Workshop Experience : Semester B Week 7 Landscape and Architecture
After the fun and excitement of studio portraiture things changed gear this week and we entered in to some new areas for me - and areas that I need to understand better and improve upon - being Landscape and Architecture.
Although I do do some landscape work with my flying camera and try to abstract out the urban and rural landscapes around me, this week was emphasised as "traditional" landscape - being an image with a foreground, middle ground, and background, where nature is the key element in the frame. So there goes my aerial work ! But this is a good thing for me, as I rarely take my standard Canon out and shoot landscapes - a challenge will be had. There are so many technical aspects to landscapes - filters or not, long vs normal exposure, hyperfocal distances, sturdy tripod, isolated areas where things can go wrong, etc etc.
I will try and keep it simple and try and capture some frames up near my friends farm in Mansfield Victoria, and I will use the following gear to try and do it :
- Good sturdy tripod and my Canon 6D with the 16 - 35mm lens
- will try our my 10 stop Big Stopper filter, as well as the trusty polarizer (to try and remove reflections and sun shine form water etc) and a 3 stop graduated ND filter such that I can adjust the tonal values of the bright sky whilst maintaining expose to get detail in the shadows of the ground or trees or whatever it may be - lot of trial and error here
- will be using bracketing to ensure i get every bit of tonal value I can and detail
- have fun and hopefully see some great aspects of the land. Ansel Adams will not be in any danger.
The Architecture aspect of the portfolio will be even more challenging.
There are no shortage of great buildings in Melbourne so the challenge is to get the interesting composition and the camera craft right to get the right image. We learnt about Trevor Mein and John Gollings and how they make this genre of photography so engaging. Really quite inspiring as I would never have been interested in shooting buildings otherwise.
Will be getting out and exploring some buildigs this week both early in morning and at night hopefully.