Overall I would say this exercise was partly a success and a very large learning curve. I had intended to create a similar scene to that of the Lumiere brothers, attempting to show a scene of Melbourne which captures some of our culture. I picked union lane as it is a common spot for tourist to go and see Melbourne’s graffiti culture and I knew was usually busy around the time of day I could hire a camera (1-2pm). I scouted the spot the day before and spent about half an hour there assessing the light, different angles and how busy it would be. When I arrived with the camera and tripod the following day I was very pleased to see a man actually making street art in the perfect spot for how I intended to frame my shot along with a lot more foot traffic than I had seen the day before. My problems arose when I began trying to use the camera. I had missed our first lesson and had little experience with cameras of this calibre and despite all of the reading I had done previous to the exercise had underestimated just how hard it was to set correctly to get the desired shot. This unfortunately led me to rush to some degree in both shots as could only get an hour in between classes hiring out the camera. My first shot had seemed to work okay however I could see I needed to adjust exposure.
I moved left for my second shot in an attempt to capture the art being created better whilst also still seeing the hustle and bustle of the alleyway filled with people. I spent quite some time adjusting the setting to achieve a better focus and exposure however upon reviewing the results did not have much success. As I played with the settings a taxi came down the tight alleyway which forced me to move the entire set up, however I desperately wanted to capture the action of the taxi moving through the crowd of people which I achieved to a degree but this did not allow me to correctly set the camera.
Overall I was not especially happy with either of the shots however I have learnt a lot about how important it is to know how to correctly set the camera to achieve the right exposure and focus. I did think my framing and visual composition worked quite well with the graffiti man being the main focus and the action of the alleyway happening behind him. It was however a shame that my exposure was so incorrect.