Lee Friedlander - street photography

Lee Friedlander is an american photographer, born July 1934. He studied photography in Los Angeles, but moved to New York in this early twenties to photograph jazz musicians for record covers. He always took images in series, a few of these being

• reflections/shadows - Friedlander would often put himself into his images, by using reflections or shadows. 
• America by car - using car windows, mirrors or doors to create a frame within the image. 
• American monuments

Here in this image you can feel the love and passion that Friedlander had for both photography and jazz music. Many times he would visit the musicians in their own homes and not just on stage. This was to show them as people 'behind the scenes' and not just the musicians they are when performing.



Architecture

Architectural photography focuses on buildings and other constructions (bridges, stadiums, airports etc), interior design photography also comes under architectural photography.  The building in the image is the center of attention, any people in the image are there just to provide a sense of scale.  If using a DSLR camera a tilt shift lens can be useful as when you take a picture of a building you can see perspective on the building, the lens make it look straight (as seen in the image above). However you can do this without the tilt shift lens, by post production.

Here on examples that I found of a tilt shift lens.

As I don't have a tilt shift lens, I used photoshop to skew images. Here are some of the images that I took.

Aperture value
ISO -200
F 5


Before






Aperture value
ISO -200
F 5

After






Aperture value
ISO -200
F 5

Before










Aperture value
ISO -200
F 5

After














Before                                                                                           After

Aperture value
ISO -200
F 5

 To do this first I went to view, extras then grid. This is so that when I skew the image I can see when it's straight.







Then I went to select then all. After this I went to edit, transform then skew. At each corner on the photo a little square comes up, you move these to skew the image.

Problems on location

Just like at any photoshoot there are problems that can occur, here are some that can happen on location and how to try solve them.

Problems 

1. Bad weather 

2. Crying/shy children 

3. Faulty equipment

4. The general public in the shot/busy place

5. Uncooperative clients  

Solutions

1.  Plan ahead, check the weather forecast for the day of the shoot. Also as the weather can change over the course of the day, have a back up plan for a location that is near by.

2.  If a young child is involved it may be helpful to bring an extra family member so if the child is upset they can look after the child while the rest of the people can get on with the shoot. Sometimes its a good idea to have probs like toy or teddys to make the child feel more comfortable.

3. It can be good to have an extra camera and/or spare battery with you at any shoot as you never know if or when equipment will fail.

4.  Again this is about planning your shoot before, if you know its a public place, then different times of the day may be less busy, also if there are people walking past and in the background then you and your client may not end up with the final images that you/they wanted.

5. It is always a good idea to meet with your clients before hand, this is to make sure that both you and them are clear on ideas and how the shoot with play out. Most people will have a image in their head that they want, but of course it wont always turn out like that, again discuss this before hand and even draw up a contract for them to read and sign.

Urban- Graffiti

 In class we looked at different types of location photography, one of them being urban/street. I decided to look more into this and take some images of urban graffiti. I'm going to keep adding images to this collection when I go to different places. I shot these images all on aperture value and used photoshop to edit them.

ISO - 200
F 5
In this image i made the back 'black and white' and left the writing in colour. To do this I used the selection tool to select the writing, went to select and inverse to select just the back. I then took down the saturation to make it gray and select, inverse again to select the writing and added a bit of colour to make it stand out a bit more.

ISO - 200
F 5

ISO - 200
F 5

ISO - 200
F 5