Specialist Location: Final Images and Evaluation

After I finished the shoot I had to finish some work from other units so I wasn't able to take a good long look at them for a couple of weeks.  I sorted through them and when I chose my final images. I decided to use eight images because it fell within the 5-10 range I set myself previously and I think eight is a nice, well rounded number (six was too little, seven seemed clumsy and well nine is just absurd!). I edited them in PS, mainly to increase the vibrance a little just to give them a little kick. In some cases I tweaked the exposure as well. Here is a before and after of one of the images just to demonstrate what my editing entails..

                                       Before                                                     After

Here are my final eight...

When I set out to do this shoot my aim was as follows..."To produce a series of 5-10 images of the lake Ullswater in the lake district using my DSLR incorporating water into my images that I would feel comfortable exhibiting" and I feel like I have achieved this. I LOVE the images and I am very happy with the final result. I was a little worried about weather and whether I would like the scenery there; in fact my Plan B was to borrow a macro lens from college and do some landscape photography with that if things didn't work out! That said, everything worked out well in the end, so much so the waves in the 4th image was pure coincidence! As part of the end of the course, some of the students on my course, including myself, will exhibit our specialist location images and I am happy to do that as I feel that these images would work in that setting as that was one of my aims when producing them :)

However, if I were to do this shoot again I would want to spend more time perhaps two days instead of one. Also I would look at different lakes on different sides of the lake district. It would have been nice to try it with film however I decided against it because with me being new to landscape photography I didn't want to over complicate things for myself. With a DSLR you can look at your images there and then and get a general idea if you happy with the result. Also I wanted to check my images after the test shoot to make a final decision as to which lake I would use for my shoot. I was able to check the images that night on my laptop whereas that would have been impossible to do using film so perhaps I would spread the shoot over a longer period of time (e.g 10 days) to give myself a chance to develop my negatives and see the results of my test shoot in order to make an informed decision.

Playing around with motion blur would be interesting however I don't know how well that would work as lakes are quite still as opposed to streams and rivers that run. It would be interesting to see how the small ships and boats turn out though.

Something I would definitely like to try would be panoramic images. I considered it with this shoot but again I didn't want to over complicate things as my DSLR doesn't have a panoramic setting so I would end up having to borrow one which I didn't want to do because the last thing I needed on my first landscape photography shoot was a camera I wasn't used to! What I did however is I go two images I took on my test shoot at Windemere and stitched them together in PS to see what it would look like...

I was actually quite happy with this image and I think that it would make a really great series if I were able to master the panoramic setting on another camera!