Water by TJ

The huge scope of doing water made it quite difficult to choose which photo to go with. I love being close to water whether it be streams, rivers or the sea, and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to photograph the Welsh coast whilst doing this subject. I eventually decided to go with the picture of the sea at Prestatyn in North Wales on a winter's morning in January. I had tried taking some photos with my tripod, but then I got this photo by pretty much getting down to ground level on the beach and getting the close up up shot of the tide just on  the turn with the almost bubble bath effect and also getting the wind farm in the distance. I decided to go with black and white as I felt in gave a darker more powerful feel the sea. I changed the brightness and contrast too to add to this effect.

Amongst the other pictures under consideration was a lovely stream I got in Devon, a scene of the river Thames at Maidenhead, a more abstract reflection shot of my van in a puddle at work, and another shot of Prestatyn with the waves lapping over the rocks.

Water by The Blonde

 I hadn't decided what I was going to shoot yet for this assignment, when I looked out of the bedroom window early one winter morning and saw this beautiful frosty sunlit scene! So such is my dedication to a good photograph that I leapt up in my pajamas and threw on some trainers, grabbed my camera and raced out there! I shot a whole lot and had trouble deciding my favourite but I think in the end the simplicity of the composition and the beauty of the sprinkling of ice crystals on the leaves and the tiny bud does it for me!

9) Water

A massive subject! Everything from a raindrop on a petal to a lake or an ocean! Plenty of scope for imaginative interpretation on this one!

Machinery by The Blonde

I REALLY enjoyed Machinery as a topic! I had a ton of ideas and luckily a ton of machinery / tools etc around the house! I finally ended up by concentrating on the “machinery” closest to my heart – cameras! This is a close up of a vintage manual focus 50mm lens, and I love the colours in the light refraction  of the glass, and the depth of field effect on the writing on the lens edge, Its kind of abstract and beautiful I think!

Machinery by TJ

Whenever I think of machinery I always harp back to the golden age of steam and the industrial revolution. It is one of my favourite periods of history. When coming to choose a subject to photograph for this topic I quickly ruled out modern machinery and thought about discarded rusty agricultural machinery, but I quickly came back to steam. How I now wished we could have done this topic in the summer and I could have gone and hunted out steam engines galore at steam rallies. However one of my favourite toys as a child was a miniature working steam engine, which I would spend hours outside playing with in the garden shed with my dad. I dug this out at my mum's house and had the added bonus of trying out my new photography backdrop and indoor photography lights. The challenge I set myself was to try an bring out the essence of machinery,  taking away the "toy" element. The resulting image was shot using a macro close up setting to give an illusion of a greater size and a result achieved a nice depth of field. I simply turned the image into grayscale, sharpened it and finally adjusted the brightness and contrast.

My other efforts show how I zoomed in on the piston, which although pleasing gave no indication as to what exactly I was photographing. I tried editing the photos in old Cyonatype format, but felt the grayscale worked better. I also came across a a piece of agricultural equipment stored in a barn of my work travels which lacked a "story".

8) Machinery

The next topic is machinery, and this gives us great scope. Going back to the amazing technological advances during the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, machinery plays a huge part in our daily lives. Possible avenues could be engines whether they be a car engine, steam engine or even a jet engine! Or high tech machinery such as modern manufacturing and the every appliances that we all have in our houses. Machinery in our every day lives is common place, but also perhaps the social effects of machinery could be a more abstract interpretation of this topic... Need some inspiration? Check out here and here!