Environment 5

It was recommended for me to look at the photographer Ansel Adams. His photographs are all black and white and seen as how my work is black and white, I could take some influence from his lighting/tonal work.

Almost all of his photographs are landscapes so he doesn't do the lighting himself, it is whatever nature decides but looking at the different tones I think I can take some of that into my own work.

Images from:

http://outffocus.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/ansel-adams-photographs.html

http://jennyartichoke.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/ansel-adams/

http://sarasfavoritebwphotographs.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/ansel-adams.html

http://allrebeccasprettythings.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/ansel-adams-photography.html

In all honesty, I don't think I can produce anything that's going to be anywhere near as good as this, mainly because my image isn't a photograph but also because I don't have enough time left in this project to practice. 

What I mainly want to try and take from these photos is the shadows it casts. I want the shadows in my image to be correct so that's what I'm going to work on most.

To start off with, I want everything darker.

I just filled an empty layer with black and set it to soft light, I then deleted the back from inside the shed to make it look like there is a light in there

I added two more layers, the first is the light on the counter and I used the gradient tool to get it to go slightly darker towards the edge and changed the layer effect to soft light. I then used a circular gradient to add some light on the counter coming from the lamps above and made that layer effect an overlay.

Next is the light from the lamps.

Again, I used the circular gradient tool and put the layer to soft light, the effect wasn't bright enough though so I duplicated the layer to make it brighter.

The sky is to dark with the black layer over it so I'm going to delete the black wherever I can see sky.

After I deleted it the sky looked to bright to sit properly in the image so I changed the brightness of it just a touch to make it a little darker again.