Another experimental shoot I undertook for the Light and Shadow assignment was a trip to a local country park called Teggs Nose. This particular day, the sun was shining bright and the many brick walls and fences were casting shadows across the stunning country fields. I decided to take out my camera and again experiment with the exposure settings (shutter speed, ISO and aperture) to effectively capture these shadows and areas of contrast in the fields. My hometown of Macclesfield is quite a rural area and so capturing the light and shadows in this type of area also adds a personal touch to my assignment as it feels like home to me and therefore adds some personality into my work. I enjoy shooting landscapes in particular, and so I like the element of capturing light and shadows for the assignment brief, but also adding a personal touch and more depth to the images by also capturing a successful landscape photograph which can be used in both circumstances.

One thing in particular that caught my eye were the houses and outbuildings that were hiding in the shadows of the hill which was the vantage point I was standing on, as seen in the image “teggsnose_08.NEF.” This could be interpreted in many ways by the viewer, such as the people living in this house are hiding away in the shadows, separated from the rest of the world that are living in the light.

When I presented these images in a group tutorial, the feedback I was given mentioned that these images focus heavily on shooting the landscape itself and aren’t so focused on the shadows themselves. The image of the house hiding in the shadows was praised as this shows that I am paying closer attention to the shadows in the scene, rather than the surrounding landscape. I don’t think I will use these images as my final pieces as country fields and landscapes are quite commonly photographed and could be perceived as “boring,” and I would like my final images to stand out for the right reasons.

Below is a contact sheet of the images from this shoot: