Objectifs Course – Guided Shoot 24th April

For our next guided shoot, we took a morning trip to Little India. Wendy (my shooting partner) and I decided to have a wander around the markets next to where we were supposed to be shooting, as we thought it would be more interesting. I got a great shot of some fish, showing a really shallow depth of field (I added the vignette later):

 

The shot of the guy smiling would have been much more natural if he hadn’t insisted on mugging for the camera – I was hoping to catch him working, but he wouldn’t stop being a dick…

 

The next shot of the guy skinning a chicken is much more natural. After the market, we headed outside to the street, and Wendy found much to shoot in the shadows and shapes of a small table outside a very colourful building, I snapped a quick shot and then went to shoot the building itself, which I found more interesting:

After we had all got some shots that we liked, we headed down to the Temple on Serangoon Road to get some more shots, this frieze was inside the temple and the lighting was poor, it took a number of tries to get a shot without too much camera shake:

We had looked at some Dave Hill shots in class the previous Thursday, so I processed this one with an emphasis on detail enhancement, and some colour saturation:

This last one was taken just outside the Temple, it shows the outside of the temple (above the entrance):

More to follow when we do out night shoot.

Objectifs Course – Guided Shoot 17th April

Last year, I took a basic DSLR course, and that covered most of the basics of camera function and operation – ISO, Shutter, Aperture, Depth of Field, Rule of Thirds etc… However, it didn’t really cover taking photographs, and how to improve your craft.

I met a nice guy and fellow photographer at a wedding recently, and he recommended the film and photography school Objectifs, located at the corner of Arab St and Baghdad St. I recently joined a course on basic photography, conducted by Alvin Tang. Our first shoot was in the area around the school and our objective was to cover the four basic tenets of photography – minimum depth of field, maximum depth of field, slow shutter and fast shutter. Here are my shots:

Fast Shutter:

I took two shots. Alvin suggested that 1/200s was fast enough to qualify as a “fast” shutter, so I took this panning shot of a motorcyclist to illustrate that it’s not really fast enough…

Then, I took this shot of a bird at 1/320s and it’s a bit better (I think, anyway):

Next, the slow shutter – I took this at 1/13s standing in the middle of Victoria St:

Next up, we have maximum depth of field – I went at f/22 for this shot to get as much of the detail in the building as I could – I kind of like the result, even though it’s not a “typical” shot to demonstrate max DOF:

Now, for the shallow depth of field, the lens I was using on the day didn’t stop down far enough (for me, anyway) and the best shot I got was this at f/3.5:

So, on the day of the next class (yesterday) I got my daughter to model for me and I used my 50mm f/1.8 prime lens to get some razor-sharp depth of field:

Our next shoot is on Saturday 24th in Little India, so expect lots of colour and plenty of Indian faces (I hope).