Assignment of the week!

In a variation on the Blog of the Week theme, I am grateful to tutor Alan Byrne for drawing our attention to this assignment for the level one course The Art of Photography by Roukay Mahajar. The assignment, Elements of Design, asks students to produce a series of images of a similar subject which respond to series of words or statements. The image above is Roukay’s response to the word ‘rhythm’.
For Alan it was not just the quality of the images which made the assignment noteworthy, but also the way Roukay incorporated her assessment of the relative success or failure of the image into her learning log write up. Here is what she has to say on ‘rhythm’:
‘A shot that came instantly to mind when I read the description of rhythm.
I had a corn put across two skewers on two stands so it was sitting kind of suspended in the air. I used a blow dry to heat the corn and melt the butter. In order to create the steam, I took a candle, put it right underneath the corn and then blew it out and shot as the smoke rose. It took me about two hours of blowing candles to get the not so perfect steam. Not to mention reheating and replacing the butter repeatedly so it wouldn’t look cold and lose its melted shape on the corn.
The uniform lines of corns, along with the melted butter as well as the rising steam provide movement across the image and add interest.
I ‘m not very happy about the steam though. I do realize that with the right lighting the effect would have become far more interesting and appealing.
Post processing amendments: White balance, exposure, tone curve, vibrance, & sharpening adjusted in Lightroom. Then in Photoshop I used dodge & burn to add more detail to the corn.’