PHOTOGRAPHY black and white
OCTOBER ISSUE
1. Editoral Page 2. Man on bench 3. Castle from Grassmarket 4. Two people walking on path 5. Cyclist on path 6. Man listening to music 7. Sunset from Castle 8. Friend walking on path 9. Castle from Princes Street 10. Traffic Flow on Princes Street 11. Reflections
MATT GIRVAN AGE: 18 Canon 650D Canon 17-40L Lens Canon 70-300 Telephoto Lens Canon External Flash
I am Matt. I am from Aberdeen but I currently live in Edinburgh and I love to shoot urban landscapes. My main focus has previously been night photography so here I have tried to move away from that to vary my work a bit. With my photos I love to try and create something a bit out of the ordinary or photos that simply look impressive to the average person as they are usually the consumer. A good example of this would be creating car headlight streaks when using a long exposure. This has always got great feedback as most of the time, people don’t understand the technique to create these images. I love seeing their reactions. As far as photography goes, I’ve shot a couple weddings. One for a family friend, voluntarily, and one through a recommendation. This provided me some amazing experience as a wedding photographer and I can really see it being something I could do in the future. The photos below won 1st place awards at my school back in Aberdeen in the Urban Landscape and Natural World catagories which was pretty amazing. As far as the post production stage goes, I do put a lot of effort into retouching my photos to bring out the optimum outcome that’s waiting to be found. I also love graphic design which actually led to me making my CV based a bit more different from the average one as seen below. Overall, I want to learn from the professionals!
I was aiming for repetition here with the benches and used my telephoto lens to (1) not intrude the man and (2) get a shallow depth of field as I wanted to isolate the subject in a small focus area. The original photo was not as cropped in as far. I left that to Lightroom to improve the composition of the photo and to add clarity and contrast. I then moved it into Photoshop to add some extra field blur to exaggerate the depth of field as I didn’t notice my eye locking onto the subject quick enough.
This common angle taken from Grassmarket was used here, however I thought about leading lines and using people to move the eye up to the castle in a more fluid motion rather than just composing the castle. I left the stairs on the right third and the last in the top left cross of the rule of thirds to create balanced composition. I used a tripod and used a very small aperture to get everything in focus. I waited until I saw two people walking up the stairs to show some movement. I found that the sky was also a bit dull so I added contrast and clarity to a selection of the sky and added a vignette exaggerate at the top left and bottom right. There was lots of poles and signs across the photo blocking the sight of the castle so I removed them using the stamp tool in Photoshop.
This was originally just supposed to be a test photo as I saw the line going down the middle of the pavement and saw potential so I lowered my camera (using a 70-300 lens) almost touching the ground to achieve an obvious blur in the foreground of the pavement. This photo is a bit of an illusion to me as at first glance it doesn’t seem that my camera is that low down at all when it is almost touching the ground. I made sure my aperture was as wide open as it could be as it wasn’t the brightest of days and the light was quite soft so I wasn’t going to get the fastest shutter speed. Also I did want a shallow depth of field.
I saw this cyclist come up the path a few hundred yards ahead of me so I had some time to adjust me settings accordingly. I zoomed in, but not too much as I wanted to retain a high shutter speed. The picture was originally framed showing the whole cyclist but I liked the artistic effect of just showing half. Adding a slight mystery to the picture. The subject had slight motion blur but thankfully, using Photoshop’s filter to reduce motion blur helped tramendously and I ended up with the above shot.
I took this photo very quickly as I was walking on the other side of the road as I saw a depth of field opportunity. As soon as I saw the opportunity I was thinking how he is so focussed on his music and phone that he is separated from the outside world, so the background being blurred behind him resembled that well. It wasn’t the perfect photo but I do like how one of his shoes is blurred showing movement. I placed him on the right visual third roughly and kept the colour as he was already separated from the background. No post processing was done.
This photo is from the top of Edinburgh castle. I ran to this spot when I saw this amazing sunset appear and didn’t have time to set up my tripod so I resorted to just propping it up on the wall. It was at a slight angle but that was easily fixed in Lightroom. I added some warmer colours to the shot to bring out the colours that I was originally hoping to capture and that I imagined before taking the shot. I added clarity and a small vignette to the sky to add some drama. I placed the sun on a visual third to make it easy on the eye which was a tad blown out but lowering the highlights of the photo helped to get the shape of the sun back.
A simple portrait shot of my friend walking towards me. I used a telephoto lens to create depth in the photo and to make it seem like he has been places on a single layer of focus on the pavement. I purposely slightly overexposed the photo as I personally believe that portaits like this should be brighter as it is the subject you want to see, not the background. Even so, the background isn’t blown out and you can see far more detail in his face and the jumper at this exposure.
I waited until night to capture a photo of the castle on Princes Street as you see people taking photos of the castle during the day all the time and I wanted to do something a bit different when it is lit up. I used a tripod here and set the ISO to 100 and the aperture to F5. The resulting shutter speed was 15 seconds which was long enough to capture some cloud movements. The lights from the cars really helped in lighting up the statue in the foreground. I used an ISO of 100 to retain all of the detail and minimise grain. There was a large lens flare in the frame as I was not using a lens hood but I managed to remove it in Photoshop.
I was going to do one light trails photo and decided to try one that I haven’t done before and capture traffic on both sides of the camera. I used an ISO of 100 again to get a long shutter speed to capture as much movement as possible as it was relatively quiet. I set the aperture at F22 as all of the lights would have overexposed the photo if I used a wide aperture. I also like the star-like effect a small aperture gives to street lamps. I was hazey to if I liked the buses on the right but I ended up using this photo as it does gives a glimps to the actual vechicles on the road instead of just the lights.
A more simplic and easy picture. With a balanced composition and sharp detail but with some hidden elements. This is an HDR (High Dinamic Range) photo. I took one underexposed, one correctly exposed and one overexposed photo and blended them together to capture as much detail in all areas as possible. You can see a result of this from the person on the right who is slightly transparent. I corrected the compostion in Lightroom and cropped out some foreground distractions. The path on the right leads the eye far down into the photo which creates insane depth. Then the eye comes back up the canal. I isolated the colours in the water which gives this photo its name.