Tropical World (write up)

For the 3rd week’s project, the theme “tropical world” was introduced using the technique of shutter speed. Though the idea of the topic was to visit Tropical World in Leeds, I actually visited Eden Project in Cornwall – which essentially offers the same things such as plants, waterfalls, etc. except on a much bigger scale. I absolutely loved Eden Project and any lover of photography must experience it. I went with my brother’s family, including my 10-year-old niece as a day out. Therefore again, there wasn’t planning as such involved because it was a fairly spontaneous trip. As like with the Urban Landscape project, there weren’t many risk assessments or safety issues as such except protecting your equipment from water, crowds, etc.

Being my biggest set of images from the entire module, it’s safe to say I produced a great amount of photos, which was quite time consuming choosing which images were the best/most appropriate to use. I’ve found it’s a great way of criticising and evaluating your own work – much like choosing a set of images for a portfolio, being hard on your self I feel is important.
From the set, I have a few favourites that stand out. Focusing on shutter speed and depth of field mainly, I tried to capture wasps and bees surrounding the photos. Looking at the images now it’s obvious I’ve taken to a shallow aperture to focus on the flowers, whilst using a fairly high shutter speed of around 1/200 to capture the insects landing on the flowers, whilst keeping the ISO at a minimum as the light inside was overwhelming. I think in particular these are my favourite images of the set and I was really pleased with them. Going to Eden gave me a new love for natural photography, I feel I have matured within my work and become more open to new ideas. As shallow thought as it is, flowers never interested me before visiting Eden – I’m glad my opinion has been changed for the better!

As the weather worked in my advantage, I got some beautiful shots in the sun. From remembering work during “natural and artificial light”, I always think ahead how I’m going to position the object to the background, e.g. a flower in front of sunlight will produce a silhouette. Learning, remembering and practising this has helped improve my skills and initial planning thoughts as a photographer. As the weather stayed the same during the day, it kept me focused on what I was doing rather than fiddling with settings. Criticising myself however, I feel I didn’t adequately use shutter speed to its full advantage and concentrated more on the aperture. When discussed in a lesson, it was said that we could swap a couple of techniques that we were assigned to certain themes. For example, instead of concentrating on shutter speed with “tropical world”, we could perhaps concentrate on it more with “sports”. I struggled to capture the waterfalls at Eden without a tripod, which I regret not taking. But overall, I was extremely pleased with my images and really enjoyed myself on the day out. I would say this was one of my favourite projects out of the module.