Hey! Look! It’s More Project 365

Time for another round-up of a week’s Project 365 images…

I started off the week with this stylised image of a tree that lives outside the offices I worked at. I had been meaning to get an image of it for a while and, since it was my penultimate day at work, I thought I better grab a shot.

I liked the contrast of the green tree against the red tones of the wood on the wall behind it. The tones are quite muted in real life, which is one reason I went for the high contrast and saturation in the image. I wanted to really bring out the contrast in the colours. The tree is permanently in shade so I threw a bit of flash light on it to vary the brightness a bit. The vertical panoramic format lent itself to the shape of the tree. I like images to be cropped in tight on the main subject, in the normal 3:2 format there was too much background. This format still shows enough of it to get the contrasting colours across the view. I nicknamed the tree, The Poodle Tree, because the topiary.

Tuesday was my final day at Sony Ericsson, so I wanted to use an image that marked the occasion. This sign lives in the main reception area for the Sony Ericsson offices. I liked the choice of colour for the fall that the sign is mounted on, the red contrasts well with the green of the logo.

You can see some of the offices reflecting in the sign. I did think about trying to eliminate the reflections when taking the shot but time was tight and I think it gives the location some context. I did have to shoot the sign from slightly below so that I didn’t appear as one of the reflections. Because of that, I had to correct the perspective of the shot afterwards to keep the sign straight.

On Wednesday, I was playing with a composition idea that involved one of our gate posts. Both posts are fortunate enough to still have their original ball ornaments attached. The right hand post, used in the image, sits roughly opposite a pair of trees on the park. I wanted to use these trees as a frame for the ball.

When I took the shot, it was late afternoon and the sun was creating long shadows in the park. Unfortunately, at this time of day, the sun has moved around to the side of the house and no longer lights up the gate posts. To replicate the light, I used my flash with a half-CTO gel to give it that golden colour. I held the flash off camera so that it was hitting the ball at a similar angle to the sun hitting the trees. I wanted hard light from the flash, to match the sunlight, so no diffusers were needed.

We went into Liverpool city centre on Thursday so I took along my camera to grab a shot of this building that I had walked past a few days previously. It’s a new apartment building that has been built as part of the Liverpool One development project. The composition of the shot comes from the unusual shape of the building itself. The end face of the building is a triangle, which I have aligned with one edge of the frame. Fortunately it was a sunny day and the afternoon sun shines onto that face of the building. Because of the triangular nature of the building, I could split the shot into 3 triangles. One for the building face, one for the side of the building and another for the sky.

Rounded subjects usually suit soft light, it wraps around the curves in that appealing way that soft light does. That thought occurred to me when getting these eggs out of the fridge so they became the subject of my image for the day. They were lit in a similar fashion to the shot of the orange from the previous week, using just part of the umbrella to let light through. One of the eggs was a darker colour to the others so I picked this one out in the image by using a shallow depth of focus. I tried a few different compositions, some involving the egg box, but settled on this shot of the eggs in a row. I deliberately organised the eggs so that they weren’t perfectly aligned in the row because eggs are just a bit rebellious like that.

I‘ve always loved the colour and texture of wood as well as all the different variations you can find in this material. This wooden bookend has lovely warm and rich tones, which I wanted to retain in the image.

I lit it with the umbrella, but aimed most of the light onto the background. I feathered some of the light across the elephant, but just enough for the colour and texture to show without me getting too many reflections and highlights.

I angled the shot so that you couldn’t see any of the actual bookend part of the subject as you just get the front bit of the elephant - the elefront (sorry). There was still a bit of the bookend platform in the shot, which I removed in processing using a quick mask with a soft brush.

The final image of the week is Candy doing what cats do best, sleeping. Candy has a knack of finding the last bit of sunlight coming into the house and will often follow the sunny spots around during the course of a day. In this shot, she is in the back bedroom, which probably gets the last bit of sun as it disappears over the houses behind us.

I was originally going to shoot a different image for that day, but when I saw this scene I thought it too good an opportunity to pass up. The light is mostly coming from the window, opposite me, just out of shot. I added a bit of fill with my flash to calm down any hot spots from the sunlight. I used a half CTO gel on the flash to match the colour of the light and kept a daylight white balance so that there was an overall warm feel to the shot. The warm light colour also works well with the browns and beiges in the image.

More Project 365 next week!