(Above is a picture of the outside of the theater).
What I did for work experience.I did my work experience in a small fringe theater in Islington, in north London, called the Pleasance Theater. Which put on both theater and comedy productions. I really enjoyed participating in work experience, because it gave me a real good taste of what it would be like to work in a working environment. When working in this fringe theater, I would work in the box office in the morning hours and I would help out doing jobs in and around the administration office. It is hard to choose a favorite out of both of them two, because both were really enjoyable and what made the whole experience the best was the great people that I worked with. It was fun to work in the box office, because it was really interesting to see how all the tickets are sold and I also got to communicate with members of the public, and it was interesting to chat with passers through. On the other hand I liked working in the admin office as-well. The reason for this is that they gave me really exciting tasks to carry out such as working with spreadsheets and e-mailing production company's. It was much more refreshing than doing the usual work which I do at school.
Overall I really enjoyed work experience, however it wasn't fun whatsoever being stuck in traffic on the way back. Unlike most work experience students, I had pretty good working hours, from 11 in the morning till 5, therefore rush hour in the morning wasn't an issue but rush hour on the way back was not fun at all. This, for me, was the only bad part about work experience. Below is a slideshow of all of the photos which I took, you can also see all the photos in my flickr set, which you can find in the link at the top of the page. |
My thoughts on the photos I took.When taking photos for this personal project, I was trying to focus on playing around with the ISO settings and how I can use the different camera settings to my advantage. When taking pictures, for instance, of the busy rush hour scenes; I would set the ISO setting really high, to ensure that the crowd is not presented as a large blur in the photo. (The blur may have been created because the people are walking to fast). However, having said that, it was difficult experimenting with the ISO setting when taking the pictures of the theater. For example in this photo,
you can see that the ISO setting was too low and didn't allow enough light to enter into the lens. The camera was set on these settings:
I therefore looked at these setting and altered them slightly, to improve the photo, and make it look better. I also took the photo from a different angle, to make sure my photos have a large verity, then came out with a photo like this.
At this time in the theatre, the lighting was very limited which meant that the ISO had to be very high to ensure that all the light which was available in the room went into the camera lens. I changed the settings on the camera, so it was like this:
As you can see, the photo now has more light in it because i changed the ISO to 1600, compared to my last photo which was only ISO 64.
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Original ideas which I had.
Photographers which inspired me to take these photos.
One of my favourite photographers who I really like, and I always keep in mind is a photographer called Daido Moryamo. He takes really nice photos of scenes on the street, (such as the ones I took during the rush hour photos I took). I saw Daido Moryamo once at the Tate modern, which was a really good exhibition and showed me that some of the best photographs are taken when on the street and using the decisive moment to my advantage. Even though I did not take any black and white photographs, if I ever did this sort of photography project again, I would take more photographs in black and white much like Daido Moryam becauseI really like the way black and white photographs can look so nice even though they use the bare minimum of colour.
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Another photographer, which I took inspiration from, is one I found on Mr Nicholl's website. His name is Tom Wood, and I really like how he takes everyday situation such as the scene in the cafe (pictured below), and makes them look really interesting and abstract. I tried to do that sort of thing when taking my photos, trying to take photos which would catch your attention. I also admire the way Tom Wood makes his photographs really intense with they way he uses colours.
My favourite photo I took.
This is my favorite photo I took when on work experience. What I especially love about this photo, is the scenery involved in the photo. This photo really sums up why rush hour was such a mad panic and why it was such a big problem for me during work experience. The momentum of this photo is really nice, what I mean by that is you can feel the energy in the photo moving from the bottom right hand corner and moving towards the top of the escalators, you can feel yourself moving with the blurred image of the woman which is the subject of the photo. I also like the small details which are in this photo, such as the poster which has all the rules of the tube station on the right hand side of the picture. Using a blurred image was a technique we learnt during the mobile photography personal project, which I have put , to make out photos more interesting, I have put this idea to good use in this photo. What I also really admire about this photo is the way that in every part of the photo their is something interesting going on. Such as on the left side there is two commuters getting off the escalator. Another great thing about this photo is the lighting which is used on the photo, when taking pictures on tube stations, you get this really nice artificial lighting which shines down on the photo. The kind of green-yellow feel of the photo makes it feel really warm.
In this photo, because I was taking pictures of rushing crowds, I took the picture with a high ISO to make sure I get the blurred images of the commuters in full on detail. (pictured on the left). I also set the ISO very high because on the underground tube stations the lighting is very dim and setting the ISO higher meant that more light would go into the lens. Which was the same case I had with the photo of the theater pictured above.
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I have also created a Voki to sum up my thoughts on the ISO I used during the photo.
What would I do to improve my photos even further?To improve my photos even further next time I do this sort of thing, I would like to use Photoshop to enhance the photographs in terms of what lighting is used, etc. In class Mr. Nicholls taught us how to use editing software in Iphoto, but unfortunately I wasn't able to do this since I do not have Iphoto on my laptop. I would also perhaps like to use the decisive moment to my advantage more often because I think this is a really good technique for taking photos in areas which have a large amount of people doing all sorts of jobs, such as the tube.
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My Voki |