Finishing Up The Trimester

During this trimester of Digital Photography I learned a ton more than I would of ever imagined.  I came into this class knowing nothing about how to take a decent picture and even less about Photoshop.  But, by the end of the trimester I now have a basic idea of how to take some quality pictures and what goes into a picture to make it look very nice.  I also learned a lot about Photoshop and also how to edit pictures to make them look a bit better.  This was an extremely fun and also very educational trimester for me and it stinks that it has to come to an end.

Photo Assignment 7_ Architecture

For my photo assignment for the last week I chose to do mine on Architecture,  I had already taken a lot of photos for this so I just needed my best one.  So here are my final original and edited photos.

Original:

Edited:

Exposure Triangle:
Shutter Speed: 1/800
Aperture: 4
ISO: 80

This assignment for me was just an easy assignment to finish up all of my photos.  Being busy with the portfolio and all the other assignment this was just one of those filler assignments that i used to finish up my year.  I took my best picture where I thought was the most interesting part of the school and tried to edit it to show more color.  This was an extremely fun assignment that I greatly enjoyed.

Vortex Spin Tutorial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhXEURBfJoU

When I was first given the assignment to go out and pick a Photoshop tutorial to do, I was nervous that I wouldn't like any of them and also that they would be too hard.  But as soon as I found this tutorial about how to make a Vortex Spin I loved it.  I thought it was easy enough that I could handle it, but also something new that I had no idea how to do.  I was an amazing assignment that I would like to do again.

Photo Assignment 6_ Still Life

For week six I chose to do my pictures on Still life.  I decided to try to do something with many different objects and photograph them on many different angles.  My best photo turned out to be of dominoes.  So here is my original and then my edited one.

Original Photo:

Best Photo:

Exposure Triangle:
Shutter Speed: 1/15
Aperture: 2.75
ISO: 200





 When I was trying to decide what to do for this week's photo assignment I decided that I could really make a good photo by doing still life and arranging all kinds of different everyday household items and making them look interesting. When I found the dominoes at my house I knew I could make something really interesting with them.  The biggest challenge of the whole thing was to find the right background for it.  I really enjoyed my Still Life assignment and think my best photo turned out very good.

Visual Dictionary

For my Visual Dictionary assignment I was allowed to pick three words and then I had to make a image with the word, its definition and three or more photos to help show what it is.  I really enjoyed this assignment because I learned how to use the layer masks and opacity a lot and also could make my images look pretty good in my opinion.  I would like to do this assignment all over again.

Visual Puns

The assignment for doing visual puns was an extremely fun assignment because I had to use my imagination to create a pun in Photoshop. I learned how to add photos into my image and rearrange the layers so that it all looks good and fits well.  It was a very fun assignment that I really enjoyed.  Lets see if you can guess these!

Portrait/Framing Assignment

For my Portrait/Framing assignment I learned how to use lights to set up a good picture and then use natural light also to reflect on someones face and create a beautiful portrait photo.  I learned how to use big lights and also how to use boards and other things to reflect lights onto a person to get rid of shadows and even out the light on both sides of their face.  This was a very fun assignment.

Photo Assignment 5_ Food

For my photo assignment for week five I chose to do mine on food.  Food is something that is in my life all the time.  I always am around food and i wanted to now try and capture a very good image of it.  What I was really going for in all my photos and especially in my best photo I wanted the person viewing my image to crave whatever food i was presenting after they were done looking at it.

Exposure Triangle
Shutter Speed: 1/25
Aperture: 2.6
ISO: 200




With my week five assignment on Food I actually do think i did pretty well on capturing some good photos of food and making someone crave it after they were done looking at it.  One thing that I learned with my food assignment that I used my Macro settings to capture a good close up picture to get all the grains and small details that look very good in a meal.  There are so many different ways to take good photos of food and I just explored only a few of the aspects of it.

Photo Assignment 4_Black and White

For my fourth photo assignment I did mine on black and white.  It was a busy week for me so I just used some of my black and white photos that I had taken a few weeks previous to this and also took some this weekend.  Here is my best photo.

Exposure Triangle
Shutter Speed: 1/125
Aperture: 2.75
ISO: 800





While doing this assignment I learned how to change my exposure triangle in order to get the contrast from the black and white to work out. Wit black and white I learned that the pictures can look very good if you take your time to mess with your settings in order to make sure its exposure looks good.  Exposure is everything in black and white and so is your contrast between black and white.  If there is no contrast then the picture will not turn out well.  So I tried to pick a picture that would draw your eye to the less dominant color and then you would see the more dominant color surrounding it.  It was a very fun assignment and my photos turned out a lot better than I ever thought they would.

Photo Context Assignment

The photo context assignment was an extremely good assignment for me to do. I really helped me learn and understand a lot more about how to us Photoshop and all of it features.  I am still really bad at it, but this is really helping me understand more of it.  We started off with one picture that we took of someone or something in the school.  Then we added a theme to it using pictures and backgrounds.  This assignment was a lot of fun and very beneficial I will use what I learned later on in the class.

Photo Assignment 3_ Macro

For my third week I chose to take some Marco photos.  I thought this would be a good set of photos for me to take because I have a lot of interesting things at my house to take pictures of.  The hardest part of this whole assignment was trying to get the photos to be clear even up close especially with these cameras it was a real challenge.  So here is my best picture and then some more!

Exposure Triangle
Shutter Speed: 1/8
ISO: 200
Aperture: 2.6





This assignment was an overall easier assignment because all I had to do was change the camera mode to exposure and then find something interesting to capture a photo of up close.  What had to be the most tricky part of the whole assignment was trying to get the picture to be clear.  These cameras for some reason got really blurry when I got up close.  Taking these pictures were very fun and interesting to do though because there are so many things that look cool up close. I wish I could do this assignment again because there are so many good photos out there to be taken for this assignment.

Paneramic Assignment

This Panoramic was a very fun assignment for me to do.  I never even knew you could do something like this.  When we first started the assignment i thought it would be very hard to do, but it ended up being very easy surprisingly.  I learned how to use my manual focus and how to use a tripod. Computer wise I learned how to use more options on Photoshop and how to put all the pictures together using automate.  Overall, it was a very fun assignment and I will be taking more of these in the future.

Photo Assignment 2_ Nature/Landscape

For the second week of photos I chose to do it on Nature and Landscape.  So my goal was to go find a nice scenery ( Landscape) that was in Nature. With the two combined in one picture I thought that it would have the best finished results.

Exposure Triangle
Shutter Speed: 1/640
Aperture: 2.8
ISO: 200




While doing this assignment I learned that a photo of Nature and Landscape is best when you involve both that Nature and the Landscape is involved in the photos.  A photo of one main subject is good, but if you can get a photo that involves two different techniques or styles into one picture it looks a lot better. Also, I gained more knowledge on what settings I would in the Exposure Triangle depending on that days conditions. With this knowledge of trying to but two different styles into one picture and working even more with the image triangle, I will imply these into my next pictures for the future.

Phot Inspirations For The 2nd Week

For my second photo assignment I am going to do mine on landscape and nature. My main goals for landscape and nature will be to try and capture a quality photo that shows off the inner beauty of nature and also uses light in the picture in some sort of format either being shadows or light.  I think with nature you have to try to capture the best images you can and use light to help show off the beauty.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99996011@N00/433034408/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99996011@N00/507431664/

I like these photos because they show of the the landscape and show its beauty.  Also and most importantly they use light in it to show better detail or try to make the background not distracting and my interesting.  These are great examples that I will try to go off of.

Photo Assignment 1_Animals

For my first photo assignment I did mine on animals.  For the animal assignment my goal was to try and capture some sort of personality,emotion, or action that the animals give off. They had to show their personality in order to capture a good photograph.

Image Triangle:
Shutter Speed - 1/200
Aperture: 5
ISO: 125






While doing my first assignment on animals, I learned a lot of new things about my camera and the way I use it.  Right off the bat I quickly found out that the animal assignment is harder than I thought it would be, not because of having to capture an animal's personality, but animals don't do anything when you want them too. To capture an animal's personality I learned that you have to sit out there with them and wait until they do something to show character.  So you must have your camera ready to take pictures on the fly.  I also learned how to adjust my camera Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO in order to take pictures outside on these bright sunny days.  The animal assignment was a blast and I learned a lot that I will carry on to my future assignments. 

Car Editing Assignment

For this assignment we used a picture from an auto show and edited it to look more professional.  We used a photo taken by Noelle Jacobs.  The editing included getting rid of glares, changing the background, and editing the car's color. Here are the before and after photos.

From doing this assignment I learned how to use a lot of new items in Photo shop.  I learned how to clone, change the lighting and background, and use the brush, eraser, and quick select tool.  I learned how to use the levels tool to do many different things to my car, and background.  I also learned how to save a photo as a JPEG.  This will help me a lot when I need to turn in my weekly photos and they might need some slight editing in photo shop.

Motion Demo

Today I learned how to take a picture of something moving and focus in on that and blur out the background.  This is called a motion photo. I learned how to change my ISO, Shutter Speed, and Aperture to make it work with the light outside and still get a quality photo.  This will help me if i do motion pictures for one of my weekly assignments.  Motion pictures are a lot of fun to take and a new skill in Photography for me to learn.

Photo Inspirations for the 1st Week

For our first assignment for photo of the week I am going to take pictures of animals.  To make my photos unique I am going to try to capture photos of animals personalities and their characteristics.  The pictures will only be good if the true nature of the animals are showing and they are doing something active or interacted in some sort of activity. Here are some examples..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/g2pix/3017431364/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/g2pix/3021379784/

I picked these photos mainly for the general reason that because they both show some sort or action that the animals are doing or some sort of personality characteristic or trait that they have. The pictures show off the animals personalities which is very crucial to a good photograph.

Popart

I took a photo of myself in Photo Booth and then dragged it into Photo shop and edited to look like it is now with all the different colors.

For this assignment I learned some of the basics of Photo Shop and how to use them.  I learned how to crop my image and then copy it onto a new page.  Then I learned how to add different colors to my pictures and change the color to whatever I wanted it to be.  Finally, I then learned how to upload my photo onto my blog so everyone can see it.

Composition Assignment

For this assignment we learned 11 different forms of photography.  We then brought back all of our photos that we took for then and picked our top 3 for each type of photo and uploaded it off the computer and into our server space.  From there we uploaded all our best pictures onto photo shop and put our best picture for each type of photography into a folder.  We then took the folder and made it into a slide show on blogger.

Types of Composition
1.  Rule of Thirds " Jacob looking at his camera"
2. Texture "Bark of the tree"
3. Pattern " Lines on Construction Sign"
4. Depth of Field " Picture of Megan with school in the background"
5. Symmetry " Tennis Net Lines"
6. Lines " Electric School Sign Lines"
7. Framing " Jacob in a cabinet"
8. Perspective " Looking down the stairway"
9. Balance " Jacob and my Shadow on the ground, and the ground's color"
10. Space "The sky"
11. Color " The colors of the cups and their markers"










During the composition assignment, i learned how to take pictures with different styles, like rule of thirds, framing, perspective, etc.  I also learned how to upload photos from my camera onto my computer.  Also i learned how to edit pictures in photo shop and then make them into a slide show on blogger.