Positioning The Horizon

In this exercise we find a landscape with an unbroken horizon, in which to take a sequence of images from right at the bottom to right to the top and asking ourselves if the shot works.

I went to a hill where it over looks a little village called “Newton Tony” and used this as my view for the horizon.

Image 1 here is with the horizon as low as I could take it without it looking like a waste of a shot because when looking through the viewfinder, if you took the horizon any lower you lost the buildings and were left with a row of trees and a lot of mist. If the skies were clearer then it would have worked by using some of the cloud formations to please the eye.

So now I look at this image and I feel that it does not work as the sky has let the image down, so we move the horizon up a bit to see if this helps the image in any way it can.

Image 2 the horizon is getting close to the middle of the frame and as you can all see the mist was not on my side on this day. If I could take this mist away I know that this shot would work quite nicely because it would almost be a balance between the sky and of the village below it. It was not until the postproduction of this image that I noticed that I have got the postman’s van in the shot, making me think that this could be an opening shot for a cartoon of postman Pat kids series.

But cracking on I moved the horizon up that little bit more to see how that would work and to whether I would like it or not.

Image 3 and I like it the horizon is pretty much central so the balance is good, I do feel tho that it could do with something in the lower right couner to break up the green grass a little.

Image 4 and it’s not bad it works well in the mist because as the sky has been reduced you find that you are looking more at the village as this is in the middle with a rolling hill, in the foreground there is the patches of tall meadow grass which does help a little in breaking up the plainness of the green grass.

 

Image 5 I find does not work as well as image 4 there is not much in the difference but it is enough to take it out balance, I think that if you are to take the horizon higher in the frame then you do need to have a very good foreground to have in view as I feel the foreground here has let the image down by being to plain and not having that something to give it that bit of balance it needs.

Image 6 and again I feel the quite plain foreground lets the image down I think that if there was a couple of sheep or something to one side it would work quite nicely.

When I was taking these images I was thinking whether they would work or not and I felt that they all would have worked really, there was the mist that let the sky view down and because the animals had been moved on from this field they would have helped when you got to like image 5 and 6. This is what I thought and I still feel that this is the case with these images now.

Balance

In this exercise it is to look at the image to see how a balance is achieved and works in the image, balance can be in any of the main elements in the image like masses of tone arrangements of points colour or lines. So we are to look for what the dominant part/s are and identify them also in include the ‘weighing scale’ interpretation.

 

 

Image 1 a sunset over a Welsh bay, in this image I believe that balance is achieved through the colour which is in the sky and the colour on the rocks. I also feel that balance is achieved in a linear way from the lines in the rocks and you can get equilibrium from a big section of rocks and a small section near the edge of frame the sun.

 

Image 2 flowers on a pillar, I would say that in this image there is maximum symmetry in it by the way that there is the flowers in the middle of the image with smaller images either side of the flowers and then you have the lines of the boards coming in to a point at the flowers.

 

Image 3 flowers and ceiling, in this image there are two main parts to it those being the blue flowers and the ceiling of Salisbury Cathedral. So this gives us two unequal objects that balance themselves very well with each other the small section of flowers to the large section of the ceiling in my opinion balances out very nicely.

 

 

Image 4 the fungi growing on a tree. I stragguled with this image at first I thought that you could say that the image is balanced by the fact that you have a large section of the image is the fungi and then a small section of the tree in focus not been blurred out from the depth of field. I have thought about and agree with what I thought in the first place but also feel that you could have it as a balance in the colour from the lightness of the fungi to the darkness of the tree bark.

 

Image 5, kid’s behind the logs. This image I feel is balanced by the log in the middle then adding the two kid’s faces and then the logs framing off the sides, well it works for me.

 

 

Image 6 with this image I felt that as there were so many lines in the image that this is what gives the balance to the image, then noticed that when a line is put through the middle of the image you have an almost perfect symmetry. So when you look at it this way it is a lovely shot for static balance when you take in the pews of seating on either side.

So after going through these images I did find some easy to identify the means of balance but harder with others, which caused me to make sure by going over the whole lot quite a few times.

Focal Lengths and Different Viewpoints.

We know that different lenses give different views but here we can see how changing the lens as we change viewpoint can give a difference in the perspective of the image.

Firstly here is a wide angle shot of the scene.

 From this scene I noticed the cross above the arch and chose this as my subject. On goes the telephoto lens to 300 and I focused in on the cross and this is what I got.

With this shot you feel as if you are almost level with the subject but also you feel as if there should be more to the image, like a little country church or something that time has almost forgot about. I changed the lens to my wide angle lens at 18 and started to move forward to see what I could see through the viewfinder trying to get as close to the telephoto image.

 This is my wide angle shot up close to the subject. In this shot I find this one to be more eye catching and have more feeling to it.

I find that I like the close up wide angle shot because you are drawn into the cross by the converging lines to the sides of the cross which all seem to lead you to the cross and then framing the cross making it look powerful as well as making you feel somewhat comforted by it.

When I look at the two images and compare them for impression of distance then image one makes me feel as if I am at a distance when looking at it because you have the tree hanging over the image on the right, whereas with image two you feel you are looking up slightly and there is nothing in the way to obscure the view of the cross in the arch.

Focal lengths

With this exercise the aim is to an appreciation of the changes from 1 focal length to another, the amount of the view that you can take in.
I went to another churchyard for this exercise, I started with a lens that was 18 – 55mm then my telephoto lens of 70 – 300mm then used a 2x magnification lens to add a 360mm and 600mm. so for this sequence I was outside of the churchyard stood on a hill facing the church looking towards a stained glass window that was on the front of the church.

Image 1. This shot was an 18mm focal length making a wide angle showing off the church and the grounds around it.

Image 2. Focal length 24mm in this shot you can see that one of the main differences is that the tree that was on the left hand side of the image has gone.

Image 3. Focal length is 28mm the grounds have reduced and the church has almost filled the image.

Image 4. Focal length 35mm if I repositioned the camera then I would have just the church in frame.

Image 5. Focal length 55mm now in this shot even the church has started to get cut out of the frame.

Image 6. Focal length is 70mm now there is not as much of the church in view and what is in view is looking as if it closer.

Image 7. Now the focal length set to 100mm I do like this shot because of the angel the window and the brickwork work well together.

Image 8. Set to 135mm starting to see more detail in the window without the use of a magnification glass, tips of angel wings cut off from the frame.

Image 9. At 180 we can see the window clearly but have almost lost the entire angel.

Image 10. This is at 300mm the angel is now gone and a bit of the window at the bottom.

Image 11. Now we are at 360mm a bit of the window at the top as now gone.

Image 12. 600mm not much else to see but the picture in the window.

I thought that I would do a bit of research with this one also because I knew that focal length had something to do with the diameter of the lens and the distance of the subject.

This is what I found out.

Very simply, it is the distance from the lens to the film, when focused on a subject at infinity. In other words, focal length equals image distance for a far subject. To focus on something closer than infinity, the lens is moved farther away from the film. This is why most lenses get longer when you turn the focusing ring. The distances follow this formula:

__1__  +  __1__  =  _______1________

image        obj             focal length……

This means a 400mm lens should be 400mm long. If you get out your ruler and measure it, you will find it is less than 400mm. That is because a camera lens really has many individual glass lenses inside, and this makes it behave as if it is longer than it really is. This is called “telephoto.”