Black and White

Going old school with some black and white photography!
This week I shot only in monochrome (with the exception of some color pop), which was quite the departure from what I was used to shooting. This one forced me to look at things differently- paying attention to color, and considering what it would look like in color's absence. What I looked for, most of the time, was a sharp contrast in color. I wanted the viewer's eye to be immediately drawn to the point of focus- in black and white, things should be simplistic, not busy and distracting. I tried to find one thing that was a sharply different hue from the things around it, which were all a more similar hue. This way, in black and white, that thing in focus would stand out. My favorite picture I took this week was one of my dog, which was taken after a storm. I went outside to take pictures of the drenched scenery, and let my dog come out with me. I ended up taking many pictures of her, and I particularly liked this one- it is a profile view, with the light coming from the direction she is facing. This puts parts of her, the parts facing forward, in a very sharp light, leaving the others to fall into shadow. I really liked how the lighting turned out, and it looks particularly striking in black and white. Overall, I learned yet another perspective when it comes to photography. Ahh, so much to think about!

 

Shutter speed: 1/60

Aperture f-stop: f4.4

ISO rating: 50

Visual Dictionary

Quite the involved Gimp assignment, the visual dictionary. Nonetheless it was rather enjoyable!
The challenge this week was to create 5 "visual dictionary" pages, defining a word for each in pictures. The only requirement was that the word and definition be legible, and the picture incorporates 2-3 or more components. It was very fun! This was one of the more creative assignments I've had the opportunity to do, so I really liked it. The first couple I had trouble coming up with ideas, but then I got on a roll and they were turning out better. I re-did any ones I didn't like, so now I am fond of all five of them.
Here they are~

Elation:

Idyllic:

Fashionista:

Unique:

Eerie:

Well, did you learn any new vocabulary? :)

Macro

This week (and some time previous) I shot macro. This is perhaps one of my favorite things to shoot- close-ups of nature. I love taking pictures of flowers and plants, especially. It is fairly easy to do, but most of all, I just love the way they look in the end! I thoroughly enjoyed shooting this theme.
A few of the pictures I took a couple of weeks ago and just rediscovered; they feature some interesting post-winter plants that grow around the school. I tried to shoot them in an interesting fashion, perhaps highlighting some things that most people wouldn't notice. I used to walk by them every day, and I never saw them as anything but some boring yellow plants. Later I took a closer look at them and took some pictures, and I thought it brought them into an interesting light. I showed them to some other people, and they gave me exactly the reaction I was looking for- "What? That grows by the front entrance? I never saw that." The others I took a few on Thursday, and a few over the weekend around my house. It is completely surrounded by dense trees, and this is my favorite time of year- when everything becomes green and sunny, with the light filtering softly through the leaves...it looks almost surreal. I went around and took some pictures close-up of the greenery and, thirty pictures and six mosquito bites later, I ended up with some rather interesting ones. My favorite is of one seed-like thing I found on the deck. Its bright color caught my eye, so I set my camera on macro and shot a couple of angles. I adore the image below! Something about the extremely shallow depth of field, with the stem and the deck blurring out, the fact that nothing else is really seen around it, and most especially, the long shadow it cast...I love it so much!

 

 Shutter speed: 1/60

Aperture f-number: f4.4

ISO rating: 50

Portrait Photography

This week's assignment was shooting a fine form of photography, portrait style. We made use of two types of lighting setups- one professional, three-point lighting, and the more affordable window-lighting method. It was easy enough, (particularly since we did not have to pay for the lighting setup ourselves!) getting the correct manual settings has become like second nature, and composing is relatively simple, relying almost entirely on the rule of thirds. Perhaps the hardest aspect was simple picking the most flattering angle from which to shoot the photo; however, even this was not overly difficult. The biggest thing I learned from this is how to get (almost) professional-grade lighting using only a window and a piece of paper, which are two things that my freshman budget can allow for!
Lindsay was my model for these shots. They were taken on two different days- I didn't make her change outfits between the shoots!

Food theme

Food, glorious food!
This week I shot food as a theme. Meaning, at every meal, I rearranged what I was eating, cleared off most of the rest of the table, and took pictures of it. My parents thought this was awfully strange, but I assured them to have no fear, it was for a school project, and all in good fun. I wasn't developing symptoms of OCD or anything!
What I found most difficult was actually finding good perspectives to shoot at. Not everything looks great as a background, so this involved a lot of staging. For example, I had an entire elaborate ice cream photo shoot, in which I used scrapbooking paper was a background, set up ice cream in a bowl to look pretty, used a desk lamp as lighting and fired away. The entire thing took about an hour, and whenever I had to readjust some element, I would have to shove the ice cream in the freezer to keep it looking nice! I feel like those turned out pretty well, though. My favorite picture was one of these. Among the others of this set are pictures of my dinner, which consisted of an egg roll and fried rice. I set up my plate to look appetizing (not that my mom's cooking doesn't always look appetizing, of course!) and placed some chopsticks for added effect and theme. That picture was probably my second favorite of these. I also put the chopsticks in the big bowl of rice and took a couple of perspectives. The next morning I also took pictures of my breakfast, which was French toast. The previous day I had just conveniently gotten a food magazine, so I looked through it, searching for inspiration. I noticed that any pictures of waffles or pancakes featured syrup drizzled across them, as well as a giant block of butter. In this spirit, I stuck a huge hunk of butter on my toast, took the picture, and then pushed it off to the side of my plate...because that much butter on anything is really quite gross. But it looks pretty!
All in all, I had fun with this assignment. Here is the aforementioned favorite picture of mine, taken during the ice cream shoot of epic proportions.

 

Shutter speed: 1/15

Aperture f-stop: f6.4

ISO rating: 100

Changing Context

An assignment that warrants some creativity as well as some editing skill- that is the context assignment! This has probably been my favorite editing assignment so far, as I got to use some of my knowledge from Photoshop! (though everything is shuffled around in Gimp, I still survived it)
The assignment was to "change the context of the school" by editing in foreign elements, for example, placing Mickey Mouse on the front lawn. This could be taken a multitude of ways, with many different creative interpretations! Overall this makes for a very enjoyable assignment. I chose to take a picture I had of the hallway, and submerge it. I used two semi-transparent layers, one a blue gradient and the other a generic water texture, to give it the right look. Then I edited in a few fish, along with a no-fishing sign, just for further comedic effect. I suppose it ended up semi-convincing, as convincing as a school hallway underwater can look! As I said before, I got to use many techniques that my experience with Photoshop has taught me- transparency, selections, changing lighting and distorting perspective. It wasn't overly difficult for me, but I still enjoyed it a lot!

Here it is, the water cooler leak gone out of control:

Motion Blur demo

Putting the camera on a slow shutter speed creates motion blur- this is a relatively simple technique used to show motion. Today a slightly more advanced technique was introduced- panning to create a focused object, while letting the background blur to give it the look of motion.
It took quite some trial and error, but eventually, I did manage to pull it off! My problems at first included overexposure (it was a beautiful sunny day) and completely missing my subject (Mr. Bush is awfully speedy) as well as taking the picture preemptively, as in only getting half of him in the shot (my button-pushing finger can be pretty speedy, too). I got the hang of it after about fifteen junk photos, and in the end, I had two that turned out well. The composition of the one below I particularly liked.

Overall, I learned how to synchronize my picture-taking with a moving object, and how to compose it beforehand to some degree, so that it turns out halfway decent. Oh, and there's that one lesson again of not giving up when you try something new... my goodness, that comes up a lot in photography, doesn't it!

Still Life

This week, I shot still life. I would like to begin by confessing that I shot these pictures with 3-4 hours of sleep under my belt, so please, bear with me!
This theme was a very different experience from the last set I shot, those being animal themed, seeing as last time it was easy to choose what to take a picture of (my dog) but it was much harder to actually compose it and shoot it. This time, taking pictures of the objects was simple, composing them quite easy, in fact, however, choosing what to actually take a picture of and figuring out how to make it seem interesting... that was much more difficult than was expected! I actually ended up liking the pictures that I didn't purposefully arrange better than those I set up myself. My favorite picture was one I took of some oranges on my kitchen counter, half-spilling from their mesh bag. I liked how the colors stood out, and the fact that I didn't arrange it that way, that it looked so appealing naturally, seemed to make it look even better. My favorite that I set up myself was of the two carnations in the vase, which I was given at the Fiddlers ReStrung hometown concert the night before. I liked how the wallpaper in my kitchen gave it a nice background- plain and simple, yet just enough texture to add something and not attract attention. The red color popped out nicely. Still, I ended up choosing the oranges picture.

Shutter speed: 1/15

Aperture setting: f3.1

ISO rating: 100

Panoramic editing

Even more Gimp fun! I think I'm actually starting to get the hang of this!
This week's assignment was to create a panoramic shot. This involves taking multiple shots of the same scene at different angles, then editing them together into one huge, wide photo. Photos of this type allow you to get a better, more complete view of the scene.
Supposedly this assignment is frustrating, but I didn't find it to be overly difficult. It only involved moving the layers around, playing with transparency to line them up, and then scaling them to get everything to match, finally blending everything together with the trusty fuzzy eraser tool. The only trouble I ran into was due to the fact that I took this picture outside. It was cloudy, and somehow this resulted in extreme differences in lighting with only a slight change of angle. One layer seemed to yellow, one too blue, and one underexposed. I had to painstakingly adjust levels on each layer to get them to match, bringing one up a little, bringing another down a little... This was a mite frustrating at the time, but in the end, was far less time-consuming than I expected. Overall, I feel pretty good about it.
The scene is the pond in front of the school. It was cloudy and a bit breezy, which made some nice ripples in the water. There had been some swans as well, but by the time I managed to get the tripod set up (much more difficult than it may at first appear) they had drifted out of sight. Still, the scene looks nice and serene.

This assignment has also improved my skills with using Gimp! Hooray!

Animal theme

A photo assignment that is much more difficult than it may seem!
I wasn't going anywhere interesting this weekend, so I decided to take pictures of something that I had close to home- my dog! What better subject is there for an animal theme? She's a pretty dog, and very cute (of course!) so I thought this would be an easy photo shoot. Well, learn something new every day, right?
When taking pictures of animals, it is hard to simply get a good shot of them- not blurred, flattering, et cetera, let alone a well-composed, artistic shot. It was difficult to get my dog to look up at me, or at the camera, or at anything for that matter- and if I used some food to distract her, then she would be moving her head around too much for me to put a lot of thought into getting a shot. My favorite picture is one that I actually put a lot of effort into composing, and then I sat and waited for a nice-looking shot to come. There were many shots of this particular scene, and this one was the best in my opinion. I tried to frame her face with the fence, and frame the entire picture with the leaves, while balancing with the sky. I like it quite a bit!
Overall, this is one photo shoot that I would like to try again someday. Still, there is at least one that I was pleased with!

Shutter speed: 1/125
Aperture setting: f5.0
ISO setting: 50