On Wednesday 15th March, I returned again to The Butterfly Garden to observe and take pictures of the students and volunteers. I went with the hope of getting images showing interaction between students as well as getting more close up shots of features in the project. For example, any hidden butterfly symbols.
On this shoot I took both a 50mm and a 28mm lens with me. The above images were shot using the 50mm with a Canon 70D camera. As we were indoors, the lighting was quite dark. To combat this, I used the widest aperture the lens would allow which was 2.5 with a shutter speed of 1/125 and an ISO of 100. I could have used a higher ISO but I thought this worked well and I didn’t want the images to come out grainy. I took a total of 189 images over the hour and a half I was there. Through those pictures, I created an edit of 28:
I think I successfully got a mixture of detail shots and shots of interaction between students an volunteers. On this day, there was a drama lesson. This worked in my favour as the students who were more introverted usually performed, allowing me to shoot more students instead of the same ones repeatable. However, there was one student who stood out most because of his facial expressions and movement which made me navigate to photographing him more than anyone else:
I think these 3 images work well as a triptych as there is one main subject and he is wearing the same outfit in all three. As well as this, his face is very expressive in all 3, but they are all different too. Unfortunately, on the portrait image, the focus isn’t quite right. This is because the lens’ auto focus was playing up which meant I had to use manual focus. This is more difficult when the subject is moving (he was dancing in the portrait shot).
My two favourite images from the day were these:
Again, I think these would work well as a diptych as he is wearing the same costume in both. Although I like the portrait where he is looking directly at the camera, I think the facial expression and action in the landscape image works well. I think the bottom image will be in my final edit. This is because of the happiness seen int the image, the context in the background and the shirt the subject is wearing which depicts the location.
As mentioned at the start, I also tried to find small butterflies within the multiple buildings as more detailed shots that I could potentially use to add context or just use as a detail shot within my magazine layout. As the locations of the butterflies varied, so did my settings. The two brighter shots used a shutter speed of 1/160 with the darker one using a shutter speed of 1/60. This was because the building was considerably darker and had less natural lighting than the others. They all used different F stops depending on the amount of available light, and an ISO of 100. I probably could’ve upped my ISO on the darker image as I still think it is too dark, however I didn’t want to risk the image being too grainy.
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