Work Record- Shoot 3: Journey by Horse

What I hope to achieve-
With this shoot I hope to create a different view on how journeys can be taken. Every other one of my shoots have aspects of motor vehicles as an idea of how the journey can be taken, however with this shoot I am hoping to be able to use a horse as the means of transportation. I am hoping to get the animal and rider in motion of walk, trot, canter and galloping, the range of speeds of motion will be evident in the photo and create different feels. I am hoping to edit this shoot in colour with an enchanted undertone feel, which will obviously be done in Photoshop. Im hoping to show a wide range of skills within the editing stages, for example the use of tools that I haven't used in any of my other shoots. The overall photo should look natural but with little aspects of fairytale weaved throughout, the reason I want the enchanted feel in this shoot is because horses are largely connected to fairytale stories, therefore I felt it would be nice to incorporate that into the images.

What I actually achieved-
I was able to create my images showing a journey by horse, through different motions such as walk and canter. I also used a variety of shot types to get different points of view, I felt this worked well and created a more unique photo, in some senses. During the editing stage I managed to pull in a diverse set of skills, for example I was able to take the sky from photo which was blue and clear and merge it into another photo without creating fraying between the bushes. I feel like the extra bit of colour from the sky matched with the rest of the image worked well, brightening it up making it feel more like a fairytale, which again was what I was hoping to do. I did however originally think that I would be including and creating extra fairytale like aspects for the image, however this didn't work as well as I was hoping and left them out of the finished image.

 This is my favourite photo out of all of my own, this is because I managed to switch the sky from a dark grey and gloomy colour into the light blue fairytale kind of sky that I wanted. I also really like this image because there are many indications that both horse and rider are taking part in a journey. The way the horses legs are one in front of the other shows that they are travelling and the path indicates a route in which they are following. Also the path leads right into the camera lens, which again I think looks really nice. The log, when looking closely at it looks fake and cartoon like, which links in with how I had originally wanted to create an enchanted feel. I do feel as thought the journey could have been made even clearer throughout this image, perhaps if the path could be seen from behind the horse as well as in front of it. Overall, I'm happy with the work I have put into creating this image.

Personally, this is not one of my favourite photos and this is because the white of the sky behind the trees blends in with the white fur of the horse making him not stand out enough in the photo. I do however like that he is in mid stride because it shows a clear indication of movement and the fact that they are on a journey. I think there is a lot of room for improvement with this photo even though it does show aspects of my exam question topic.

I used an Olympus camera and an Olympus 12-40 mm f2.8 camera lens. My camera was set at shutter speed 1/1000secs, f3.2 and Iso 200. The f stop being at 3.2 created a small amount of depth of field with some of my images which had been taken from a low angle. In the editing stage I took two different paths with different images. For the first path which created more of the enchanted feel I started off by cropping the photo with the blue sky down so that all was left was the sky. I then selected and copied the image that I wanted the sky to be changed on. Next I pasted the photo onto the image of the sky and then duplicated the image so that there was two layers of the same photo. I then used the polygonal lasso tool, once having turned the top layer of and selected the original layer, to select any part of my image that didn't have any sky in. I then added a layer mask onto the layer which basically merged both my photos together. However, I then turned my top copy layer back on, this made the photo look normal again, I then directly double clicked onto the copy layer thumbnail, which opened up a layer style dialogue box.

With this box I adjusted the leaver for the bar that said this layer, doing this merged the blue sky into the image and still allowing any tree branches to sit in front of the sky. Lastly I adjusted the transition between the photos to remove any fringing that may have happened.

What am I going to do next-
Next I would like to focus on taking images focusing on places, I would like to do this by travelling around to different cities and towns taking photographs of any unique building, attractions and the people that inhabit the places. I would want it to show my own personal journey through different locations and everything that I would have seen whilst travelling. Im not too sure in how I would like to edit them but I would want it to reflect how the places made me feel, to give an overall feeling to the photo.

I really enjoyed photographing during this shoot and I feel that I used a lot of different skill sets that cannot be seen in any of my other shoot, which I am rather happy about. However I do not feel that every image from this shoot shows a clear indication of a journey, even though a journey can be seen. Overall, I am happy with how this shoot turned out but feel theres room for improvement.