After a week of noticing, I managed to take 5 photos of things that got me interested. I still chose to take those photos based on the theme of finding the beauty in life. It means finding those very detailed and delicate things in our lives that people normally ignore, but they are actually around us all the time. As a photographer I think every good-looking thing deserves to be remembered and recorded. That’s why I kept looking for those tiny details.

Here are the photos I took during the week:

Speaker on my laptop

Texture of a zipper

Texture of a nut on my tripod

Texture of stainless steel

Brass chain on a bracelet

This week I mainly focused on textures of different kinds of metals. It was actually unintentional, when I took the photos I didn’t think that much, I just recoded what I thought was worth recording. However when I put the photos in my computer I found out that they are actually all related to metals. During the process of editing those photos, I found it very interesting to see the differences between the textures of iron, stainless steel, brass and aluminum. I used a macro lens for all of those pictures. I think a close up shot can show the details of something in the best way, the first picture of the speaker is a very good example. It is hard to see the texture of a MacBook by human eyes, but the texture is shown very clearly in the photo, and it looks so much better than I thought.

I took all five of these photos when I was using those things in the pictures. I took the photo of the speakers when I was typing on my laptop, and I thought the material of MacBook actually feels very interesting when you touch it. So I just took a close-up of it. I took the photo of the zipper when I was getting my camera out of the camera bag, and I saw the reflection of light on the surface of the zipper, that is the first time I noticed the zipper is actually glossy. When I was using my tripod I noticed the nut on it is a little rusty, but the rust actually gives it an antique look, which looks quite vintage on a photograph. The door handle photo was taken because I was looking for texture of stainless steel in my apartment. The door handle happens to be made of stainless steel and the lighting makes the texture look even better and clearer. I took a photo of my bracelet because I was wearing it that day. In the beginning I was trying to take a photo of the leather part of it, but when I was adjusting the focus I found the chain part more attractive to me, the tiny rings over the chain makes an appropriate composition, and the finish of the metal created some extra textures to the photo, it just adds more brilliant content to the photo.

The result of this experiment proves that the first experiment worked really well and my noticing skills became a lot better than the time I just started this course. Now whenever I look at something I will be thinking how can I turn that into a good-looking photography work, or what is interesting about that object, what can I find on it that everything else doesn’t have. I think that is quite a big improvement for me.