Evaluation

Over 5 weeks of studying photography I have learnt about street photography, painting with light, shutter speeds, aperture and macro photography. Before I started this course I did not know anything about street photography. We looked at some examples of this and then we went out and attempted doing our own street photography, I enjoyed this but I felt a bit rude taking photos of people on the street, but apart from that I think it went well apart from I didn't get too close to some people. I didn't know how to use shutter speeds correctly before I started studying this course. Now I have learnt when to use them correctly. If I now wanted to take photographs of a person doing some fast sport and I wanted the freeze the motion in the image I would use a fast shutter speed. I think all of my shutter speed work went well apart from when using a slow shutter speed sometimes I get too much camera shake I would need to take a tripod. I now know how to create a motion blur using shutter speed as well. I had always seen photographs like this and wondered how to get that effect, now I know that I need to use a slow shutter speed and I can create this effect myself. Before I began these 5 weeks I had always seen light painting photos and thought they were really good. I didn't know how to do this either though. Now I have studied this I know if I use a slow shutter speed then move a light around, such as a torch I can create light painting effects. This would have been easier if I had used a tripod because the shutter speed I used was really slow so this causes camera shake. I needed to also make sure that the room is as dark as possible so that you cannot see the person behind with the light. I think my photos went well though. I knew about aperture before I started the course but not how to create this effect. I did not know what F numbers where or how to use them. I now know how to create shallow and wide depths of field by changing the F numbers. If i want shallow depth of field it is a low F number and if I want a wide depth of field it is higher F numbers. I think all my aperture work went correctly and I don't need to change what I did. In the future if I went somewhere such as a huge building and wanted a photo of it from the outside I could use a large F number and that would mean all of my photo would be in focus. Before I started the course I had done quite a lot of macro photography, as I enjoy this. This is where you take a really close up photograph of something. I think my macro photographs went really well apart from sometimes my camera does not focus in as close as I would like. In the future I could use a macro lens to improve these even more. When I had taken these photographs I edited them in photoshop to make them even more effective by changing saturation and things like hue. I have really enjoyed this course so far and have learnt a lot in such a small space of time.