Sunday 18 September 2011

Exercise 47 - Rain

What: The brief of this exercise was to show the understanding of illustration by producing an original image for a magazine cover which demonstrates the subject of rain
Where: In the house
When: During the two days of storms
How: First of all I had to do was to reference some book and magazine covers and get an idea of what to avoid when coming up the subject of rain.

At first I wanted to produce an image of someone walking across the road at a set of crossroads where I could capture the silhouetted figure under an umbrella while the rain socked building could be seen going off into the distance using the perspective from the crossroads. However as the wind was so strong I could not find a position in my chosen location where I would not be buffeted by the wind and where I could catch someone using an umbrella, it appeared that umbrellas were not in use due to the very high winds.

I then thought about shooting out of a first flooe window into the dark night, placing a remotely fired flash on the ground floor below. I believed that the rain drops would be light up from below with the flash and this would produce a nicely light image of the rain. However the flash I am using has developed a fault and would not trigger correctly or produce a flash of the correct intensity. SO I had to rethink the idea again.

While at home I remembered an image I had taken a long time ago which had received some good reactions from friends and relatives. I then tracked down the original file and decided that I would like to use the concept to produce a new image

The original image produced in 2005 using one of my first proper point and shoot digital cameras.
break-in-the-storm

I waited during the stormy days until there was a moment when it was not too dark and that the rain was light enough not just to streak down the window. I then just shot a few frames in different directions out through the glass until I was happy with the background of the image.

D80,Aperture f/22, Shutter Speed 1/3000 sec, ISO 3200, 105mm (35mm equivalent 157mm),Centre Weight Metering Mode, Cloud White Balance, Hand Held, 105mm lens

Rain V2

I used cloud white Balance rather than shade as I could not get the right colour representation from either shade or auto white balance.

I then gave the image a title to look like a magazine cover and then a couple of lines of text as you would normally get on a cover.

What I learned

I learned from this exercise that sometimes a plan just does not work out and that you have to be flexible with your ideas. I quite enjoyed the exercise as it was a task where I had to exercise my imagination and come up with some concepts and the second part was the exercise in producing and photograph to a set specification.

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