This week we began to have an in depth look at the elements at play that affect exposure and how to manipulate them to achieve an intended effect. As I’m a bit of a camera nerd, these little tips and facts were not something that I was unfamiliar with – however I find that it’s always helpful to reinforce knowledge I already possess and to of course pick up a few little bits of information I did not already know. For example, this week we were shown how to correctly setup the contrast and brightness of a viewfinder so that what we are seeing through it is accurate to what the camera is actually recording. As I have generally worked with a small monitor mounted on the camera rather than a viewfinder this was not something I was even aware you could do, or indeed needed to be done. Now that I’ve been shown how to do this and have used a viewfinder a little bit more I can definitely say that I feel far more comfortable using one in conjunction with – or even instead of a monitor in the future. I might add that it was also extremely helpful to learn that you can adjust the focus of the viewfinder to suit your eye – though given my poor eyesight I may require more correction than the viewfinder could really offer.
Upon reflection of exercise two I’m finding myself feeling much the same way as I did last week. Once again I’m fairly happy overall with the first shot, while I find the second to be somewhat lacking. The first shot I think actually looks rather nice for the most part. Exposure isn’t amazing – I think that the background is definitely too bright compared to Jagger in the foreground, which at least to my eye, is leading to the eye wandering away from the actual subject of the portrait. However the subject isn’t totally underexposed and there definitely isn’t any information lost so I probably could recover this during the colour grade in post, by masking out the background and better matching it to the exposure of the subject – but I think for the purpose of this exercise we were supposed to have presented a correctly exposed shot in camera, so there is definitely improvement needed here. While exposure could have used some work, I think the other technically aspects are more or less on par with my expectations (ignoring the fact that I’m reframing while rolling). The shallow depth of field we were supposed to create has clearly been executed correctly and somewhere in between shaking the camera around everywhere trying to find my frame, is a spot I’m happy with (specifically around the 01:24 mark of the video). As I’ve already mentioned, I was not quite so happy with how the second shot turned out – though I did anticipate this would be the case, given that generally it is accepted that you wouldn’t really want to shoot a portrait on so wide a lens. The greater depth of field that we were supposed to create is quite clearly present, so I suppose we were at least successful in following the parametres of the exercise. However on the whole this shot is really rather unflattering – due largely in part to the lighting decisions. The choice to light Jagger from directly above with a hard light is most definitely not something I would do again given the chance to revisit the exercise. Though I’m aware this was a conscious choice due to having to get a correct exposure using a more closed down f stop and no lighting equipment, it still isn’t an excuse for creating what I feel is not a particularly appealing image. If I were to repeat the exercise I would have probably shot closer to something like a 24mm lens, moved Jagger back away from the light source slightly, and opened up the aperture just slightly – enough that it would allow us to move Jagger back from the light and still get correct exposure while also maintaining the required depth of field.