Evaluation

For this project we were given the task of creating a pop art image for photography. We were first told to research pop art as a genre and see what we discovered and what i discovered was that Pop Art was often presented as screen prints of everyday objects but colourfully presented. Their work was often amusing and used every day objects such as coke cans, dollar bills and comic strips as their subjects. Pop art also used the faces of well known people (Marilyn Monroe), again as their subjects. My research found that the famous artists were Andy Warhol and David Hockney as well as Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper John. I also had to research pop art images and then make a contact sheet for them. The contact sheet is here for you to see: 

After doing the research and writing about pop art pictures and what pop art as a genre is, I then went on to write about the lighting diagrams, how I'm going to position the lights, how certain lights effect the shadows of an object and where to place the lights. It wasn't just the lights either it was how to actually set up the seamless background by using blue tack to stick paper or card up and how to position the camera etc. We then just had to create a small item list which you can find within the seamless background post. 

My proposal went okay, I wrote around 450 words and i think that I ended up sticking to the ideas that I came up with in my proposal. Also in my pre production I drew a sketch up of where the cameras were going to be placed, I then wrote down a list of 10 objects that I could bring to the lesson and you can see these objects under the "list of objects" post.

For the production side of things we first had to take pictures of our objects and what you see here is a seamless background that me and my friend created with a table. 2 overhead lights, a camera and stand, some white background card and the weight to balance it out which just happens to be my bag.

In the photoshop part of the production you can see in the first picture that it's zoomed right in and what I had to do was select the paint bucket part of the tool bar, select a colour and fill in all of the white parts which was very tedious but paid off in the end. Below you can see that I put a "filter" over the top by selecting the rectangle tool and drawing me over the top, putting the opacity to around 30% and changing the pattern colour overlay to a rainbow one which made it a bit more colourful, especially the background because it looked a bit dull just being one colour. I also selected the "bubble pattern" took on the bucket tool and filled in some of the top 2 parts of text and made it look a bit more funky, you can see in the pictures below at the top left of the screen, the bucket tool is active and the bubble pattern is selected.

Here is my final piece for you to see. I think my production came off okay and I think it was worth all the annoying filling in of the White parts.

After the whole production and shooting my images (which went really well by the way), I had to do a memory check and these questions were just to check my memory. Questions like "Detail two reasons why we change the ISO" and "Explain the difference in depth of field between a wide and a narrow aperture" etc.

What I would change if i had to do this again is to pick a different and more complex object and spend more time on actually getting a good object to shoot and not just a bottle, maybe go out and buy a colourful slinky.

Overall I enjoyed this project and I think that my project that I created met the requirements of the assignment brief.

Memory check

Q1 – Detail two reasons why we change the ISO

We change the ISO which controls how sensitive the camera is to the amount of light you have, for example, if you were photographing in a lit studio you would be able to control the light and therefore you would set the ISO to 100. But if you're working somewhere low lit maybe 800+ would be more ideal. The second reason is to control the detail of your picture. An example for this is a 100 ISO would take in a lot of detail while a 800 ISO would look a bit grainy.




Q2 – Explain the difference in depth of field between a wide and a narrow aperture

A wide aperture means that the background of the object that you are shooting would be blurry while if you had a small aperture then you would be able to see all of the details in the background of your image. In simpler terms the background of an image that has been shot with a wide aperture would be blurry.


Q3 – List four consideration you had to take into account when producing your pop-art photography. For example, depth of field, shadows etc)

The background of the image had to be one colour as we would be also ediitng the background.
The shadows came into consideration as I didnt really want them in the pictures.
The editiing needs to not be over edited.
The pictures need to be detailed very nicely.



Q4. Describe when would you choose to use the ‘A’ and the ‘P’ modes on a camera

A means aperture and you would use this setting when shooting a flower for example and you want to blurr the grassy background out of it etc and you would use P (programme) when you need to constantly need to change camera settings but its just the shutter speed and the aperture that changes.

Production

For the production side of things we first had to take pictures of our objects and what you see here is a seamless background that me and my friend created with a table. 2 overhead lights, a camera and stand, some white background card and the weight to balance it out which just happens to be my bag.

In the photoshop part of the production you can see in the first picture that it's zoomed right in and what I had to do was select the paint bucket part of the tool bar, select a colour and fill in all of the white parts which was very tedious but paid off in the end. Below you can see that I put a "filter" over the top by selecting the rectangle tool and drawing me over the top, putting the opacity to around 30% and changing the pattern colour overlay to a rainbow one which made it a bit more colourful, especially the background because it looked a bit dull just being one colour. I also selected the "bubble pattern" took on the bucket tool and filled in some of the top 2 parts of text and made it look a bit more funky, you can see in the pictures below at the top left of the screen, the bucket tool is active and the bubble pattern is selected.

Here is my final piece for you to see. I think my production came off okay and I think it was worth all the annoying filling in of the White parts.

All contact sheets

For the football boot pictures the placement of the boot was easy to do as it's got many sides as you can see in the picture above, the ISO that I had set was around 100 because it was a on a seamless background and was all lit up, the aperture was a wide one as I didn't have anything in the background to capture so I didn't exactly want to capture anything, also as its a still object I just had the shutter speed on about 1/4. The lighting was good on all of these pictures so u didn't really need to move the lights around. These pictures were all good however I didn't end up using this one.

