Triple Point 7

Triple Point 7, a photo by nmonckton on Flickr.

Found this view while out shooting for Assignment 5. It combines the sun-star exercise from the notes with an idea I picked up from Rowell's Mountain Light about using the edge of a solid object to cause diffraction patterns.
While not really relevant to anything I was attempting at the time it seemed foolish to turn down the opportunity.

Sun star and silhouette

Quite a challenging exercise this – which is why I’ve already had one pass with archive shots. This one I took in London in December with this exercise in mind. I considered cropping it to make it more obvious, but try as I may I couldn’t find a crop that I liked as much as the full shot. I have, perhaps, cheated a little by using a reflection of the sun of the office building – but I can’t see any harm in creative use of the resources on offer. I managed to get this one shot before the guys semi-silhouetted in the bottom right moved and spoiled the effect. As a street shooting technique this requires more than a share of luck and rapid reactions.

The sun star is not as well defined as it could be because the reflection off multiple window slightly diffuses the light source, but it is still dramatic enough to add to the image. The tarmac was also sufficiently shiny to catch and reflect the highlight which gives the silhouette of the two gents in the bottom corner.

As I write this I’m also beginning to wonder if a tall thin crop of the RHS would make an effective image after all. Once I’m near a suitable editing programme I’ll give it a try.

More Contre Jour

Exercise 20 – with it’s emphasis on sun stars is ultimately about shooting into the sun. It undoubtedly a tricky technique to get the exposure right , and even more tricky in the absence of easily available sunlight. yesterday would have been perfect for these exercises, but I was working – so I just have to keep waiting for an opportunity. In the meantime, and in good old Blue Peter fashion, here are a couple of takes on shooting into the light (and the infernal sunstars) that I prepared earlier.
These first two are very much earlier in fact – dating to 2005 with my first digital camera. They don’t feature sunstars – the sun was behind some cloud and much too diffuse for that but they do feel like decent examples of using sunlight, reflections and silhouettes to achieve a satisfactory composition.

In both these examples a silhouette against the reflected light of the sun adds to the overall composition – in fact in the version to the right it’s the whole point of the composition.

In this example – which I took with this exercise in mind - I have hidden the sun behind the tree on the left so that I can expose for some detail in the foreground. Again the cloud has diffused the sun too much for sun star effects to be really obvious, although close inspection does reveal a couple of relatively weak examples. Although the guy sitting on the bank adds a nice touch, I think that the light/camera on the pole rather detracts from the beachside idyll in this shot.

And finally, something that rather turns the concept of a silhouette on it’s head and has a luminous body against a dark background, and still manages to include a “star”. this was taken in Switzerland while I was studying People and Place (which in truth is where I think this technique belongs). I used the floodlit Jette and the luminous spray to form the main composition, dwarfing the masts to the left  - which are reverse silhouetted against a darker sky beyond. A conveniently placed searchlight on the far bank of the lake has then served the role of the sun to add a highlight of interest in the bottom right of the shot.