Light and Shadow Assignment

This picture was taken in Sleepy Hollow, NY. To place more focus on the shadow of the house as the subject, I could have cropped the picture, but I thought that it would add more interest to include the house. Since the top of the house is cropped, the shadow allows the viewer to see what the house top looks like.

This picture was taken at Sunnyside, Washington Irving's home in Sleepy Hollow, NY. I like how the light was shining through the trees so that it was highlighting some of the tops of the plants while others remained in shadow.

Here is another picture which places more focus on the plants receiving the light from the sun.

I took this picture using an aperture of f/5.6 a and shutter speed of 1/40, which allowed for more focus on the subject, the leaves in the foreground. I like how the settings on the camera were able to be manipulated in this way. It allowed for more flexibility to create the image that I wanted to capture.

This picture was taken in Connecticut. I think it shows a perfect fall setting, but the photo could be improved with more focus on the horse.

Fall in New England

Here is a picture taken on October 23, 2009, of an actual pumpkin, grown in western Pennsylvania, that weighs 570 pounds. I couldn't believe how big the pumpkin was when I was up close to it. Its magnitude is obvious with the other smaller pumpkins overshadowed by it.

I like the contrast that the light creates in these two pictures taken in Connecticut of a river. There is a bridge overhead, so it was blocking some light from reaching the river and cast a shadow. I think the bottom picture shows a lot of texture to the water, so it could be argued that the bottom picture is more interesting than the top picture. The top picture, however, has a lot of texture in the rocks, which occupy half the space in the photograph. The top picture from this standpoint is successful as well.

10/19 sunny

The top photo is the original taken of the altar inside the Basilica. The picture was taken on October 19, 2009. It was a sunny day and the only light source for the picture was the light from outside shining through the stained-glass windows. There was minimal tungsten light inside the Basilica. The bottom picture was altered using Photoshop. It is much more successful than that from Oct. 18, 2009, since the walls behind the altar are less warm in tone. The colors of the walls match better to how they should be after the calibration using the highlight dropper.





calibrated

10/18 - cloudy

The top picture is of the altar in the Basilica. On October 18, 2009, it was starting to get dark outside and it also cloudy, so the light that is visible in the picture is mostly due to the lights in the Basilica, or tungsten light. The bottom picture has been altered using Photoshop using the highlight dropper in order to calibrate it. The top photo has a lot of red, yellow, and orange in the photo. The bottom photo is much improved in terms of allowing the true hues to show. However, the limitation existed in determining what white to choose to base the other colors off of due to the risk of losing too much information. More should probably be done to eliminate the yellow tone to the walls, but it would have to be done carefully so that more information in the picture is not lost.

10/19 sunny

The top picture is the original picture taken on October 19, 2009. The lighting conditions were different from the day before since it was a bright, sunny day with few clouds in the sky. The bottom picture has been calibrated using Photoshop. There is only a slight difference between the original and the calibration in the tone of the stone material of the Baslicia has less blue in it. More work would need to be done to improve the calibration, but it was rather difficult to calibrate the original photo since any true white tone that was chosen caused the picture to lose too much information. In this sense, it was advantageous to do as little as possible with the photo to alter it.

10/18 - cloudy

The picture on top is the original while the picture on the bottom has been altered using Photoshop. This picture was taken on October 18, 2009. It was a cloudy day. While some information in the photograph of the sky has been lost in the calibration, the structure of the Basilica is more true to life in its tone since the stone does not have as much of a blue tone as the original does.