Shoot Eight - Work Diary

For this shoot, I wanted to try and capture some abandoned areas, keeping to the theme of urban decay. I looked around Harlow for a location that had been left alone for a long while, as this would mean that nature has taken over what was once man made, linking to my theme. I found an abandon school ground that was open to the public, which is where I decided to complete my shoot

This is one of my straight images from my shoot. I shot this image with a shutterspeed of 1/100, with the aperture of f11. I shot on this shutter speed as I was shooting without a tripod and wanted to avoid camerashake; my aperture I set to F11 as I wanted a fairly wide depth of field, as the image is landscape style image. This image links well to my subject of urban decay as the image depicts a field on a schoolground, on which the grass has become unkempt and overgrown and has covered some of the school structures in the background. The image makes heavy use of shades of green throughout the foreground and midground, which I have emphasised by increasing the colour saturation as well as shifting the colour balance to reduce yellows and increase greens. As a result, you get both saturated and muted shades of green throughout the grass, which could be seen as a reflection of the negatives and positives of a place like this being reclaimed by nature. The bright green shades represent the positive in that the structure is unnatural and was put in place where there once was nature, therefore the process is in a way a "return to normality", whereas the muted shades could represent what is lost in the school being abandoned, as it was once a place of learning.

 

Here is another of my straight images from my shoot. Like the previous image, this was also taken at 1/100 with an aperture of f11 in order to keep the depth of field wide and avoid camerashake from handheld shooting. This photo as been editing far more than the other image, as I wanted to create a gritty and dark mood from the image. To create this mood, I converted the image to black and white, then went into photo filters and added noise to the image, creating an overall rough texture of the image. It depicts and bench that has had once of its seats broken off. The floor below it has gathered large amounts of moss, as the bench has been left untouched and the area has been rained on; this links very strongly to the themes of urban decay and urban structures being retaken by nature. The use of black and white and noise in the image creates a very sinister mood, as it creates a wide tonal range, with tonal contrast between the dark tones of the moss on the floor and the light tones on the wooden boards that cover the buildings. This contrast creates connotations of the strength of nature against urban structures that have been left unattended for a long period of time.