Frames of Beauty: Capturing Moments
Photography work in day to day situations and for business
In the summer semester of 2020 I spent a semester abroad at Hongik University in South Korea. In order to improve my skills in photography, I attended the master class of 'The International Design School for Advanced Studies', IDAS for short. There I learned how to operate a camera in different settings and what artistic components can be added.
Modern digital photography is no longer just about taking photographs in the traditional sense (historical film photography); the unique quality of digital photography is that it can encompass many data streams and techniques and still be classified as photography. In my project, I experimented with the nature of the camera as a scanner, not just a camera. As such, the scan opens the door to many processes in the photographic pipeline. Traditionally photography uses the darkroom, I use tools like Metashape and Cinema4D.
For this assignment, I decided to go out in the evening to take pictures without a disturbing light source. My intention was to take pictures of fast cars on the road. But in the end I found out that buses are even more interesting for this experiment. You don't just see stripes in the landscape, you also see the outer contours of the buses. This gives the illusion of looking through the windows and into the buildings behind them. For editing, I added a little more contrast and made the overall image a little darker.
I tried the long exposure effect for the second time. I went to the highway and took pictures from 1 to 15 minutes. Here's the result, which is the final look. I used a Canon EOS 2000D with a 18-55mm lens.
In our second lecture we saw pictures on how to edit a small planet. So we had to find a place that was not too flat. But also the big problem is that Seoul has a lot of tall buildings that I couldn't fully get on my camera. So I was looking for low buildings, I also had to use ground so it would look like an earth. Also, I did not want to have too many people in my pictures because they would just interrupt the surrounding surface. Luckily they all walked out of my way, so I got some nice shots. The man on the daylight earth was a cool thing, so I let him be there, and I decided to make a daylight and a nightlight picture so I could train both and learn how to make a scene out of them.
Our task was to create an image from many images of this object. I saw this beautiful vase and thought it could be perfect. It has something cultural of Korea and the structure is majestic. It was very hard and time-consuming because it was my first image to do this kind of experimental photography. But by the end, I had a sense of how it should be done and that it's okay if it's not perfect. It's more interesting when it's rough. It went better with the second picture that I started editing. I took more pictures because I wanted to show the whole landscape. I became very optimistic. That this one would work better. When I took the photos, I was very structured. First I took a picture of the exact section of the picture. Then I started from the upper left corner and took pictures all the way to the lower right corner. You can see that time has passed because of the brightness and contrast of the pictures.
At least we were encouraged to create a big photo project from the photo effects. The category that stuck in my mind the most was photogrammetry, so I decided to make things and people appear in 3D space without any great knowledge of CAD. I took advantage of the new technology of photogrammetry and used the computer program Agisoft Metashape. The trick is to walk around an object or a person in a circle, keeping the position on the circle and taking as many pictures as possible, which should overlap for an optimal result. To make sure the camera only focuses on the fore-ground object, you want to set the depth of field as high as possible, which means the widest aperture. So I set it to f1.4. When I had all the images in the box, all the images are uploaded to Agisoft and it creates an object from the images. The user now has an exact overview of where in the object each image has been included. If a spot is still very fragile, the photo
graphy is uploading can be repeated at this point. If you are satisfied with the result, you can export the object from the program as an .obj file and use it in your favorite CAD program or in Adobe Photoshop until you get the desired result.
