Project 6- Framing The View Differently.

The idea of the project was to find a distant view with a large enough surrounding area so that you could walk around it and find a combination of different foreground interests to add to it. I tried to find a landscape that i felt would offer this but found it hard to find enough variety (kept ending up with trees and wall lines not anything truly original), in the end what i chose to use Hardwich Hall in Derbyshire because the surrounding gardens offered what i was looking for. Unfortunately the light on the day wasn't the best so the crappy grey skies do spoil the shots a bit, but not enough that they don't show what i aim to get across.



This first image i really like a lot because of the contrast between the straight lines of the building and the distorted reflection in the pool. It creates a very original view of something that's probabley been shot hundreds of times, and i know it could have been even better had the light played fair. I have had to use photoshop a little to get the final images to look right (only little tweaks) mainly just to make the hall appear more upright as it does to the naked eye instead of seeming to be falling away into the background as building normally do when photographed.

The second shot i took through the ruins of the old hall using them to frame the new hall. Again its the contrast between the two that make this work but this time the heavy sky does actually add something to the whole (a kind of heaviness/foreboding maybe?). Again this could have worked better if I'd been able to get a little further to the left so the ruins weren't overlapping the new hall but this wasn't possible dew to the condition of the ruins.

The third image and again its the contrast between the straight lines of the hall and the curves of the modern sundial that make this shot. Its a very simple but effective setup with maybe the trees spoiling the shot a little but not that much (maybe I'm just very picky but then again that a good thing as you should want things to be as near to perfect as possible). I know that I've used contrasts in these 3 shots but its one of the main things that always stands out to me when a look at any scene for the first time so i tend to be drawn to shot like this, not really shore if that's a bad thing or not or whether its just my natural stile.

For the final image i wanted to add a little life so the obvious thing to do is add people, no to many mind you as I'd didn't want to over crowd the frame and make it seem to busy. As by using the hedge line you're naturally drawn towards the hall with the flow of the people. Possibly not my favorite photo but it does the job.

Overall what i found this project teaches is as I've said before patience is important, you should always study the whole surroundings because even a simple landscape can be altered by changing little things plus don't be afraid to take lots of photos with digital cameras we have far more freedom then we ever had with film so it doesn't matter if you have to delete later just take the shot and be sore you get the best shots you can.