planning for preliminary work...

At first, I had no idea what I wanted to do for my preliminary work. After brainstorming for a couple of days, I decided to do a photo series. I decided on this because I knew that I wanted to do something with photography, but I wanted the photos to tell a story as well, or at least depict some sort of movement/action. After struggling to come up with an idea for a little bit, I realized that my brother's birthday was coming up, so I decided to make a photo series depicting the global tradition of receiving cake, and blowing out candles on your birthday. I didn't do much planning, beforehand, and kind of just went with the spur of the moment. I bought a cake, and white candles. I made sure that both of these were fairly simple, because I wanted the main focus to be on the subject, and not on the details of the cake. I also wanted my parents to be incorporated into the photos, to show love and togetherness, especially on special occasions like birthdays. I wanted to do this just by incorporating their hands in the frame. I decided that the series itself was going to consist of six photos:

1) the first lit candle

2) mom lighting the other candles with that one

3) mom giving cake to brother

4) brother happy, seeing cake

5) blowing out candles

6) close up on candles, partially or fully blown out

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I had to experiment a bit with the settings on my camera beforehand, and I found that I was able to obtain the best results when the camera was set to night mode, and using a 50mm lens. This was the most successful for me because my camera adjusted to the low light setting pretty easily, and the photos turned out how I wanted. I also found that if I shot on a darker table, the photo was a lot darker, because there wasn't as much light reflecting off of the surface. I didn't want this, so I decided to instead take the photos on a very light colored table, because the light was distributed much nicer throughout the photo as it reflected off of the tabletop.

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This was when I was experimenting with my camera settings and seeing how different backgrounds affected the amount of light reflected off of the flames. As you can see, the first photo has more of a soft glow around the flame because of the light background, and the second photo doesn't, and is instead more harsh, and accentuated. Which I did not want.

I also ran into another problem while shooting. Of course, the more candles there are, the more light is reflected, and the brighter the setting. I added a lot of candles in the beginning, and I ended up having to remove some of them, because the photos were too bright, and the light from the candles was drowning out the subjects features. I also wanted the flames to be seen individually, and a bit more detailed, and when there were too many on the cake, it just kind of turned into a giant luminous blob. Here is an example of what I am talking about...

I worked past these problems, and I feel like I came up with a really nice, composed result. The results will be in the next post...