Assignment 6 - Inner Eggleston

The path of the walk is shown below. "Look Right" started at Kirkland Ave and Main St heading down Kirkland Ave to the water. "Look Down" and "Look Left" started at the same place, but in the opposite direction, towards Central Ave (looking to the right).

Reflection

For this assignment, I started “on the right,” which, according to the map, took me down Kirkland Ave to the Waterfront until I arrived back where I had started. I then had to run to pick up my daughter since the loop took, with photos, much longer than I thought it would. A loop with stops for taking photos took over an hour. After dropping my daughter off at home, I returned and repeated the exercise in the opposite direction. 

While on the second loop, I noticed interesting subjects appropriate for both the "Left" and "Down" assignments and took shots without thinking. Since I was already sliding down the slippery slope and it was getting late, I combined the two. I did three circuits (initial walk plus two photographic runs) instead of four. I was also trying to take advantage of the one good sunny day available this week (welcome to the vagaries of shooting outdoor footage in the Pacific Northwest in late March). Not surprisingly, the assignment was much more complex and time-consuming than I thought it would be since it took time to compose and shoot each photo, especially with bracketing, and I shot a lot. All images are presented in the order in which the subjects were encountered.

My biggest surprise was that I could hold the camera still for long exposures (Grate, Travel). I was using aperture priority and forgot to check the shutter speed, thus did not notice the slow shutter speeds. In retrospect, I must remember to recheck everything between photos and change the f-stop and ISO when the lighting changes instead of hyper-focusing on the composition.

I also must remember to consider the camera positioning when bracketing for exposure. I paid more attention to the composition in the initial photograph and then focused on the exposure for the brackets. Meanwhile, since the camera was handheld, it moved slightly. For example, the “best” composition for Flower was the image where the big and little flowers were entirely in view. However, that only happened for one slightly overexposed image, so I had to live with the overexposure.

Many photos required that I get into odd positions, either sitting on the sidewalk (Outdoor Patio) or lying on my back looking up (Gazebo). The latter was “fun” since it involved my having to lie down on concrete on my back to set up and take the shot (fortunately, the people present didn’t think I had fallen sick or gone insane).

I tried several shots of interesting items in store windows. Unfortunately, the reflection in the windows overwhelmed the subjects. The reflection was much more prominent in the photos than in real life. I ended up with awkward self-portraits and couldn't use those photos.

I taped a zoom lens at 18mm (EFL 36mm). I noticed in the EXIF metadata that my EFL ranged from 34mm to 38mm, so there was some "drift" despite the tape. 

For the editing portion, I selected three photos with shadow clipping or where the white balance or the level was off. Bird Eclipse, since it was shot into the sun and had lighting extremes, suffered from shadow clipping. By raising the shadow highlight, some of the sculpture’s structure became visible. I had to increase shadows by 50 to stop the clipping and a further 25 to 75 for a visible change in the photograph. I am a bit uncomfortable with the size of this change. 

For Flower, adjusting the white balance toned down the yellow of the flower and allowed the other colors to be more noticeable. I selected a white area in the upper right as the neutral point for the eye-dropper control. 

For Teapot, adjusting the level improved the photo. Adjusting the white balance corrected the color of the teapot and bricks. I used the building soffit for the line and the neutral point. 

One thing I noticed while editing was parallax. There were some photos where the parallax was bad enough that fixing one line made other lines more obviously unlevel. I had to find the right "compromise" between the various lines. The parallax was bad enough to require reshooting the next day (Outdoor Patio). Since it was overcast instead of sunny, I increased the ISO to 400.

In terms of favorite shots, that would be Gazebo since shooting it pushed my comfort levels (lying on my back while others walked around me) and produced an excellent outcome. Shadow was a close second. The least favorite of them landed in the category of being too literal and not graphically interesting, such as some of those involving signs (Chianti) and Flower.

One final note, my camera has one quirk:  its native aspect ratio is 4:3. This is why all my images have a 4:3 aspect ratio. I had set the camera to use a 3:2 aspect ratio, but this was not applied to RAW images. However, when I clicked on the "crop" button on the "Develop" tab in Lightroom CC, it used "As Shot" settings and triggered an automatic crop which I had to undo by resetting to "Original."

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