Another Week Of Project 365

Yes, it’s another Project 365 roundup…

We got this interesting looking glass vase at Christmas. I knew that I would use it for one of my Project 365 images at some point, but wasn’t sure how I would shoot it. It was when I was reading an article on light graffiti that I made a connection between the light trails and the pattern on the vase. I thought it would look cool if I could get some light trails to mimic the pattern on the vase, so decided to give it a go.

The light trails were provided by a keyring LED torch and it took many attempts to get right. Firstly, I tried just holding the torch in my hand and moving it round the vase. I found that I kept hitting the vase with my arm and it was difficult to get smooth light trails. Next up, I tried hanging the torch from a piece of thread and swinging it around the vase, like a pendulum. This got me some smooth trails but it was difficult to control the speed and direction. In the end, I fastened the torch to the end of a long pencil. This gave me enough reach to avoid hitting the vase and a bit more control over the path of the torch. I tried a few different lengths of exposure until I found one that gave me bright trails but was quick enough to allow me to keep the torch moving smoothly.

It had been quite mild over the past few days and I noticed that the daffodils were starting to appear. The weather forcast for Tuesday was good, so I thought it would be an opportunity to get a good shot of them.

After work, I took advantage of some low sunlight to get some back-lit shots of a patch of daffodils, near the car park. As I was shooting, I noticed this arrangement of three daffodils. They reminded me of a cow’s face for some reason, a bit like Ermintrude from The Magic Roundabout. This promoted them to top spot for Tuesday’s image.

I didn’t have much time for a shot on Wednesday, so I wanted to use something I could grab for a quick and simple image. This biscuit barrel used to belong to my mum and has always been a favourite ornament of mine. I like the bright colours and happy expression on the cat (I’d also have a happy expression if I was meant to be full of biscuits).

I went for a white background and soft lighting, along with a low angle to add a bit of interest to the image.

Thursday was another sunny day, so I decided to grab some pictures of the blossom that was starting to appear on the trees around work.

Although it was sunny, it was quite windy too, making it difficult to keep individual branches in the frame. I took plenty of shots and managed to get a number of nice images. This one was my favourite because of the almost repeating pattern of the blurred blossom in the background. I was using my 70-200mm lens, which allowed me to get pretty close to the flowers from below the tree. In processing, I wanted a deeper blue for the sky so I dropped the luminance and upped the saturation of the blue channel.

Friday’s image was a bit of an experiment. Becky had picked up some washing detergent from the local shop (for local people) that came in the form of round, soluble, gel packets. I liked the colour so I thought I’d see how they looked with a bit of light through them.

We have some glass worktop protectors in the kitchen which made an ideal platform for back-lighting the gel. I sat the glass on some upturned cups, to raise it off the worktop, and placed a white diffuser on top of it. I emptied the gel packets onto the diffuser and stacked them up, to get a varying thickness of gel between me and the light source. My flash was attached via an off-shoe cord, so I could slide it under the glass (facing upwards) and still be able to shoot from above. I tried a few different exposure settings until I got a result that I liked.

I got the idea for Saturday’s image from noticing the sunlight coming into our dining room and casting a shadow of the plants onto the wall. I wanted to replicate the idea, but giving the shadow a bit more impact.

I used a bare flash, directed through the plant leaves, to cast the shadow. The flash was connected by a PC Sync cable so I could fire it from the other side of the room. I had to play around with the positioning of the flash, until I got a composition that I liked for the shadow. I was originally thinking of making this a black and white image, but decided to leave it in colour so that there was good separation between the plant and shadow. I increased the contrast and saturation in processing to give a darker shadow and help the plant stand out more.

Sunday’s image was a combination of multiple exposures. I was after an old and grim feeling for a shot of the terraced houses in our area. The weather was quite bright but the sky was grey so I took a few shots, exposing some for the sky and some for the houses. When processing the raw images, I generated a series of jpegs which varied in exposure. I combined these with the ‘Merge to HDR’ tool in photoshop. The result was converted to black and white and the contrast altered to suit the houses. The sky in the image had retained some cloud detail but was still a bit bright for the look I wanted. A bit of dodge and burn was needed to get the final result.