LIGHTING
When working with cameras, lighting is incredibly important. You can change the tone of the image depending on the type of lighting used, and how you use it.
The two types of lighting in photography are,
Available light, which are naturally occurring light sources, like the sun or moon.
Artificial light, which are light sources that are created for the purpose of the photo, like torches and lamps.
Reflect and Explore
Daniel Schiffer is a Canadian born photographer and videographer; he first gained popularity through instagram, sharing his photography work, and later a self named YouTube channel. Schiffer uploads behind the scenes, vlog style videos of his processes during photo/video shoots, as well as walking through his post-production editing process offering tips and tricks for his viewers.
I'm inspired by Schiffer because of his easy to digest videos - he is a strong communicator and his style could be described as informative and uncomplicated, he explains things in an easy to understand manner and due to this, I have learned a lot of what I know, about videography and film making.
Make a LAME tripod shot look WAY better! is a video I frequently refer to. He demonstrates his post-production technique for a commercial for a coffee pod manufacturer in this video.
In order to provide the viewer an understanding of why he took certain creative decisions, he breaks down what he is doing and why throughout the video. He also demonstrates how a few minor adjustments and masks in post-production can have a significant impact.
In the video Schiffer shows the audience how he was able to come to his finished product, by only using a tripod and post production tricks. The whole video was filmed on a fixed tripod, and not moved throughout the entire shoot.
He started off by explaining his use of adjustment layers - his first was layer was to add film grain to the frame, this was to accentuate the dry ice fog, against the dark background, and made this layer span the length of the entire timeline of the project.
His second adjustment layer is a zoom, spanning over multiple clips, to give the shot the pan in look, he wouldn't otherwise be able to get because of the camera being fixed to the tripod, and this way he is able to keyframe the frame to move along the X axis to track his subject. This carries on over the length of the video, where a majority of the effects are racking/ panning shots.
The reason I like this video so much is his use of a 'difficult' setup, he chose to challenge himself by only using the tripod.
I am inspired by Daniels ability to challenge himself on shoots, purposefully making the shoots hard in order to challenge his creativity, I want to do this with my own work, to challenge myself in order to further my skills.
Daniel also makes a lot of tutorial style videos, such as how to use stock footage more effectively, or to make a bad shot look good - these videos can help everyone, and are not too septic enough to be a one case scenario, you can use Daniels channel as a guide to help when you've hit a brick wall.In the future I want to be like Daniel, where I challenge myself purposely on shoots, by creating a limiting factor, ie shooting a whole commercial on tripod, and creatively trying to find a way to create a professional finished product, this will allow me to start to think outside the box and further my creativity and skills a videographer.
What is a Research Project?
The goal of a research paper, is to educate others on a given topic, being backed up with usage of data and research, using primary methods such as surveys or secondary research, like pre existing methods such as other research papers, surveys.
An example of this could be a research paper into Artificial inteligence and how its shaping modern day art. With companies like OpenAI and Nvidia giving such a push into the AI space, they have both developed tools that can create hyper realistic images using AI, something a real person artist could only dream of creating, or that would take them server thousand hours, this come with many upsides, such as having the freedom of having art specific to you created at a moments notice, and not having to pay extreme amounts of money to commission it from a person, however this is a delve edged sword, this would cause artist to possibly go out of business or reduce prices for their art.
You can collect data from the likes of interviewing artists and ask their opinion on AI art, compared to the average user and what their opinion is on AI art vs paid artist commissions. This can be done through sources like reddit, finding a corroding sub reddit and sharing a survey, or by directly contacting artists online, through commission sits like Fiverr, Tumblr or even once again Reddit.
You can also utilise Google Scholar, a modified version of the google search engine, which is built around showing reliable sources/other research papers, on a given topic, to allow the user to find credible results. However as AI tech is relatively 'new' you may not be able to find a specific paper, however would likely be able to find papers, relating to your subject
Research Project Ideas
For my research paper I was certain I wanted to delve into virtual reality - my first idea was to look into the cultural impacts of virtual reality, and how it has helped shape todays tech giants, like Facebook (Meta), Microsoft and the OpenXR project, however as the issue with all virtual reality related research papers. most are biased against the use of Virtual Reality, with lots of news articles based on bashing virtual reality and it being seen as a gimmick.
So I opted to further look into the social side of virtual reality, and the immense popularity of games like VrChat.
At first I was going to look into the popularity of virtual night clubs and overall the acceptance of drinking in vr, how since the pandemic social vr has seen an increase of nightclub rooms for users to feel connected to others in a time when everyone was feeling isolated.
I rather opted to look into the effects virtual reality has on social anxiety as there are disproportional amount of people allover the world who use VR to cope with their anxiety rather than those who spend time in Virtual Nightclubs, specially since their popularity has plummeted since the world has came out of lockdown. I am now going to base my research paper on the effects virtual reality has on social anxiety, and how it has helped enabling people to become more social and work through their anxiety.
The challenge I face with this subject Is that research into and anxiety relating to VR is minimal if at all, with few credible source, finding more news reports rather than actually papers, making it hard to find an unbiassed opinion, as many people see Virtual Reality as a 'niche' or a gimmic - on the opposite side of the spectrum those who are into Virtual Reality, are heavily biassed in VR's favour, often being very hyperbolic about it, giving the wrong conception to those who don't know any better.
I will have to conduct my own research, using websites like reddit, where I can conduct surveys pertaining specifically to my project, acting as primary source of data.
