“Once you’ve shot and reviewed your first Individual Exercise, reflect upon it.  What did you learn doing it?  Is the result very different to what you planned?  If so, what accounts for this?  Does it matter?” 

So when we did this exercise in class we all ended up doing wide shots involving the city landscapes and cars or some sort of street suburban situation. When we reflected back on this in class Robin said how we do have the scope to zoom in or focus on a different subject. He linked this back to The Lumiere brothers footage of the girl and the cat, in which the camera is pulled in close on the girls face and the cat continually jumps in and out of frame. I remember this clip in particular as i really liked how natural and intriguing it was. i loved that despite all the movement the composition was still really solid. Earlier in my planning I hadn’t particularly set out with a specific subject I had hoped maybe an animal of some sorts would be around but I wasn’t limiting myself because i wouldn’t of found anything. I wanted to let the inspiration and observation come to me as opposed to searching for it. So when I went out to film I had this in mind as inspiration. It just happened to be an early morning in the state library park where there was about a hundred birds and pigeons. I got as close as possible to them and tried to stay very still so they weren’t afraid of me. I used a very low almost eye level shot of the birds because I wanted to capture them as they were, i didn’t want to infer anything about them via the use of angle. Likewise with the cat video I wanted one shot where they were full in the frame and then for my other one I wanted a slight shift in zoom just to capture a larger sense of their surroundings. I thin all in all its quite amusing to watch how birds come in and out of frame all on a different path. I had a bit of trouble with the exposure at some points because some birds were black and some were white so some of my shots the white bird was extremely over exposed therefore i chose not to use this shot and focused on the darker birds as they were in the majority. Another thing i had trouble with and would like to learn is how to get the time on the camera, I had to count 50 seconds on my watch because i couldn’t read it off the camera. I struggled a lot with figuring out the correct focus, partially because the birds kept moving. So with this in mind I just focused on a mid centre piece of grass. This of course meant that some birds were focused and others weren’t but I kind of like the feel that it gives. I discovered that when doing shoots like this you can go in too planned because when your recording an observation anything can happen. So you have to set up the shot and just let the subject fill the frame in its own way. Overall despite a few difficulties with focus and exposure I like the outcome of the task.