This is my final project! I decided to shoot snow. I started shooting one day during the first snowfall for a while so there wasn't much snow but there was just enough to lightly cover things. It was difficult to shoot then because the snow kept landing on the lens and the lens kept getting foggy and having spots on it. I didn't really know where i wanted to go with the project then and I just thought it was interesting to see how defined the snow was and how when it landed for the first time you could really see every snowflake. The shots that were shot on this day were: The fuzzy berries, The black berries, The pine tree, The birds nest, And the roof.
The other main day i shot was when i woke up and saw that everything had frosted over. It was kind of early in the morning about eight, and it was FREEZING. I went out to a smallish corner of my yard where the most bushes were and they looked very cool so i shot them. The frost turned out to be harder to shoot than i thought because unless the focus is absolutely perfect, the frost doesn't look cool. The second hard thing about frost is that in order to get the detail I wanted i had to get pretty close to things and because the background was mostly shite, it was very hard to get the exposure right without blowing out the photo.
My favorite shots are the tree with the cool sky in the background, and the shot of the fence. I think these were better than the rest because my mom had sent me pictures taken in winter time and I really tried to look at what made those photos interesting and I found out that if the background was a different shade than the main focus, that helped, and also just a shot that looks longer than it does wide or wider than it does long, that helps sooo much. I tried to accomplish that in the shot of the fence and i really like how it turned out! I think it would've been better if the footprints weren't in the background but i didn't want to edit them out and risk the photo looking fake.
My least favorite shots are the pine tree, and the dangling branch, and the fence. I don't like the pine tree, I think, because the content wasn't the best and the light could've been better. I chose it because i really liked how the snow was only on some parts of the tree and it made it look shadowed but really there were hardly any shadows on the tree, it was just the snow. I didn't like the dangling branch because it was kind of a let down compared to the real thing. The real image of the dangling branch was SO SO cool! But when i took the photo, the branch blended in with its background more than the actual thing which made the editing reallllyyyy hard and ultimately ruined the photograph just a little. The fence i liked a lot at first, but editing it was a beast and it got really blown out when it was lighter and alot of the details that made it good were lost.
I really liked the images with the berries/seed! The seeds were fuzzy which made the focus look bad but when you look at the image closer the snow is perfectly in focus and it looks great! and the other shot with the berries I thought was good because if the background was in focus the image would just look like hundreds of those little berry clusters and because it was blurry, it just made it better. The birds nest, I thought was really interesting because i felt like it was acutally telling a story because it was winter time and the birds had all left and their home was being covered in snow.
Over all I think this project was a success but there are definitely things I think could've turned out better. I really liked almost all of my images but they were really hard to deal with and develop. I thought lighting was going to play a bigger part in this assignment than it did which was really weird to me.
