Reflection

For this assignment, I elected to use some photos taken during my trip to Arizona a few weeks ago, augmented by additional photos from around the Seattle area and Vancouver, Canada taken over the last week.

While visiting Taliesin West, I was given a tour and granted access to some areas which were not open to the public. During the tour, I frequently moved between in the indoors and outdoors. Unfortunately, I sometimes neglected to update my ISO settings as I moved between the environments. The "Leading Lines" picture of the "portal" at Taliesin West was mistakenly shot with a high ISO of 1600. Luckily my camera is very forgiving and introduced very little noise. I should make checking and updating the ISO setting the first thing I do when entering a new environment. Despite my error, the stone walkway formed an excellent leading line that guides the eye to the portal.

For the “Rule of Thirds” photo, the sculpture feels just a bit small. I wish I had stepped in a just closer for the shot.

The “Framing” picture worked out well. The plants make an excellent frame for the building behind. If I could reshoot it, I would zoom in so that the plants occupied a bit less of the image and the building a bit more.

There is, I discovered, an inherent risk in taking symmetrical photos, namely that there is a fine line between well-composed symmetry and work which is simply boring. I originally took a photo of a waterfall with staircases on either side at Downtown Park in Bellevue. It was perfectly symmetrical and perfectly boring. My second try was in Vancouver, Canada over the weekend. The symmetry in this picture obviously comes from the staircase, lampposts, and trees. There are a couple asymmetrical elements that make the photo interesting: a service van with the door open on the left side, a person with a red hat on the right side, and the mountains in the background. The mixture of symmetry and asymmetry work to make an interesting photo.

For the "Viewpoint" photo I needed to get underneath a tall tree like sculpture and look up. My fisheye lens was the only lens with a wide enough field of view to accommodate the sculpture from this position. I took several shots both with and without the "fisheye compensation" feature of my camera enabled. The most interesting image came with the fisheye effect which gave the image a surreal appearance with the details in the clouds and exposed glimpses of the horizon in all four corners. Since some of the clouds were dark, I opted to overexpose this shot to even out the sky. This is my favorite photo of the series.

I like the way the Foreground and Background photo turned out. The pier in the foreground is a nice contrast to the gazebo across the water. Unfortunately, the gazebo is underexposed so it does not stand out. If I were using film and a darkroom, I would burn the section with the gazebo to brighten it up. I look forward to using Lightroom to do this digitally.

The Horizon photo was challenging due to my location in an urban environment. I visited a nearby waterfront park to find an expansive horizon. The park featured a gazebo next to the water, so I aimed to find an angle where the horizon acted as a line pointing directly to it. I had to walk out to the end of a rickety old dock which flexed noticeably with each step to get an optimal lighting and position. As with the Foreground and Background image, I would have “burned in” the section of the photo with the gazebo to make it less dark and more obvious if the option had been available for this assignment.

The “Isolation” image is a night view of a lit walkway at the Andaz Scottsdale Resort and Bungalows. I deliberately underexposed the image (by 4.5 EV) to create an image with lights and darkness. The shortcoming for this image is the tree on the right, which I would crop out of the image in Lightroom.

Technically, I enabled the “autobracketing” feature of my camera and set it to take three images, one correctly exposed, and two additional images that were under and overexposed by one unit. In some images the brightness of the sky still overwhelmed the image, causing the subject to be underexposed even when the image was overexposed. In retrospect, spot metering would have been a good strategy to use in these situations.

I also need to remember to bracket for depth of field. Some of the images were shot with a low f-stop. Later, I realized that they would have worked better with a higher f-stop. Unfortunately, I didn't shoot with a higher f-stop, so there was no means of fixing it as of now. Going forward, I should start bracketing for depth of field as well as exposure as standard practice.

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