Firstly, I noticed that there was a large chess set in the gardens of the hotel. In the morning it was cloudy, but I took a couple of photos of the white pieces and black pieces looking to frame the pieces without distracting background. I planned to return again when the sun was at a lower angle to take different groups of the chess pieces.
Whilst the subdued light on the rows of shiny pieces is quite attractive, the images lack visual impact. A less ordered arrangement of the pieces and more interesting light or human interest might have created a stronger image. However, I did not get to spend more time on this.
I found a dragon fruit on the breakfast buffet. This fruit is a bit like a small water melon, with pure white flesh specked with black seeds. The outer skin is a rose pink, which I thought should make the white flesh stand out.
I cut open the fruit and placed it on a pale background in shaded sunlight. As I did not want the pink skin to dominate the white interior of the fruit, I wanted to compose the picture so that the white was the main element in the picture.
The angle of view was too wide using the 70-210 mm at its maximum magnification, but I have a Nikon close up lens which I used to obtain slightly higher magnification. At this magnification the depth of field is very shallow. The first series of photographs I therefore held the lens parallel to the cut through the fruit. I also turned the ISO up to 500. I did not have a tripod with me and I therefore used the arm of a chair to provide stability. I took a sequence of pictures placing the pink skin of the fruit in different places in the frame. This is the composition that attracted me most.
I then tried some photographs taken from the side.
Even though I reduced the aperture to f/22 and above, the depth of field was very narrow. Nevertheless, I liked this composition and believe this is a suitable candidate to portray the "white" characteristic. The area of focus across the diagonal of the frame draws the eye to the white flesh and black pips. The pink skin in the foreground and background is blurred and less prominent than most of the other pictures of this subject that I took.
We went out to the large souk (covered market) in the port of Muttrah in the afternoon. I was hoping to take photographs of a number of subjects:
- Omani men dressed in their white robes and various types of headgear ("white")
- Omani women dressed in their black robes ("black"): unlikely that I would get permission to take their photograph, however.
- piles of goods in the small shops in the souk ("many", "much" etc.)
- the fort standing on the top of a rock that guards the harbor ("solid", "strong" etc.)
When we arrived at Muttrah there was a large crowd of more than a hundred men on the pavement all dressed in black, instead of the customary white, chanting and waving their arms. I went along and they were quite happy for me to take photographs. They were performing the ceremony of mourning for the massacre of Ali and his family which led to the schism between Shiite and Sunni muslims, the Ashuraz.
There was unfortunately no elevated position close by that I could find to take a picture of the crowd from above. I therefore tried a variety of other vantage points: at one side of the mens group, there were some youngsters waving flags; I tried taking pictures between the shoulders of the men in front of me, and I tried holding the camera at arms length above my head set to wide angle. It was the last technique that gave me the best view:
The light levels were low as the crowd were in a shady area just as evening was just falling. I therefore put the ISO up to 800 and set the aperture of f/8 hoping that on wide angle, this would give enough depth of field. The resulting shutter speed was 1/160th.
Looking at the pictures again at home, I found it very difficult to decide how to best crop this picture. I tried using the technique suggested in the exercise on cropping of printing out various versions A4 size (this is not difficult in Lightroom) and comparing the prints. I chose the cropping above for the following reasons:-
- the white hats worn by some of the men strongly attract the eye. There was another hat prominently located along the bottom edge of the picture. This added nothing to the scene, but distracted by its position. I therefore cropped out the lower part of the picture to exclude the hat, and the rather dull backs of the men. This left five hats in the centre of the frame, spread out in a triangular shape.
- there was a light colored wall behind the crowd, which was noticeable in the top left of the frame. I adjusted this partly using the perspective tool in Photoshop and by cropping a narrow strip from the top of the frame.
- the picture is framed on both sides by the backs of the heads of the men in front of me. This seems to anchor the composition.
The black robes contrast starkly with the white hats and this will be one of the candidate images for "black" characteristic.
Inside the souk, I took a number of pictures of the small shops displaying their goods. Looking again at the pictures after I got home, I felt that including only a small area of the display was more interesting than including the whole display. The items are too numerous and small to have an impact if they are all included in the frame. I felt that the relatively few items included in this picture are sufficient to portray the characteristic of "many":-
I also looked for a contrasting picture to show the characteristic "few". I found a shopwindow with an elegant display of perfumes which I though provided a good contrast to the previous picture:-
Again, I cropped out the rest of the interior of the shop on the right hand side of the frame to concentrate on the rather sculptural display.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment