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These are the photos i used for my final submission(photos sent were bigger and didn’t have the funkypancake watermark). 

i also sent a commentary for each photo explaining why and how i’d taken it and why i put them in this particular order

These are my 28 ‘final possible’ images out of my original 785

these first two show people up the tower.  the triptych is a sneaky way of getting three photos in to one, but sums up how this area of the building is used.

this shot is of some detail and makes a change from the wider shots in most of the other photos

this photo was in my last assignment, but it fits well in to this series, so i’ll include it anyway !

i was drawn by the way the food shapes resemble those in the distance, and the contrast between the bright colours of the fruit and the muted city in the distance

i like the isolation of the tower in this one and the muted colours of the sky

this shot is from a distance (on the south side of the thames).  i was drawn by the nearly symmetric cranes and the almost water colour like appearance at sunset.  i’m not sure if it’s a particularly strong image though

this is a straight (boring?) shot of the interior

these next few shots are looking up at the tower.  the passing plane in the middle shot is a nice touch, but the clouds on the bottom right are blown out (as they are in the bottom picture, though not as obvious).  if i use the middle shot i’ll do some burning in photoshop

these next three shots show the tower reflected in adjacent buildings

some more pictures of the tower

a couple of pictures of the tower seen over the top of other and alongside other buildings

some more reflections (in puddles and a bike wing mirror)

and finally some shots of london taken from the top of the tower

i’ve decided to sleep on the final selection and come back to it with fresh eyes another day

(apologies comments seem to be broken at the moment – otherwise i’d have loved to have got your comments. ho hum)

i’ve been looking through the shortlisted photos and there are some are rejects which didn’t make the final selection which were worth commenting on.  so here goes:

the tower shadows:

this top photo looks quite sharp from this thumbnail, but on closer inspection it’s obvious it was taken through a mucky window (not much opportunity to give them a wipe that high off the ground).  the muck has given the photo a mockled effect, especially in the darker areas, so for technical reasons this was rejected. 

this was another attempt to capture the tower’s own shadow, but this photo is let down by the over-blown highlights of the building (particularly the white tower in the background).  Since it couldn’t be recovered, and it’s a hugely stunning photo, i’ve put it in the rejects pile

Views of the tower from the ground

the sky on the shot above wasn’t very interesting, and it was difficult to get this nicely exposed and the road below.  the shot ended up over-exposed to record the detail on the road, and my attempts to salvage the sky wasn’t very successful.  the scene isn’t particularly interesting so i rejected this one.

the idea of this shot was to show an arrow pointing upwards in the same direction of the tower.  the shot, whilst a nice idea, doesn’t really work because of the amount of background ‘mess’ with the tree etc.  for this kind of graphic shot to work it would need to be nice and clean.  sadly this also went in the reject pile.

sadly, it was the same with the one below where the foreground arrow is a little too dark.  it would need lots of work in photoshop to balance the foreground and background, and again, it’s an interesting picture, but unlikely to be in my final dozen

The curse of rogue chairs and uninterested people

i attempted to get some shots of the interior of the top of the tower, but didn’t pay enough attention to where the seats were and ended up with some awkward looking shots.  this is a real shame as it would have been easy to move a few of the chairs (although there were other people in the area – it was after all a just before a work meeting!)

similarly i tried to get some pictures of the people who worked there.  there’s a rogue chair below and the chap’s expression/position above isn’t particularly interesting

this was potentially a nice picture of the view from up the tower, but there’s too much reflection of the windows to the right of the picture and the sky

this shot is quite nice, but, again, there’s a building blown out in the background

this shot had a similar problem – it’s a nice document of some food at the top of the tower, but there’s little to really grab the eye and draw the viewer’s attention

i also had lots of shots of the tower seemingly springing out the roof of different buildings, such as this one

i like this photo which is a close up of the tower in a puddle.  however, it looks just like a poor quality photo if you don’t realise it’s a reflection.  i’ve got other more obvious pictures so for this assignment i decided to reject it

i absolutely love this photo below which shows the chap who works the lift, but sadly the photo isn’t sharp enough so had to be rejected.  it looks great as a small thumbnail (below), but the large version just doesn’t make the mark

This assignment is intended to bring together what’s been learnt on the course so far, focussing on any theme.  I put a lot of thought in to what to use as my theme and considered a number of options including doing a study on my local train station and our church.

however, i settled on BT Tower which is a building i see a lot when i’m in london.  i could see BT Tower out of my office window when i worked in the centre of london for about 3 years, and i get to visit BT Tower for work meetings a couple of times a year, so i’ve had a connection with the building for a while.  As a result i’ve got quite a number of photos in my archives of BT Tower, and this assignment gave me an opportunity to take a whole heap more.

A sweep through my archives show i’ve taken over 785 BT Tower taken from the ground and up the tower itself.  I narrowed these down to a ‘usable’ list of 172.  In order to get down to the required 8-12 photos, i broke down the photos in groups of categories:

Inside the tower:

• flower/food/catering
• people up the tower
• the lift man (sadly one poor quality photo)
• views of london
• rainy windows

Outside the tower:

• looking up directly under the tower
• reflections of the tower in building
• reflections of the tower in puddles
• views of the tower from a distance
• views of the tower with other street things

Next step is to narrow down the selection to the best few shots in each category and look what i’ve got.

