Assignment 4 Evaluation

I find lighting to be a bit overwhelming and try to stay in my comfort zone as I am afraid of making mistakes with it. For the research stage of this assignment I used a book On-Camera Flash by Neil van Niekerk but found some of the technical aspects of the lighting quite difficult to get my head around as I am more of a hands on learner and nothing seemed to work by reading this book.

I then started to look into DVDs and viewed some of David Hobby's Strobist videos, as well as Zack Arias One Light videos. I found that viewing these made it easier for me to understand but had to watch them a couple of times till anything really sank in. I had a couple of friends that were pregnant and wanted some practice taking maternity shots so thought that lighting the baby bump would be the perfect subject to base this assignment on.

I found the feedback very helpful in making me rethink how I could improve my work. I had tried a different style of presentation, with 2 images on a page with text on the images. My tutor suggested that this was not the best way to present them and to avoid text on the images, so in my revision to the assignment I have altered these. Another of the photos had light on the models head and bump creating two points of interest, when my tutor pointed this out I realised that this took the emphasis away from the bump. The feedback also made me realise that where I had tried to achieve something different by including hands, detracted from the bump and what I was trying to initially achieve.

By using a macro lens I could have achieved a better result with the textured and coloured photos, but I think now that my lighting the bump idea was not ideal for this assignment as my model was quite anxious about her skin tone and wary of my taking close up shots. I have made revisions to this assignment but if I had used a movable object I would have been able to be more experimental without the worry of my models needs.

This assignment made me realise the importance of light and my need to explore this further, so I have since attended a lighting course at the Blackthorn School of Photography where I looked at direction of light and studio lighting set ups, this has made me more experimental where before I always used to play it safe with flat lighting. I have now brought a flash and am experimenting with different lighting effects.