Specialty Workshop

Prior to the fall break, we had an amazing opportunity in our Advanced Digital Photography to go through a workshop with a talented photographer from Nikon. He taught us many photography techniques such as surface reflections, the use of colored film to create ethereal colors, lens flare, the bokeh effect, reflections through different objects, and many more. In this blog post, I will describe some of my favorite photos and techniques used in those photos.

Digital Contact Print:

This is my digital contact print for the workshop. This allowed me to narrow down my photos to my favorite ones and eventually choose those I wanted to edit. The ones I edited are those surrounded by the blue box. Here are the descriptions of each of those:

• The first image I want to explain is the first image in the first row. This image covers the technique of color reflections. Color reflections are basically when you shine a light on an object and colors are presented on that object. For example, my image is of a disk which reflects a rainbow of colors. I really liked how the colors are very bold in the image as this made it very pretty.
• The second image I want to explain is the sixth image in the first row. This image covers the technique of ethereal colors. Ethereal colors is an effect in which you use a colored film and place it over the lens to create a scene which is somewhat "not normal". What I mean by this is basically it would not be possible to see in our world. For example, in my photo, I used a pink film to create an idea that my friend is in two worlds at the same time. I really liked how it only covered half because this creates a very unique and mesmerizing image.
• The third image I want to describe is the third image in the second row. This image covers the effect of reflections through a glass. Well, this wasn't a glass but an orb of some sort, but they have the same effect. In this effect, you take a photo of your subject through a glass and this gives you a very cool reflection. In this image, I took a photo of fruit through the orb and it was shown upside down and I found this very cool.
• The fourth image I'd like to describe is the fourth image in the second row. This image covers the effect of shadows from a point light. This is basically when a shadow is created from a direct ray of light (torch, sun). I took this image by making my friend stand outside and make a heart with his fingers. This was the shadow and the point light was the sun.
• The fifth image I'd like to describe is the first image in the fourth row. This image covers the effect of bokeh. Bokeh is basically the blur created in the out-of-focus parts of a photo. The shape of the blur is determined by the lens and aperture. In my case, the subject was the piggy bank so this was in focus, but the lights were out-of-focus and that created the really cool bokeh effect in the back.
• The sixth image I'd like to describe is the second image in the fourth row. This image covers the effect of the camera rotation when the flash is triggered. This is basically when you turn the camera very quickly as soon as the flash goes off. This creates a very cool effect with lights in this example. In my image, I rotated the camera to the right and this created this "light rain" effect in the image and I thought that this looked very interesting.

Final Edited Images:

This is the first edited image. It is of the disk with color reflections. For this image, I really wanted to focus on the color aspect, so in photoshop, I increased the saturation of the bottom colored part. Next, I lowered the saturation and increased the darkness of everything else apart from the colored part. I also decided to use the high pass filter to sharpen the edges of the disk and used the contrast and highlights tool in RAW to make the borders of the color sharper.

This is the second edited image. This is of my friend who is "in between two worlds". This is also the image I decided to show my editing techniques for. For this image, I really wanted to differentiate the two sides but also wanted to keep the emphasis on my friend. This is why I started off by increasing the contrast in Camera RAW. I also decided to use the gaussian blur tool to blur the background. Next, I used the high pass sharpening tool to sharpen the overall image so that it looks better. Finally, I used the hue/saturation filter to decrease the color of the right side to add increased contrast. 

This is the third edited image. This is of the orb with the reflected fruit. To edit this image, I started off by using the black and white filter and making everything apart from the orb black and white. This decreased the attention from the disk but still kept it as an important aspect of the photo, but also helped the orb to become the actual main focus. Next, I used the high pass sharpening tool on the orb to make the overall focus sharper.

This is my fourth edited image. This is the one of my friend making the heart. To edit this image, I first used high pass sharpening for a rough touch up of the shadow. Next, I used the black and white filter to make the road duller. Finally, I used the hue/saturation filter to increase the saturation of the shadow to make the shadow a little bolder. It was a little blue-ish so adding color definitely helped.

This is my fifth edited image. This is the one of the piggy-bank. To edit this image, first I used the high pass sharpening to increase the quality of the pig. Next, I used the Gaussian blur tool to separate the pig from the background. Finally, I used the brush tool with the hue/saturation filter to increase the saturation of each of the lights and this allowed for the bright bokeh effect.

This is my sixth edited image. This is the one with Mr. Laurence and a big stick model. To edit this, I used the high pass sharpening filter on Mr. Laurence and the stick model to make them bolder and clearer. I also used the hue/saturation filter to increase the color of the lights and decrease that of the background.

Final Print Document:

Successes and Challenges:

Although I had many successes in this project, I had a few challenges as well. By far the biggest challenge which I had during this project was taking photos during the flash photography session. I had lots of struggles taking photos of the front and back curtain delay. I was late to capture most of the images and was unable to capture images with great quality. In fact, I was only able to take one which I believe was good. One of the many successes which I had in this project was learning how to take photos with the bokeh effect. I found this technique very cool and plan to use it in the future. Another very interesting technique I found fun learning was the technique of using the film to create ethereal colors. I found this very cool to create scenes which are supernatural and might try to incorporate this into future photographs.

Feedback for the Workshop:

I really enjoyed the workshop and the content was really good. I feel like I learned a lot of techniques well and would easily be able to incorporate them into my photography in the future. However, I do feel that there are parts which could be improved. Firstly, I feel that we should spend less time on the presentations at the start (still get the main content through with), and spend more time to take photos. This would allow us to spend more time really learning each technique. I also feel that a lot of the techniques we learned were ones only possible with lots of equipment (like the flash ones) so we should actually try to learn techniques which we can do by ourselves without much equipment (the colored lens gel, shadows from point light, etc.)