The next images we have is the lucozade bottle and the lucozade bottle was hard to keep still as its a round on its side and round things tent to roll and move a lot so I ended up sticking it down with blu tack, after the feat of getting the lucozade bottle to stay in one place was accomplished I thought about the lighting and the lighting was actually really good for this object meaning they weren't reply any large, weird looking shadows that were forming from it so I ended up just keeping the light where it was, I also ended up keeping the shutter speed the same as the previous setting that was from the boot and the shutter speed wasn't touched again as the rest of my objects were all still but I slightly closed the aperture a little bit smaller because there's a lot of detail on this bottle that I wanted to get. The ISO for this bottle was 100 again because 100 it was on a seamless background. I ended up using this one as my final image.

For this twenty pound note I set the aperture very small because I wanted to get every part of the detail in it, placing the bank note was annoying because it kept on moving and crunching itself so I ended up blu tacking it to the card and then taking the picture, the ISO stayed on 100 and I decided to crunch the bank note up and take a couple of picture of it like that because I felt like it would be different thing to do and that was good that I did that because as I went to edit my note in Photoshop a warning sign popped up on my screen telling me that the software couldn't edit bank notes so I just used the crunched version of it instead and luckily it let me edit that. I ended up using this for my edit.

For my watch I just kept all my previous settings the same apart from this time instead of a white background because my watch is white I changed the background to a more brown ish colour. After doing this I borrowed my friends watch also & ended up taking a few pictures of them side to side. Unfortunately the watch didn't make it into my work and neither did the controller which is what I'll talk about now. 

My controller was a difficult one to do for positioning reasons, I mean I kept all the other settings the exact same but I couldn't seem to position it correctly, you can see that I tried to flip it over and take pictures that way but it just wasn't happening. I wanted the triggers and the buttons in shot but that didn't end up happening as I couldn't find anything to hide behind the controller or a controller stand to go behind it and so that's why I didn't end up using this piece. 

Proposal

The equipment I will need is: White A2 paper, blue tack, table, wall or board to stick sheet too, two Red heads (lights), camera, SD card, object that I'm photographing, a computer with photoshop and a tripod.

What I'm going to do to get the correct lighting for my studio is set the object in the middle of the table/paper and set two lights up either side (left and right) so that the shadow is at it's minimal and really small and then set the camera the correct position where you wont be able to see the shadows.
My props is something that I'm not quite sure on yet but I think I'm going to be bringing in a colourful slinky, a bottle, a light bulb, a trainer and a PS4 Controller so I'm going to bring in 5 different props and photograph all of them and I'm probably going to edit all of them and then see what one looks the best. My inspirations and what I'm going to base my work off is going to be something like this:

These sorts of styles of creations is what my work will consist of. Brightly, high edited, multiple images with the same pictures but just edited differently by colours etc. The things that I will need to take in are the ISO which is the light intake and a lower ISO means more detail, that's very important because these images are being blown up to A3 size. My ISO will be at 100. The shutter speed will be whatever because it doesn't really matter when its on a tripod and as for the depth of field it needs to be shallow because we don't really want the background in so the aperture will be wide which is about F4. The editing process will be the fun part because I'm going to get to turn an ordinary object into a piece of art like a colourful Lucozade bottle into something amazing. The editing process is going to all take place inside photoshop. To cut the picture out if I'm lucky ill get to use the magic wand tool but if not then ill probably use the pen tool to draw around the object I want before I make the selection, inverse it and cut it out. The other effects that I will use is colour balance and saturation and the bucket tool which is used to fill things in with colour. The best looking one will be chosen. The lighting doesn't really matter as much as i will mainly be using the red heads to get rid of the shadows but combating the bright light with the ISO level.

List of objects.

Here is a list of ten things that I could bring next week to photoshoot.

1. A video tape.

2. An iPhone.

3. A colourful slinky.

4. A bottle.

5. An iPad.

6. A digital Camera.

7. A Lightbulb.

8. Trainer.

9. PS4 Controller.

10. A PS4 game.

Sketch of pop-up studio set-up

This is a Sketch of my pop-up studio set-up that I'm going to create next week while shooting my objects.

Popart lighting techniques and seamless background

The equipment I will need is:

• White A2 paper.
• Blue tack.
• Table.
• Wall or board to stick sheet too.
• Two Red heads (lights).
• Camera.
• SD card.
• Object that I'm photographing.
• A computer with photoshop.
• Tripod.

What I'm going to do to get the correct lighting for my studio is set the object in the middle of the table/paper and set two lights up either side (left and right) so that the shadow is at it's minimal and really small.

Here in this first picture you can see that the object has a shadow behind it and you don't really want to be taking pictures of shadows so to get rid of this you would put a lighting device either side of it, left and right like the person on the last picture has done with the pumpkin or you could actually put a lighting source above it like the person has done in the second picture.

Popart research task contact sheet.

Popart research task

      Pop Art was born in Britain in the mid 1950s. The first application of the term Pop Art occurred during discussions among artists who called themselves the Independent Group which was part of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, begun around 1952-53 and a lot of the art died out in the 1970's but still lives on today.

      Pop art was often presented as screen prints of everyday objects but colorfully presented. Their work was often amusing and used every day objects such as coke cans, dollar bills and comic strips as their subjects. Pop art also used the faces of well known people (Marilyn Monroe), again as their subjects. Just some of the famous artists are Andy Warhol and David Hockney as well as Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper John. The features of a pop art image are bright colours, comical and cartoons with the use of every day objects or famous people. I think they used to be created by hand drawings and they could also be screen printed. 

      A pop art image could be used in a comic strip, online websites, advertisements, billboards and photography galleries. Toys for children is something that people could use pop art for in advertisements because it's cartooney, has bright colours and looks cool. It could also be used on fizzy drinks and chocolate wrappers, album art for a musicians album or concert flyers and posters. The equipment i think ill need is: a camera, a studio or self made white backdrop, some red heads (lights), a tripod and my props that i need to bring in to be photographed.