This project required me to find a scene with depth a wood full of trees. For this I chose the Sunday morning quayside market in Newcastle. I thought this would make a good scene for the project because there are lots of points of interest to focus on throughout the depth of the scene.
The first problem I encountered was that my shutter release appears to be faulty when my camera is set on a manual setting, such as aperture priority for this task. This is my second technical hitch in as many days and will require yet another trip back to Jessops with the receipt. I hope they don't become suspicious.
The second problem I found was that I had fitted my kit lens to the camera for the task, thinking that this would give a nice wide view of the scene with lots of points to focus on. My kit lens (18-55mm) is my only wide angle lens. However the lowest aperture available was f5.6, which gave too broad a depth of field to properly demonstrate different focal points in a scene.
I then attached the zoom lens (tamron 70-300mm), which Jessops kindly replaced yesterday. This allowed a much narrower depth of field to be achieved, enabling me to select my 3 points of view. My settings were an aperture of f5.6 and a focal length of 104mm which was sufficient to allow 3 images focused on different areas of the scene. However the longer focal length meant that it was difficult to capture all that I wanted in the scene, namely the height and width of the bridges, along with the market itself. They were inevitably cut off in the final images. I took a number of images, however I found that it was easy to distinguish the close foreground from the background, but much more difficult to distinguish 2 different focal points in the distance, even where they were some distance apart. In other words, a focal point close to the camera could be clearly picked out to blur the background. However selecting a focal point in the distance was much harder to distinguish clearly from the middle of the scene i.e. the middle point of the scene tends to stay mostly in focus when the focus point is far in the distance.
The third problem I encountered was that of any street photography, namely people with pink hair etc. wandering into the scene as I pressed the shutter. I have not taken any street photographs before, so this was a good introduction into the difficulties it entails through the unpredicable behaviour of passers by.
I finally selected these 3 images for this blog. I converted one of them to black and white because the blurred background had so many distracting colours. Black and white allowed even more focus on the near railing post. I kept the others in colour. This was especially relevant for the image that focused on the landmark bridges, as their colour is key to them being focal points, as well as the focusing. The mid point image chooses the photographer as its point of focus in the middle of the scene.
Of the 3 images, my least favourite is the one which focuses on the photographer in the middle of the scene. Unfortunately, in this particular scene, I don't think the main point of interest is particularly aesthetically pleasing and would not appeal to many viewers.
I liked the composition of the bridges in the image which focuses on them as the main point of interest in the distance. I like the lining up of the bridges, and the bright primary colours in this part of the scene. However I feel that this image is let down by the inclusion of the crowd on the right of the scene. They are a distraction, and even though this part of the scene is not sharply in focus, the eye tends to settle on the photographer's back, the red coat in the crowd and the red lifebuoys. This also causes some dissatisfaction because these points are not sharply in focus.
Therefore my favourite of the three images is the one with the black shiny railing sharply in focus and the background sharply out of focus. However I did feel that a portrait format would strengthen this image more, because there is too much weight in the out of focus areas in the current landscape format. This also allowed me to include more of the bridges in the background, which were cut off in the landscape version. This added more interest to an otherwise quite bland subject matter.
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