Assignment Two - Seeing like your camera - preparation

Well, the honest truth is I didn't prepare for this.  I had got very behind on my coursework during the November - January period (changing jobs, Xmas, dreadful weather, holiday, January tax return etc etc) and so lost continuity of thought during Part Two of the course.  In addition to that I had understood that it's important to know what the dynamic range of your camera is and its limitations, but did not really understand how or why using spot metering helped the situation.  I find my camera works excellently with matrix metering in most conditions (using blinkies and ability to over or under-expose) - I occasionally switch to centre-weighted (e.g. photographing single shiny objects like helicopters), but on the whole I stick with matrix metering.  I generally find that when I switch metering, it becomes hard to find the right exposure and the results are often over-exposed.  I think I would probably use spot metering more if I shot scenes that were back-lit but where I wanted the subject to be visible, rather than silhouetted.  In practice though, I mostly wanted my subject to be silhouetted, except for the mountain which I shot on a long exposure. 

Feeling that time was against me, I decided to shoot as/when situations arose whilst on holiday in Iceland over New Year.  The remainder of the shots to be taken in London when the weather was appropriate.  Because I am primarily an outdoors photographer, I was not interested in experimenting indoors with different lighting conditions, although I appreciate I could have done this from the point of view of learning.

The photographs I took were purely for the purposes of this assignment.  There was no other motive, audience, theme or attempt to find personal voice or meaning.  This collection of pictures are in fact an attempt to do the best that I could do with the lighting available at the time.  I identified my four situations from choices that would enable me to shoot outdoors:

• Street scene in the middle of a clear, sunny day - narrow streets and high buildings which cast deep, long shadows: planned to be shot in Canary Wharf where I work - which involved a long wait for lunchtime in the right conditions!
• Early morning or late evening landscapes with low-angle incident light: initially shot in Iceland but I didn't get the right level of light contrast for all of them, so I took a few in London also
• Any back-lit scene, whether in direct or indirect light: shot in Iceland and London
• Scenes which include objects of very different reflectivity, even in flat light such as an overcast day: shot in Iceland and London.

One lesson learnt here is that relying on holiday photographs to produce assignment work when on a tour (with little choice over timetable, scenery and other people getting in the way) is a bit like the Masterchef chocolate fondant idea - basically asking for trouble! But I have no doubt that I will do this again, as I like the variety of locations.

I now appreciate that I really need to understand more about what the three metering options do; where time permits I will try to take each photograph on the three settings for a while to get to grips with this!

I am looking forward to moving on to Part Three of the course and working with black and white.