Photoshoot - Final Front Cover Images

This is a sample of 14 pictures out of the 80 which I took when shooting for my final front cover image. I based my images upon the ones which I had collected and displayed on my mood board earlier. I took them around the college, inside and outside, and have included a sample of good and bad photographs in order to critique and give a good idea of the ones which I took.

The first 10 photos shown here were all taken outside in the courtyard of the college grounds. I wanted the background to be blurred, preferably with some greenery in it, the image light and bright and the subject in the foreground clearly in focus. The first two pictures did not wholly achieve this as the aperture on my camera was too small, making the image appear sightly dull and dark and with a wide depth of field. Image number 3 was after I had increased the aperture however set the ISO too high and so it appears to be way too bright. Images 4 to 9 were after I had found the perfect exposure balance with the widest possible aperture (ensuring a shorter depth of field which created the blurred background effect I wanted).

Images 10 to 14 were taken inside. Though they didn't look too bad on the screen of my camera, once I uploaded them I realised the images were 'noisy' and had a lot of grain due to the low ISO (the settings of which I hadn't changed from when I took the pictures outside). The images are fairly dark as well as the colour not appearing as vivid as the outdoor ones. If I were to take these again, I'd have to look into increasing the ISO and/or shutter speed in order to compensate for the lack of natural light.

In some of the images, composition and framing of the picture was the issue. I would say personally in images 1, 8 and 13 the subject is a little too small. The background in image 12 does not do the photo much justice and images 3 and 14 are a little too close. However, these framings and composition may look good on a magazine, just not the one I had in mind.

I found shooting outside to be a little bit difficult at times as people were constantly walking in and out of the shot, as well as the windy weather messing up hair (seen in image 9 as Molly's face is slightly covered with a piece of her hair that blew across at the last minute). Despite this, I was pleased with how some of the images turned out and will be using image 6 as my final image.