Evaluation

At the beginning of this elective, I knew very little about Digital Photography. I had never experimented with it, and very very rarely used it in my practice as a visual communicator, apart from to document my work in a portfolio. I wanted to take this opportunity to get used to adjusting various settings on my digital SLR camera, and felt to do so it would be a good start just experimenting with scenes I found in and around West Yorkshire. This way, there was no pressure to produce anything particularly out of the ordinary, it was just a process that allowed me get used to the camera. I discovered that taking photos in natural light was a lot harder than in a studio setting, where you have the aid of extra lighting and a flash. The day I picked to shoot these was also dull, and playing around the the ISO and shutter speed didn't improve the shots much. The use of Photoshop was crucial in producing a couple of successful photographs. I had never taken photos using camera raw files before, which turn out to be much more versatile when editing as it offers you a larger range of aspects of the photograph to alter and play around with, than those found when editing jpgs.