1. Evaluation of Salford Quays Shoot
For this unit I was required to go out to Salford quays and Shoot pictures of
urban landscapes. My class went in a group but I went beforehand a few weeks
before (twice) and got my own images. I took around 300 different photos and
the reason I went twice is because the first time I went the weather was very
foggy and icy leading to a lot of images ruined due to the flash reflecting off
the water droplets in the air. The second time I went the weather was sunnier
and I was able to get a lot of good and varied types of pictures.
Photographers I am inspired by are Adam burton and Ansel Adams. Adam
burtons work features lots of natural blending colours and I really liked this
idea so for my edited images there are a lot of colours splashed in, I couldn’t
get these colours to blend naturally in the picture due to the small amount of
time I had to take the pictures themselves and the small amount of actual
colour in and around Salford quays. Ansel Adams black and white photography
is really striking and I wanted to recreate this sort of striking effect but mix in
slight colour. For some of my images I used a retro sort of feeling with a sepia
tint and vignette and for others I used a black and white gradient with a sort of
dark purple red for a strange dark effect. Whenever I am editing photographs I
don’t go into the editing software with a clear idea of what I want the final
product to look like and I usually just experiment and mess about and develop
my ideas further as I progress. My style involves a lot of colour or Reflection
and I believe that this works well for Salford quays because there is so much
grey everywhere it helps to brighten the place up a bit. When I went to shoot
at night my images didn’t come out too well probably because the camera
wasn’t set correctly so in the end I just decided to leave as I thought I already
had enough images of the day and that the night images were just a bonus.
If I were to go back again I would probably get more close-up images and I
would go to the observatory deck in the imperial war museum to get a large
scale urban landscape shot. I would also like my camera to be set correctly to
capture images of Salford quays at night because the lights really contrast with
the colourless daytime where everything seems to come to life and has a nice
glow about it.