I wanted to capture a wide depth of field and make sure as much is in focus as possible. As a result, I had to shoot on a fairly slow shutter speed and move the ISO up to 800 in order to let enough light in for the picture to be exposed properly. This meant there was some noise present in my image where there wouldn't usually be. For the edit of this image, I drew inspirations from Bas Losekoot, particularly the use of colour. I raised the contrast of the images and increased the saturation of the colours, which I felt created a happy mood compared some of my previous images which have been desaturated or converted to black and white. The saturated colours in the background of the image create a contrast to the muted shade of red on the pavement in the foreground. Also, in the background is a brightly coloured fairground, which creates strong connotations of fun and joy, differing from the buildings surrounding it which bare very brutalist architecture and muted shades of blue and yellow; These create a sad and depressing mood.

I noticed the noise in the image after editing it, therefore I reopened the image in Photoshop and went to filters>noise>noise reduction. I set the noise reduction level to 7 and applied the filter. Above is the changed image, which has slightly less noise present.

Above is one of my original images. I shot using 1/80, with an aperture of f18 and an ISO of 800. The image has a wide depth of field as a result of the high f stop, meaning most of the image is sharply in focus. I thought this would be effective for a landscape image as you don't want any small details blurred out. However, I noticed that the image was fairly dark, which is likely due to the very small aperture, meaning a limited amount of light is let into the shutter.

The original image was taken with the lens in a wide angle setting, therefore there was some lens distortion. I fixed this in photoshop by going into filter>lens correction, then selecting custom and dragging the correction slider at the top to +10. This corrected the lens distortion that the wide angle had created. The original image felt like it had too much of a muted colour pallets, partly due to the whether and partly due the colours used in the buildings of the area. I slightly changed this but raising the saturation of the colours by 10, as well as increasing the contrast of the image, which widened the tonal range. As you can see, the final image is a little bit brighter and more saturated due to these changes, and creates slightly more positive connotations about urban lifestyle, portraying it as fun and exciting.  This contrasts to the logos of transnational corporations such as McDonalds and Primark which represent a very predatory sales practice based on reducing costs and maximising profits. A large part of the foreground in this image contains paving slabs in muted shades of red, and as red is associated with energy, the tiles could represent the fading of any energy and interest being invested into the area and into urban lifestyle.