snow hatered

You may have noticed the recent snowfall, while everyone got excited by this all I could think about was last January when it caused havoc and everyone grew to hate it ... surprise surprise look where things are heading.
  Anyway, it does create some brilliant photography opportunities (in my eyes mainly icicles) so here’s a couple I took from a trip to my garden, I am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to go further for better subjects but haven’t even nearly had the time and I am seriously limited due to my car being to low to move on the roads in their current state. There will no doubt be another snowy blog update, until then here’s what I have so far...

In my opinion the key to photographing ice or icicles is making them appear as pure and clean as possible, shooting them against the sky is good for this and boosting the contrast of them in Photoshop helps a lot in achieving this, making them look like glass. Using a large aperture for a shallow depth of field also goes a long way depending on the specific photo.

boredom is scary

  Well being the idiot that I am I was left with nothing to do the other night because I left my sketchbook and folders in uni, to most people this is a good excuse to take a night off and not think about work but unfortunately I’m the kind of person who isn’t capable of doing nothing. Flicking through a photography magazine inevitably lead to me playing about with my camera and here is my favorite few edited results.

  Comparing the black and white to the colour version makes a big difference, personally the majority of the time I prefer black and white but its still surprising how much the removal of colour can transform a photo.

  I like these mainly because they were taken in a fully lit room with plain old boring lighting but some exposure tweaks (and help from the apparently very bright light on my mobile instead of flash) created a very different style of image. Setting the exposure to -2 helped create the spot light effect by making the unlit areas even darker while the light helped pick out detail around my eye as well as bringing out the highlights and colours.

fireworks

Well guy fox night wasn’t as big an event this year unfortunately partially because of the weather and partially because of the 1 year old in the house, so missing the display at Baxter we didn’t have our usual display at the house (that in my opinion would give Baxter a run for its money in previous years). I have never tried photographing fireworks before so thought I would give it a go this year with the few little ones we did set off, this was very much trial and error with the exposures varying from 3-30 seconds and only really liked 3 images by the end of the night.

I like this first photo especially, it was amazing how such a pathetic firework turned out looking so dramatic through the lens

I wanted to get a good shot of light painting with the sparklers but unfortunately no one wanted to co-operate so this was the best I could get out of them…

haloweeeeen

Slightly late but never mind, I decided to get a bit creative this year with my pumpkin carving, they are always so boring and since Halloween is nothing more than an excuse for fancy dress nowadays I don’t see why it had to be scary anyway here is my effort

these photos were nothing fancy, I just used my compact Panasonic lumix, by manually keeping the ISO low it reduced the grain and my turning the flash of it created a spooky candle lit atmosphere to the subject, I occasionally prefer photographing this way because if I had used my cannon I would have spent hours fiddling around with settings, lenses and tripods for what was really just a bit of fun.

baby pics

My sister wanted some new photos of her one year old daughter Jessica the other day because she was growing out of a dress that had never been worn, so we decided to set up a couple of places for photos with the intention to get some nice final prints done and also a canvas printed. Baby photography can be tricky but as she is my niece I have experience photographing her previously it made keeping her smiling a bit easier and this time she stayed fairly happy throughout until getting restless at the end. The first place was in out living room sitting on a wicker chair using the floral wallpaper as a neutral background, I used my wired flash for this bouncing the light off the roof, and this provides a more natural light on the subject rather than pointing the flashgun directly at the subject creating harsh light and off-putting shadows.

the second place was simply outside using grass and shrubbery as a background, this time I used natural lighting as it was a nice day and this worked effectively with the outdoor location, I used a shallower depth of field for these ones lowering the aperture to around f5.6 which added a nice subtle blur on the lush greenery surrounding Jessica and also bringing out her face.

sunset

finished university quite late today and as I was walking down to my car noticed the sunset was pretty damn awesome... fortunately I had my camera handy as I had been photographing some of my work so went for a drive along riverside and took some snaps

 I have photographed riverside from roughly this location plenty times and every time I am drawn to taking pictures of the rows of street lights, this time was especially effective as the sunlight is reflected in the glass of each post.

 The one below is my favourite of this bunch, I love how the rays of sunlight beam down over the bonnet of my car and the shadow cast from the light shining underneath makes the foreground so much more interesting.

this panorama was strung together from  6 individual photos, for this to work I had to lock the exposure ever photograph so the final image looks seamless.

I didn't use much equipment for these shots, just my canon 1000d, standard lens and also my ultra wide angle sigma 10-20mm lens i use most of the time. I didn't need a tripod as the camera was pointing at the sun the shutter speeds were very fast even though the light was dying. No camera or external flash was used, it is just purely taken using the light provided naturally, my favourite way of photographing sun sets/rises, landscapes and urban areas.

crail raceway

as the summer is pretty much dead me my dad and sister wanted to get all our cars cleaned up to take to one of our fairly local car shows, unfortunately the Sunday morning was very rushed and I ended up forgetting my canon and all my other equipment :( so I was limited to my compact Panasonic lumix and Photoshop later on, the day was nice but cold and I am left fairly frustrated at the fact my first real photo shoot I’m posting on my blog was done with a standard compact camera severely reducing the control I had over each photo.

Anyway a couple of my favorites from the day ...  the mini in the middle is my sister holly's, the green and silver pickup is my dads and the black pickup is mine, she is called hazel : P

 this photo was just from a random car's wheel in the show but i liked it too much to leave out :)

in general i am pleased with how some of these came out considering i was back to basics with no control over exposure or aperture size etc.

first impressions

My name is Chris Berridge, I'm a first year student studying architecture in Dundee University, I'm 17 years old and one of my main interests is photography so the purpose of this blog is to document all my photographs whether related to uni or just for fun.


one of our early assignments was to find an inspirational place in the city of Dundee, fortunately i have lived here from birth and my photography has had me exploring the highs and low's of the city so I already had a few locations in my head i thought would be fairly original.

the location i picked was the roof of Bellstreet multistory car park. What drew me to the location first time around was the high viewpoint of the city but when i was up there i was amazed by how peaceful and still everything was compared to just a few dozen feet below me in amongst all the chaos of the city traffic.

 

so on returning to the location i thought it would be good to focus on the area of Dundee that is somewhat stuck in the past, as Dundee today is all talk about the modernizing waterfront i took pride in bypassing that and looking into the old architecture that was at one point a big deal as well. i took another few photos and done a couple sketches and i tried to emphasize the contrast in being above and in amongst central city life and the ability to stand still and watch everything else pass by you, whether that is rushing cars or slowly drifting clouds.