Assignment One: Workflow.

Assignment One: Workflow.

This week has been Deals carnival week.  During the week we have a raft race, live street music, theatre, a carnival, fireworks and a funfair.  This formed the basis for my project.

I decided to focus on the funfair and the fireworks.  What I wanted to obtain from the fair was a good shot encompassing the light and movement.  With fireworks it is only possible to get an impression of the display by employing extended time exposure. 

Planning and equipment.

The first choice was which body and lens combination.  For a body I chose my Olympus E3.  The funfair part of the assignment seemed like a good opportunity to use my 7-14 lens.  I packed a 14-54 lens for the fireworks.  From past experience I knew that I would not need a large tripod as the various rides supplied sufficient places to rest a camera.  I packed a table top tripod for the firework session.  Spare batteries and an extra memory card completed the kit.  I love using polarising filters but there was no use for them during this session.  I also dismissed the use of a flash as it would be very intrusive in this environment and would not assist in the style of image I was after.  I set up to shoot in RAW.

The venue.

I arrived early and had a scout round to see where the best shots would come from.  During this time I took some images of the the fairground folk.  The light was too bright to use the extended exposure shots I had planned but still took some general shots.

As the evening darkened the fair got busier and the shots I was after became possible.  One of the rides was the Mega Dance which was an angled super round-a-bout.  I found a suitable position to set the camera and jammed it against the structure.  This gave me sufficient stability to take the extended exposure shots I had planned.   The biggest problem with this ride was the illuminated sign itself because the lettering scrolled and flashed constantly giving few opportunities for a shot with all its letters displayed.  I took 37 attempts to obtained one with the full set of.   I produce this image at the end of this assignment.  I continued round the site looking for more photo opportunities, again using the structures themselves as my camera rest.  The choice of the 7-14 lens was spot on, allowing me to get in really close to the action with minimal distortion.   

The firework display was scheduled to start on the Pier at 2115 so I had to leave the fair and set up, with a pint, at the Royal Hotel.  I mounted the camera on the small tripod on a wall.  I changed the lens to the 14-54.  From past experience I knew that this was going to be pretty hit and miss.  To give myself  a chance at any sort of result I set the camera to manual focus just short of infinity and at f8.  I set the exposure compensation dial to two stops under so that I retained a black sky.  I anticipated that the fireworks were going to be bright enough to look after their own exposure.   I took exposures of between five and  twenty seconds hoping to capture some overlapping patterns.  Again I had no time to delete any images at the time but just kept taking the shots and occasionally changing the focal length to try and match the height of the display.

The download, file naming and storage.

The following day I downloaded the file from the CF card to my Mac via a card reader.  I immediately made a copy file.  These I named Fair 2013 and Fair 2013 copy.  From then on I worked with the copy, filing the original in the file named Assignment one Workflow which was in turn within my BA file.  

Inspection and initial rating.

I had 181 images to sort through.  Because of the depth of field of the 7-14 lens there was no problem with focus, but camera shake took care of a small number.  The largest number were rejected because of the conditions I was working under.  I was attempting to record the image of movement in a single still.  On one of the rides, The Terminator, a randomly operation strobe system gave interesting if intermittent illumination.  On all of them the illuminated would flash on off and then go into scroll mode.  As I wrote earlier it took 37 attempts to record the one successful image of the Mega Dance.  

I made a paper note of the first cut and removed them to a file with that name.  This file now contained 15 RAW images.

Final inspection and selection.

I worked my way through the 15 and made my final selection.  As I picked out the images I opened them in Photoshop.

Optimisation and fine tuning.

The light sources at the fair were a mixture of daylight, white strobe and coloured tungsten.  While didn't want to lose the variety and vibrancy of the fairs lighting I wished to give any skin tones a normal hue.  Therefor the first thing I sorted out was the colour balance.  I like deep blacks so ensured that the darkest areas were pushing the edge of RGB zeros.  As these were already garish I upped the saturation and vibrancy.  I sharpened the images with a standard sharp filter then an unsharp mask.  On this occasion I left the crop until last although normally I carry this out early in the tuning process.

