Project 6: Photography II Time Exercise 1: Freeze

The course materials looked at the historical development of photography, and I researched a few of the practitioners mentioned. I was particularly interested in the work of Deguerre, and how the daguerreotype came into being through changes to a printmaking process. During my HND in Fine Art I did a lot of printmaking, and while my preferred approach was collagraph and intaglio, I did do some etching on metal - copper was expensive so only used occasionally, but other metals were available to the process. I can imagine the excitement of producing an image from light rather than etching by hand.

For this first exercise we are looking at time in photography, and the task was to take still photos of a moving object. For this entire project we are using shutter priority, and all the images were taken at 1/100s. I began with my normal lens but quickly moved on to using my macro lens in order to be able to take close up images. The flowing water wasn’t prominent enough in my first batch of photos. I also moved from the bathroom tap to the kitchen tap because, having taken photos of dripping and flowing water in the bathroom, I wanted the greater intensity of the kitchen tap, and also the potential of a reflective surface in the stainless steel, as opposed to the white bathroom sink. Here are my contact sheets.

I preferred the kitchen tap photos I had thought that movement would only really be evident if I could catch a drip in midair, but the open tap also brought forth interesting results it was difficult to get sharp images. Due to the need to place the lens so close to the water, there wasn’t really an option to use a tripod, which would have been better for this lens, so there was a bit of camera shake, as well as the challenge of getting a sharp image of something in motion. However, I did manage to get some images that I like.

As I am tending to do now, I put all the photos into a new album and then removed those that were too blurry I did a bit of cropping and minor edits. Here are my final images.