Michaela McCrum

Below is my final images for my Tiny World project.

This project has been one of my favourites so far, it was really fun to get creative and to create these tiny world scenes. I am happy with how they turned out and would like to try more miniature photography shoots in the future.

My adobe spark link for my tiny worlds project

Through this task we explored biodiversity/nature by going on a journey to a local park. I chose to go to the clyde walkway which is a beautiful nature walk near my house. For my e-zine project I have been focusing on litter and other damaging things that are ruining the environment so for this task I wanted to capture the beauty of nature and show just why we need to work hard to keep it from being ruined completely.

My idea was to take images of the scenery and other parts of nature I found on my journey. I had around 170 images to choose from by the end of my walk, it was hard to edit down to 9 as there was so much beautiful scenery to choose from. I chose these 9 as it shows many different areas I saw along my walk. When editing these images I used adobe lightroom and tried to make the editing for each image similar. I focused on making each image more vibrant by increasing the highlight, contrast and saturation slightly. I also increased the sharpness and clarity of each image to make the details clearer.

This task involved going out in our local community and helping clean up the environment by picking up litter. I decided to go to a wooded area near my house as I know this is a well-used walkway and have noticed a lot of litter there previously. I prepared for this task by bringing a plastic bag for the rubbish and gloves to protect my hands.

After collecting some litter, I started to photograph each item individually using the same background. I kept the camera setting the same for each image, shooting on manual I used a focal length of 35mm, I had the aperture at f/8 but realise now I should have changed this to f/5.6 for a shallower depth of field. I set my shutter speed to 1/60 as I used a tripod. My ISO was 400 as it was a very dull day.

For this task we had to create a series of images of going on a journey, we had to photograph the different types of light that we encountered on our journey. I chose to do a journey of me walking through my house at different times to get a variety of lighting.

I took many different shots of all the lighting I could find in my house throughout the day as you can see in my contact sheets below. I ended up choosing these 3 images for my final images because I liked the lighting and feel that these images go well together as a sequence. I felt that these images did not need that much editing as I liked the moody effect it already had, for all three images I keep the editing similar. I increased contrast and highlights in each image in order to make the light brighter and then I decreased the shadows in each image to give them a darker moodier atmosphere. I then made my final images into a triptych using adobe photoshop.

My second shoot is based inside the kiwi caves

Shoot 2

Behind the Scenes - Kiwi Caves

I created this scene using holographic card as the water/background, small rocks and tissue paper&t-shirts to create the cave silhouette. I used the led lights on the back of my mirror to give the scene a blue lighting effect.

Contact Sheets - Kiwi Caves

These ended up being some of my favourite photos from this project, I like how vibrant and shiny they are.

Shoot 3

Contact Sheet - Car Shoot

I split my project into 3 different photoshoots as this made it easier for me. My first shoot was the beach shoot

Shoot 1

Behind the Scenes - Beach Shoot

I used miniature figurines for my characters in all scenes. I created this set using brown sugar for the sand, tissue paper for the sky & water, cotton balls for the clouds, cocktail sticks & bottle caps for the umbrellas and kiwis & broccoli for the caves. This was really fun to make, It was very messy but fun.

Contact Sheets - Beach Shoot

I started my tiny worlds project by creating a mind map that included my ideas. The aim of this project is to create a 6-9 image narrative promoting positive wellbeing. I had 4 branches to begin with storyline, props, lighting and characters. I had a strong idea already in mind so I started with that, my idea was that a girl was having a bad day mentally and her friend wanted to cheer her up.

I thought of what would cheer me up on a bad day, something positive and fun. I decided on a day at the beach as this is something I would do to feel better.

As our tiny world project is to be done using macro photography we prepared for this by practising macro photography. We created images from materials connected with the UN sustainable goals.

Oil & Water -

For this project, we had to take macro close up shots of oil bubbles in water. I did this by putting water in a clear dish then adding oil to create the bubbles, I put my dish on 2 boxes to give me room underneath to place my ipad that displayed a colourful image. I did this so that the oil and water had a colourful background. I used my canon 2000d with a sigma 70-300mm lens attached, I used this as it has a macro setting and can get really close up shots.

I unfortunately missed the studio class where we created this so I had to do it from home. I created different bubble patterns by adding drops of fairy liquid into the water and tried different backgrounds. Once I finished I uploaded the photos to my mac and created contact sheets. I then annotated these and chose my favourites.

Macro Lens -

A macro lens is a camera lens that is designed for photographing small subjects at close distances, this type of lens allows you to focus extremely close to a subject so that it appears larger. These types of lenses help us to take sharp images of very small subjects such as insects or small flowers, it gives us a very shallow depth of field. This is the more expensive option out of the macro equipment with it being £1,000 or more.

Reverse Rings -

Reverse rings screw onto your lens mount and then you attach your lens backwards to the ring, this reverses the glass which ends up magnifying the image. They are a great cost-effective option but focusing can be more difficult with this option. They cost around £8

Close Up Filters -

Close up filters are like a magnifying glass that you screw onto the front of your camera lens, they work by having a piece of glass that bends light in such a way as to enlarge whatever you are viewing. They are a good option for an introduction to macro photography and they are priced from £20 and up.

Extension Tubes -

An extension tube is an attachment that goes between your camera body and your lens, this allows us to get our camera a lot closer to our subject. An advantage of extension tubes is that you can use them with any of your lenses and you can join extension tubes together to give you even more magnification. The cheapest option I could find for these is around £30.

Bellows Extension -

High key photography is a style of photography that uses unusually bright lighting to reduce or completely blow out dark shadows in the image.

Final High Key Image

Low key photography is the art of lowering the exposure to create more shadows while creatively concealing and revealing details. Low key images are darkly lit and have high contrast.

I choose Girl With A Pearl Earring, painting on canvas (c. 1665) by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, as my inspiration for this project. This painting is one of his most well-known works.

Behind the scenes of my inspired by art portrait

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Veermeer - Reference Image

*My next few posts will be catching up with my posts from folio 1 *

These are my final still life images, they are inspired by Irving Penn and Jan Davidsz de Heem.

I liked the thought of playing games with a cup of tea and used this as my theme for this still life, I added some glamour as well with jewellery . Below are my contact sheets for this still life

I liked the dark and moody theme and decided to do something similar. I decided to do a more simplistic take on this painting and put my own twist on it. Below are my contact sheets

The other day when the weather wasn't terrible I managed to get some good shots for my silhouette part of my into the light project. I didn't have a model that day so I used myself as the model and took these photos using a timer on a tripod.

After looking at my contact sheets I have a few favourites from this shoot that I have slightly edited but not finished yet, I might try to photoshop out the power lines and see how it looks without them but here is a preview of some of my favourite images so far. I'm lucky to have caught such a beautiful sky that night it doesn't need much editing.

For this project we had to take a series of images using shutter speed techniques, the techniques are Panning, Freeze Motion and Zooming.

Panning

thanks to my mum for driving her car back and forth for these images

Above are my final images using the Panning technique, panning photography is a technique that uses a slow shutter speed while moving your camera along to create motion blur in the background. For this technique, I used a shutter speed of around 1/60 second to get these images. Took me a while to get the hang of the panning technique, moving while taking a photo is not something I'm used to but I got there in the end.

Freeze Motion

Freeze motion is where you capture a photo of a moving subject this works best at a shutter of 1/60 or above. This one took me many attempts as I couldn't get a good shot of the water droplets but I persevered and got this image of the water frozen in motion.

Zooming