This week I started a new module of Fashion Styling and Photography. I have been intrigued to learn more about these roles in the fashion industry for a while now as I feel like I have a lot of interest towards them. I love the creativity you can explore while creating meanings or visual concepts for the viewer, and how the Stylist and Photographer work together to make it reality. So far I have been experimenting with my own camera, that is a Nikon D3500, to develop my skills using a camera. I only experimented with the basics like how to download photos to your phone, how to use the easy operations and advanced operations etc. The “newbie” stuff. However, I do feel like I’ve managed to understand it quicker than I expected, although I still have a lot of areas to learn! I would love to be confident in using a camera without using the operations, and being able to adjust setting myself to achieve the goal I’m working towards depending on the photoshoot. While practising with my camera, I walked down into Brighton and visited the Beach near the pier, the Lanes and the Pavilion Garden. I felt like these areas would be the best to explore the skills in using a Camera and would be good to use to teach me the basics. While I was at the beach I focused on achieving a quality shot of the waves in action. At first I was using an operation that sets the camera and adjusts to take water movement in photographs. However, looking back at my captures, I feel like this is only suitable for waterfalls and other similar water movements, not for movement like waves as it blurs and become unclear so therefore becomes difficult to see the structure of the wave. So instead I used an operation with a faster shutting speed, like modes for sports, people or fast moving vehicles. This allowed me to take much more clear and in the moment shots of the waves, showing the structure, and as if you physically paused the wave for a moment. It took many attempts, but when I finally got home and went through all the photos that I had taken, I found one that was exactly what I was hoping for! So now I have a little bit more of an understanding how different shutting speeds affect photos, and what settings are most successful for this type of shoots and similar. However, I would like to now aim towards not using the operations and being able to adjust this all myself. Moving on to the photography through the Lanes, I found myself taking many photos of street art or aesthetically pleasing looking shops, just to again experiment with the basics of my camera and capturing photographs that look good quality and interesting. These were mostly just as I was walking past and were taken for personal interest, for example street art that looked really cool and interested me as I love to take my time admiring different forms of art, especially street art. When I was at home, I took my time to look a bit at the retouch menu on my camera. The retouch menu is where you can edit photos and add a variety of different aspects, and they can create such different meanings to your photos. I explored selective colour, cross screen and image illustration. Selective colour was really interesting to use because that’s the effect that can easily create a whole new meaning to a photo. I originally had taken a photo of some graffiti, surrounded by colourful stickers and posters with different meanings. It was a photo where the viewer could determine how they viewed it depending on the way you perceive things. However I edited it to only keep the red in and for everything else to become black and white. Just by removing the positive bright colouring, the picture almost turned quite aggressive looking. But when I used another photograph of the graffiti and edited it using the image illustration, everything looked like a poster or a cartoon, creating harsher black lines and the saturation and vibrancy being turned up, creating more of a positive meaning behind it rather than aggressive. I really enjoyed using the image illustration effect and seeing what works successfully and what doesn’t because I feel like it has to be a very particular vibe, person or object to make the effect work. I also edited photos using cross screen that is an affect that turns lights into “starbursts”, enhancing the photograph. This is really affective to use on pictures in the evening and night time as I felt like it created a very warm and cozy vibe to my photos. You can adjust the amount and size of the starbursts and I just feel like it’s a very small but effective edit you can use on your photographs to create a vibe and that emotion that makes you feel comforted. Overall I enjoyed experimenting and learning my camera and I’m motivated to continue learning the settings so I’m able to adjust different aspects by myself. I feel like it’s an area I could really develop my skills in, and I would love to learn all aspects about it. So I will continue doing research on Photographers as well as sustainability to understand how photography can also be sustainable.