Kaveen- Progress Update

For my project I am set to photograph Vaisakhi – the Sikh New Year festival which is being celebrated across Leeds. The event will take place over two days, with the first day set to involve many preparations. I will document this event throughout and be taking part in the Nagar Kirtan which is a parade through the streets of Leeds.

To prepare myself for the event I will:

• Continue to practice using my Nikon D3100 to take images that utilise different settings
• Use the adjustments tool in Photoshop to apply appropriate edits to my images
• Focus on capturing people and close-up shots of objects to further enhance my skills
• Possibly attend a smaller event before hand where I can practise taking documentary type photos
• Conduct research and plan my interview questions in the run up to the festival

As we have recently had some good weather, I decided to practise taking some more shots outside to capture my subjects under the sunlight.

For the first image I wanted to capture my subject and the expression of his eyes so I used a low F stop setting to ensure that only he was in focus. I plan on getting some portraits of people at the festival so that I can capture their emotions and thoughts through their facial expressions.

For the second image I wanted to capture a more natural shot, where both subjects would be in focus. For this, I applied a high F stop. I plan on taking images of people parading the street which would require all of them to be in focus.

With these images I wanted to focus on taking close-ups to capture fine detail so I applied a low F stop. I also edited these images in Photoshop and adjusted the brightness and vibrance as the original images were quite dark due to some shadowing. For the festival, I hope to capture some close-ups of food or the flags that they carry through the parade so by perfecting these type of images I can make simple objects look a lot more creative and vibrant.