Final Project

Magnifying Glass Project

For my final project I had the idea of using a magnifying glass to enlarge the specific object that I am photographing. This idea came to me when I was thinking of different ways people look at things.

I tried to take a photo of magnifying glass through the magnifying glass with the shadow circling words 'magnifying glass'. I had to find the word in an english-french dictionary because in the english dictionary I have, the word was not in it.

This was one of the only photographs I could use as an introduction image because when i was taking the picture and trying to enlarge the words the camera would not focus on any words. I tried to move the camera closer to the page to focus it however it still did not work. When I managed to focus the camera it would not enlarge the word to make it look significant compared to the other words.

When I was on my way to school, I saw a shop with a chess board printed to the front window. I thought this could work with my final project. I set up a small table with two sheets of paper covering it, I had a lamp above this to give the image light...

I then placed a glass chess board on the table and used the king in the of the board with the magnifying glass either in the image or creating a shadow to surround the chess piece.

I experimented with the reflection of the light and angled the camera and magnifying glass to see what would happen when the light reflection was on the tip of the chess piece.

 I then tried using a different chess board to see if this made the chess piece stand out more against the board.

 I experimented with the different chess piece and instead do using the magnifying glass to create a surrounding shadow, I use it to enlarge the object.

I then tried to take the photograph from different angles to see what effect that angle made on the enlargement of the object.

I realised that when using the flash tool, the light just reflected off of the magnifying glass so did not work.

I also tried an experiment with enlarging a person's eyes against their face. For this I used my brother as a model and made him stand next a plain wall with the magnifying glass in front of his eye.

I found that this did not make his eye enlarge by a significant amount so I asked him to hold the magnifying glass further away from him. 

I thought this was effective and worked well. I tried to see if the same effect would happen with the other eye, however when he held it to his eye the reflection of the light stopped the effect.

 

I also experimented with a flame and how large it was through different views. I tried this through a magnifying glass, a glass, on its own with flash.

I like this photograph because it has a strong, sharp, dark colour with the bright flame coming through the glass.

I editted this picture with Photoshop by making two layers and keeping the flame in colour and the rest of the image in black and white. This stops the other distractions leading the eye and keeping the focus on the flame.

I tried it in the glass with flash on however, this just reflected the light off of the glass and did not work, it also makes the flame look smaller and less effective.

This showed not to use flash with glass or reflective objects so I changed the settings and took flash off.

I found that when the flame is infront of the glass the flame looks larger than behind the glass. However, when the flame is inside the glass, it blurs and goes even larger, this ruins the focus and quality of the photographs.
The lighting for the previous images of an enlarged eye were bad quality and poor lighting so I tried the expeiment again in the school studio with better lighting. These images were batter quality and had better light.

I edited these images on Photoshop by bluring the background and focusing on the magnifying glass and hand. I also changed the brightness and contrast to make the eye stand out. In the first edited image, I used the liquify tool to enlarge the eye. In the second, I used the blur and sharpen tools to focus the eye and changed the brightness and contrast to make the eye look more effective.

This project relates to the theme exploration and discovery because it is the way people look at life and how things look different with different objects and enlargements in the way. I feel that this project could have gone better if I had more experience and knowledge about photography and what makes a good image and if I had a more advanced camera that has manual focus.