My Canon 350D camera has three metering modes – evaluative, partial and centre weighted average. 

I preset my camera to evaluative for most of my shots as it gives good all-round metering from the 35 ‘zones’ it creates on the image.

However, the other main metering mode - ‘centre weighted average’ attempts to optimise the meter for the middle point of the frame, and is useful for when taking photos of say a shaded object in a bright scene so as not over-expose this object.  The ‘partial’ setting is a combination of the two which gives greater influence to the centre point, but also takes account of the whole frame (but to a lesser extent).

The camera’s meter is easily confused however, as it ‘expects’ pictures to be made up of averagely brightness.  Thus, if you are not careful, dark scenes are over-exposed, and bright scenes are under-exposed. 

The same can happen with printing images if the printing process automatically compensates for the brightness of the scene.  I was very disappointed with a poster sized print i had made of an image of a man painting a wall white which when printed was a dirty grey !

Here is an example of a dark image i took whilst on a walk.  it’s of some tires on a black tarpaulin on the edge of a farmer’s field

This was the first image, metered using evaluative metering from the camera

I then adjusted the exposure compensation to +1EV which clearly made the effect worse !

i then gave a negative exposure compensation of 1 stop (-1EV)

This still seemed rather bright on my LCD screen so i dropped it 2 stops (-2EV)

This looked too underexposed on my camera LCD screen so i backed it off to –1.3 EV.

On a proper calibrated computer monitor i prefer the –2EV adjustment which shows how wrong the automatic meter can be !

The following pictures were both taken using the camera’s automatic setting (with a minus 1 2/3 EV exposure bias to avoid blowing out the highlights in the covered statue)

This first one was taken with ‘average’ metering.You can see the background foliage is slightly lighter

the second shot is slightly darker and uses pattern metering which spot meters across the image (including the quite statue)

This was a demonstration shot to show the effect of different sorts of metering (the composition of the shot is quite uninteresting!), but it’s useful to zoom in on the statue to see the difference between the two types of metering for this subject.  As you can see, the pattern metering works better as it takes account of the particular brightness of the statue when metering the whole picture

so, i did the experiment !

i sat at home all day on the 17th November taking photos every few minutes.  the photos i took throughout the day are arranged on the sheet below.  The most recent picture is at the top left.  The shutter speed and aperture are shown under each picture together with the time stamp.

A few points are worth noting – the easiest setting to change (for my camera) is the ISO setting which i had to set to 1600 at the beginning of test in the morning at 7.27am.  The weather forecast suggested an overcast day so i expected to have to use relatively long shutter speeds at a low ISO.

To begin with you can see i experimented by changing the ISO value from 1600 to 200 which allowed me to set the aperture at f/6.3 (although you can see this gave a slightly darker exposure).  I then settled on ISO 200 for the rest of the experiment, although over time i had to vary this to give readings at 1/50 (rather than 1/10).

One interesting point to note was the effect of the weather !  it began to rain at 9.38 which initially made the scene darker – i assume this was both because of the increased cloud cover, but also because the rain drops made the concrete slab darker. 

Then, after a few minutes, the rain stopped, and the rainy surface actually reflected more sunlight back this increasing the brightness.

Images 28 and 30 show the light levels inside the house at the same time as images 29 and 31 respectively). The location of these photos was around half a metre from the leaf pictures, but was not in direct sunlight. The difference between these photo is startling.

The lighting level started to stabilise between about 1pm and 2pm. Again i moved to a different ISO to see the effect – noting what the equivalent values would be for the aperture at the different ISO, which would give an indication of the same EV (exposure value). 

This is interesting as EV is a way of showing equivalent settings for aperture/shutter speed/ISO that give the same exposure – ie increasing the aperture one stop requires a reduction in shutter speed by one stop to get the same exposure.  Therefore these three variables can be changed to produce the same exposure, but with different characteristics – ie a higher ISO might allow a faster shutter speed at low light levels, but it also increases the graininess/noise in the picture.  Or a high quality photo with a large depth of field would require a low ISO and a small aperture, and would therefore require a long shutter speed – possibly requiring a tripod and likely to blur any moving objects in the picture.

The other key variable in the experiment was the weather which changed the light source !

In terms of what to expect from sunlight, when the sun is above 40 degrees above the horizon .  However, the sun doesn’t reach this height in the UK for some of the year (according to this calculator).  Various charts show how the sun moves across the sky at different times of year (eg here).  ‘Capping’ these charts at the 40 degrees elevation would show how the light levels change throughout the day and seasons

Here are some useful pictures from CLEAR

The height of the sun not only impacts the light level, it also changes the angle of the light – for example, in winter (as now) the sun does not lift high above the horizon which creates dramatic highlights and shadows which reveal the textures of objects such as ploughed fields and walls.  This can be compared to the more direct ‘flat’ light when the sun is more overhead in summer.

[words to be added !]

see project 38.  pictures to follow