After completing each of my shoots I began to post-process my images using Adobe’s Lightroom. Some of the images were edited a lot more than others, some required little editing, but overall I attempted to maintain a sense of consistency throughout the collection. Certain editing manipulations were applied to every single one of my images, rough numerical values of these manipulations are as follows:

• Increasing contrast to +30
• Reducing  highlights to -30 to -20
• Increasing clarity to +20
• Increasing vibrance to +30
• Increasing sharpening to 80
• Increasing noise reduction to +30

Increasing contrast, clarity and sharpening all have a similar effect. They essentially make the image appear more defined, crisp and stark. This ends up making the image appear grittier, more textured and more ‘professional. Reducing the highlights helps regain information that is lost through over saturation of light, retaining more detail in the image. It also helps to balance the exposure of the image, so there’s not one area that’s significantly brighter or more saturated with light than the rest. Increasing the vibrance helped to bring out under-represented colours within the image, making the images appear livelier and more dynamic. Increasing noise reduction just stops the images from appearing to grainy, sometimes if you overdo it the image appears super creamy and soft. Because I wanted these images especially gritty I tried to keep noise reduction to a minimum.

Below are some examples of the individual editing manipulations I made and how they impacted each image:

Image 1: Before post-processing

Image 1: After post-processing

Post-processing applied to this image:

I reduced the shadows to -35 to make the patches of black appear darker, this made the image appear more textured, dynamic and gloomier. I increased the whites to +39 this is confusing, but essentially it helps make the image appear ‘brighter’ and clearer overall without making the image appear less ‘gloomy’ and dark. It also really helped to bring out that brightness of the doorway, and the shafts of light on the ground, without appearing oversaturated, like an increase in highlights might do. I reduced the blacks to -5, this just helped make the blacks appear starker and more opaque adding some more depth and gloominess to the image. I adjust the hue of orange to -50 and the hue of yellow to -50 this made the colour within the doorway appear a more pinkish colour, rather than a coral/orange colour which I didn’t really want. I also adjusted the hue of green to +7 this gave the green a more bluey-green tone rather than a yellowy-green tone which I think works better in this image. I increased the saturation of yellow to +30 this helped bring out the yellow splashed on and around the doorway. I increased the saturation of green to +30, this really brought out the green, especially that on the concrete floor, making the combined colours within this image really clash, and appear super bright and dynamic. I also increased the luminance of yellow to +10 to  make that doorway light feel slightly brighter.

Image 2: Before post-processing

Image 2: After post-processing

Post-processing applied to this image:

I reduced the temp of this image to -8 and increased the tint to +5. This was an attempt to compensate for the yellow caste that was present in this image. A lot of the images I shot had similar yellow castes to them (from nearby streetlights), I attempted to reduce these caste’s so that these images would assimilate with the other images I shot that didn’t have these yellow castes. I increased the shadows to +5, so I could regain some detail lost from the darkness of this image. I increased the whites to +40 to make the image appear brighter overall. I reduced the blacks to -26 to make them appear starker and more opaque. I then adjusted the hue of red to -30 to help the bricks retain their red tones, without being too yellowy. I increased the hue of orange to +15 and yellow to +16 to change the orange caste over this image from a red/pink-orange to a more yellow/green-orange. I then increased the saturation of red to +70 to bring out the bricks behind the taxi as well as the graffiti on the bricks. I also increased the saturation of green and yellow to bring out the colour present in the two lights of the apartment in the background of this image. Bringing a higher number of colours out makes the image look fuller, more dynamic and helps to balance the extremeness of certain other colours present such as orange or yellow.

Before beginning this studio I had never used Lightroom before and I had never post-processed any images. I was actually extremely intimidated by the idea of editing images, it seemed like a complicated and overwhelming process that I wasn’t particularly keen to get into. After beginning to use Lightroom within this studio I realised that editing images does not have to be hard and the benefits, when comparing before and after photos, are insane. Editing an image really allows you to maximise the beauty of an image and to ensure that the image on screen appears how you saw it in real life. I’m at the point now, where I’m using Lightroom almost everyday and there’s rarely a time when I post an image online or send it to someone without editing it using Lightroom first.

Until next time,

Louise Alice Wilson

Over the past few weeks I’ve done about four seperate shoots. The first two shoots focussed on capturing aspects of Brunswick’s grit at night, the third focussed on capturing aspects of Brunswick’s gentrification during the day and the fourth focussed on capturing both grit and gentrification at night. I’ll give you a taste of each seperate shoot by providing five photos from each shoot below, then I’ll go into detail about each shoot.

The First Shoot – Brunswick’s ‘Grit’ at Night

Shot 1: Carpark

Shot 2: Abandoned Taxi

Shot 3: Pedestrian Overpass

Shot 4: Windows

Shot 5: Brunswick Bath’s

Shoot 1: I went out on my first shoot the night before we were presenting our compendium ideas because I really wanted to have some actual shoots to present to the class and the panel so I could get some solid feedback. For this shoot (and the rest of my shoots) I rented out a Canon 50mm prime lens with a low aperture so I could get some awesome low light shots. The prime lens was amazing, because not only does it allow you to capture images you otherwise may be unable to capture but it’s got amazing optics which just seem to make the image look BETTER. I really loved all the photos from this shoot, a: because I felt inspired but b: the sky was super bright that night and the sky had turned a kind of purple-y colour, which looked awesome in some of the shots and gave the street scenes a really interesting colour palette. In this first shoot I was just trying to photograph anything ‘gritty’ that I came across, I wasn’t particularly looking for a certain thing. So it acted as a kind of ‘appraisal’ of the entire area.

