For this challenge, I chose to shoot photos of my maternal grandmother, who recently moved to West Vancouver from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. She is my sole remaining grandparent, and she moved to be closer to the rest of her family- 3 out of her 4 children all live around the Lower Mainland, including my mother. For all of these photos, I took advantage of natural light while outside on the balcony of her apartment, but it was a cloudy day so I couldn't have the best settings in terms of ISO, but I feel like these photos turned out well anyways. In two of the pictures she is featured with my dog, who for her is just another one of the grandkids. This shows my ancestry in that most of my immediate family is connected to the matriarchal side, just due to close proximity to each other. In these images, I wanted them to feel sort of soft and serene, as she is finally closer and connected to family. My favourite image of the series is the first one, mostly because it has the best lighting out of them and my favourite facial expression. In terms of what I would do better next time, I would want to be able to do a better variation of images, or possibly combine these ones with images of my mother to have more, but this all depends on the time available of the person. I didn't want to intrude too much. so I didn't end of with many images. Overall, I feel like I successfully completed the assignment and managed to make these images work together as a series that shows a simple view of a person.
This challenge was one that I struggled with, as it became surprisingly difficult to shoot once Vancouver descended into its rainy winter season and I completely missed out on all the sunshine that I think I remember having over winter break. I especially struggled with the self portrait portion, as I remember that at the time the light was constantly changing with clouds, and I faced the challenge that my backyard at home is surrounded by massive trees in neighbour's yards on either side, so usually there is only a slim chance for sunshine to actually reach the yard between 11am-4pm. Also, I had tripod issues and generally worries in self confidence with having a picture of myself.. I feel that this portrait fulfills the requirements, even though it isn't a particularly good or interesting photo. However, I really like how the other two photos turned out, and I was pretty surprised by it. These pictures were spur-of-the-moment going out somewhere and suddenly being shocked by perfect sun rays, and proceeding to screech at my sister to "stand there" while everyone else impatiently waited for us to get in the car. Both of these pictures were taken on my phone, and then minimally edited in Lightroom on my computer. My favourite image is the centre one that fulfills the rays of light challenge, as I managed to get my sister to be in focus with a surprising amount of depth of field due to the blur of the rest of the background. Overall, I managed to somewhat successfully complete this challenge, even though it was a wildly different times. In the future, I think that I would try to coordinate my timing better in terms of taking advantage of sunshine the immediate time I notice it.
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MoniqueRemember, the camera is your friend. Archives
February 2016
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