I carried out these exercises at the same time. I also wanted to try to emulate the black and white landscape style of Don McCullin having seen his exhibition at the Tate a few days earlier, and show these in a separate post.
Because of this I sought a site where I could photograph the sun setting across water, so my images would incorporate the detail of the water in the foreground with the setting sun behind cloud formations. To plan this I used the Sunseeker app on my phone and this showed me that a local country park, Etherow Country Park would be a suitable site fulfilling what I aimed for. This is shown in the screen shot below, where the red line shows the direction of the setting sun from a given location (the green dot).
Exercise 2.6
Brief
Use a combination of wide apertures, long focal lengths and close viewpoints to take a number of photographs with shallow depth of field. Try to compose the out-of-focus parts of the picture together with the main subject.
I took a number of images for this exercise as I walked around the lake at the park. These are included in the contact sheet at:
The final selection was these three images – I have chosen these mainly for the technical qualities, as the main subject is all in focus, with the shallow depth of field, it was not always easy to ensure all the subject, or at least the key elements of the subject were satisfactorily in focus.
In terms of composing the image, I have endeavoured in these images to have the foreground object against a contrasting part of the blurred background. I also aimed that the blurred background should have enough detail to be interesting, and not just a neutral background. In the final image there is enough detail left to see the context and setting in which the post is positioned.
Exercise 2.7
Brief
Use a combination of small apertures and wide lens to take a number of photographs exploring deep depth of field. Add one or two unedited sequences, together with relevant shooting data and an indication of your selects, to your learning log.
I used a tripod for all these photographs and because I was aiming to take the pictures into the setting sun I also used a graduated neutral density filter (x8) for the upper part of the frame.
Shooting into the sun resulted in there being a number of images with flare from the lens, and while this is effective in some of the selection, I have eliminated a number because this appears a distraction from what I was intending to achieve.
All the images from this shoot are in the contact sheet at:
The final selection was:
Andrew Procter 
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