The Second Shoot – Brunswick’s ‘Grit’ at Night

Shot 1: Railway Tracks

Shot 2: Warehouse Window

Shot 3: Bike Path

Shot 4: Alleyway

Shot 5: Delivery Trucks

Shoot 2: On the second shoot I already received feedback about my first set of photos, i’d already viewed the first set of photos I’d shot and I’d also done some post-processing to them to see how they look. So I spent much of the second shoot trying to ‘recreate’ or at least mirror the images in the first shoot I did. One major thing I noticed in my first series of shots is that a lot of the images has this yellow caste to them because of the yellow streetlights they were situated near. So I purposely captured images that had these particular colour tones so they would look cohesive with other things i’d shot. I also tried to get more images of the backstreets, hence the alleyway shot and images of the industrial food warehouses around Brunswick, hence the shot of the truck. I do like these images but they felt slightly less inspired to me.

The Third Shot: Brunswick’s Gentrification at Daytime

Shot 1: Recycle Boutique

Shot 2: Cafe

Shot 3: Sunday Clothing Store

Shot 4:

Shot 5: Real Estate Development

Shoot 3: For the third shoot (after receiving feedback about how to capture the ‘gentrified’ aspects of Brunswick) I went out during the day to capture gentrified aspects of Brunswick. This shoot was particularly hard for me because it felt extremely uninspired. When I shot the gritty images I loved everything I was looking at, I thought all of it was beautiful. The process of walking around Brunswick’s backstreets and visually searching for something that you ‘particularly’ liked or something that ‘touched’ you and photographing it felt super creative. Walking around Brunswick looking for new buildings, cafe’s and bar’s and then trying to photograph them felt dry and stale. Essentially this just involved me walking around Brunswick trying to find creative ways to shoot various ‘products of gentrification’. This was quite hard as people don’t really like you taking random photos of their cafes and bars etc. and it’s hard to make a photo of a gentrified cafe or a bank look visually interesting and still be intellectually valid. I wasn’t sure how I felt about these shots and I wasn’t sure how i’d blend them in with my ‘gritty’ shots. I tried creating a collection set on Lightroom and blending them in together, but something felt non-cohesive about it, and not in a good way.

The Fourth Shoot: Brunswick’s Grit & Gentrification at Night

Shot 1: Parking Sign

Shot 2: Godfather’s Pizza

Shot 3: Apartment Construction

Shot 4: Chemist Warehouse

Shot 5: Restricted

Shoot 4: After receiving feedback from Bella I felt a lot more confident about what to shoot this time round. Essentially I showed Bella my ‘gentrified’ shots and she said that rather than focus on taking photographs of the products of gentrification such as banks, cafes, etc. that I should shoot the division caused by gentrification. Such as my last shot in the previous series of the real estate development sign and the second photo from my compendium ideas presentation of sidewalk construction. She said she really liked both of these images and that I should shoot more of this stuff, she also suggested I shoot the gentrified photos also at night time so the photobook looks more cohesive. So for this shoot rather than focussing on taking photos of grit or gentrification I decided to take pictures that spoke of both. The first photo features a parking sign covered in various artistic stickers with a construction crane looming in the background, the second photo shows the cultural background and history of the area, the third features apartment buildings being completed, the fourth showcasing mass consumerism and artistic protest and the fifth showing attempted governmental/council restrictions being placed upon the area. I really loved this shoot because I felt I could explore my original topic more deeply and it shows the way that grit and gentrification blend, often seamlessly to the eye, but very inharmoniously.  This shoot provided a number of images that really helped round off my photobook so that it not only makes more sense but it has more intellectual depth and validity.

Until next time,

Louise Alice Wilson

I’d say that 89% of people don’t like presenting, at all, to anyone, about anything (this fact is 100% made up). However, presenting to Dan Binns, Pauline Anastasiou and Brian Morris (plus the entire studio) today wasn’t actually that bad, if anything I kind of enjoyed it. This is most likely because i’d been super excited about shooting for this project, so was pretty keen to share the work i’d done so far on it. I even rented out a Canon 50mm prime lens from RMIT’s AV department for the shoot. This way I could capture some super clean, low-noise night shots and they turned out pretty great! This is what I ended up with:

Shot 1: Abandoned Taxi

Shot 2: Sidewalk Construction

Shot 3: Train Tracks

I entitled my presentation “The Grit That Remains” which Pauline seemed to really like, suggesting I should use that as the name of my photobook. The basic premise for my compendium so far is to shoot anomalies of gentrification in Brunswick. Aspects of Brunswick which have not yet been converted or engulfed by gentrification, the ‘grit that remains’. In general the panel seemed to quite like my idea and I think they quite liked the photos I had shot so far, which was good to hear! They did question why I chose to shoot Brunswick at night, and I really just did it because I love the look of Brunswick at night. I love the way the streetlights add different castes of lights to the images making them look more romantic and surreal. So I thought this would work great for my photo series as I’m attempting to showcase these non-gentrified aspects of Brunswick (which I love), in an aesthetically pleasing way.

The two questions that decided to ask the panel were:

1. Should I shoot the new, shiny stuff to serve as a comparison? Or shoot an entire series of grit?
2. If I shoot the new stuff should I shoot new things that are informed by the old, such as industrial/hip bars and cafes? or the truly gentrified new bars and cafes?

The panel suggested that I should definitely shoot gentrified aspects to serve as a comparison, maybe shooting gentrified aspects of Brunswick during the day to make the gentrified and non-gentrified aspects appear visually distinct. They also suggested that I shoot the newer, more gentrified aspects of Brunswick to make the comparison quite visually distinct. I thought this was great advice so I’m gonna head out and shoot some gentrified aspects of Brunswick during the day sometime this week, which is pretty exciting! Overall I’m keen to see how this project turns out, I hope I manage to have an interesting series of images for my photobook!

Until next time,

Louise Alice Wilson