Copying files.

I made two copies of each jpg, one at high resolution and one at low resolution, and put them in files called, lo res and hi res.  These I put back into the 1st cut file.  The remainder of the Fair 2013.copy file was trashed.  I will retain the main Fair 2013 file until I am sure I wont be requiring any more images from it.

 Leaving it to the youngsters.

 Try again Sir. You must have been unlucky.

Terminal speed.

Mega Dance.

Fire flowers.

The End of the Show.

Reflection.

The aim of this Assignment was to devise a themed topic that interests that is of interest to me and demonstrate technical and visual skills, quality of outcome, demonstrate creativity and show context.

It would have been very easy to stick a flash on the camera and click away at the fair ground but what I wanted was the feel of the rides and that meant getting the impression of movement.   I think I achieved this pretty well.  As I wrote earlier part of the difficulty was having the action coinciding with a fully illuminated sign.

I'm pleased with the outcome.  The first shot was one of a number I took to show the fair as a whole.
I like the feel of the man in green leaving the scene and paying no attention to either me or what was going on round him.  All the others in shot are teenagers and seem to leaving it to them.  I cropped it put the man's head in the phi point where it cannot be ignored.
The second is of one of the stall holders.  As it was a quiet night he had time to chat and I took a couple of images as we talked.  He typifies the travelling fair ground man, stocky, tanned an looking out for the next punter.  I took pictures of another stall holder but I selected this man because of the mischievous look in his eye.
The third one is of The Terminator.  When this ride gets up to full speed all that can be seen is the underside of the cars so I took it at the start of the ride but with an extended shutter time of 1/13 sec.  This gives the impression of speed even where it was lacking.  I would have liked more detail on the passenger's face but that would have meant losing the motion blur.  Taken with the camera jammed against a barrier.
This my favourite.  37 exposures to obtain just this one where all of the Mega Dance letters are illuminated.  1/6 secs with the camera again jammed into part of the guard rail.  The images with non-illuminated letters look incomplete.  This little bit of detail makes this my favourite.  Below is a selection of the unsuccessful shots.  They are OK in their way but not as good as the one with the full illuminated lettering.

The two fireworks pictures were the product of planning my viewing position, staking it out early and patience.  By changing the exposure times I planned to vary the number of fireworks in each shot.  Too many and the picture just burned out, too few and I got just one lonely star burst.  I think these two images demonstrate the beauty of a good firework display.  I included the two figures at the bottom right to give the image some scale.  The moon and it's reflection act as a nice counter to the display and its reflection.

Not many images for the 181 I started with but that's the way it went.

The following evening I attended the actual carnival and took shots of the passing floats, carnival queens and marching bands.  Unfortunately I manage to format the memory card before I download the images.  I shouldn't have popped into the pub on the way home.  Alcohol and good workflow practice don't mix.

They say confession is good for the soul.

Reflections on my workflow.

As long as I don't format my card before downloading it, my system works pretty well.  Lightbox has been recommended by a friend and I am thinking seriously about buying it.  I am also looking a Bridge CS4.  I am not going to change to another system until I can see the benefits and I feel at home with it.

My Workflow in brief.

Pre shoot checks.

Check Photo brief.

Choose suitable equipment for planned shoot.

Check equipment.  Batteries, memory etc.  

Set up camera for conditions.  ISO, WB etc.

On location.

Check conditions tally with what was planned.

Take pictures.

Back in study.

Down load memory card to Mac. 

Name file and make a copy.  Put original in separate holding folder and work from  copy.

Sort out usable images and put in 1st. cut folder.

Open in Bridge and then Photoshop for corrections.

Name finished images and make hi and lo res copies as required. 

Repackage images with original master file and store in my filing system.