Twelve weeks has gone by so fast, but none the less I have improved enormously as a photographer, including something completely new to me, the editing side of photography. I remember signing up for this digital photography class practically a year ago. Going into this class, I wanted to come out being a photographer that captured moments that could inspire people, and bring a new perspective to objects ad scenes. I wanted to know how to take photos that involved what I thought of as "the number thingys"(Shutter speed, Aperture, and ISO) . I wanted to create art, not just walk pass by a cool landscape or object and snap a photo that I hoped would be in focus. I have come a long way since then. I remember when Mr. Bush told us to go out anywhere on the school grounds and take 25 photos of the exact same object. I was so excited to go out and take photos during the school day. About five minutes later, I was lost. I had no idea what to take photos of, nothing seemed cool and National Geographic worthy. Well I learned that day, I was not just going to walk into this digital photography class and automatically have the eye of the photographer. The photographer's eye is something you can learn to an extent, but it is truly a gift. That day all my eye saw was a trashcan, a microwave, and a piano. I thought at least the piano was not filled with a smoothie of food scraps or covered in crusty cheese. Then, I just started to snap photos. I took photos of the entire piano and then eventually the keys. After a couple of minutes I thought I probably had 25, but when I went back to count I only had 12 photos! I was not even half way there and there was nothing else to the piano that I could take photos of. Not long after I started taking photos inside the piano, and thought this is going to be cool! However, l looking back at my best photo from the collection, it was not that good. It was too edgy from Lightroom adjustments, and compared to water splashes, bee heads, and light painting it was just not that intriguing. A week or two later feeling very confident with the exposure settings and composition techniques we had just learned, I went to a photo walk that was headed by Olympus visionary, Frank Smith. He is known for taking photos from many different categories, but what he had to offer, which is what I was amazed at, was his ability to see a good photo based all on the sun and then use composition and techniques to produce an awesome photo of ordinary objects. For this photo walk, he had no particular photo planned, he was walking us through what he saw in the moment (at the Arb, a place he has never been before). The difference between a good photo and a great photo all has to do with the sun. How it is hitting objects, how bright it is, what point in the sky it is at, all uncontrollable things. To some degree nature photography is lucky, on the other hand, it is about recognizing a great photo when there is one. This is what the photographer's eye, cluing in on great photos wherever they walk. Throughout the trimester I have been trying to look at the where the sun is and find great photos in a unique way that changes the way someone looks at the object after they look at my photograph. Below I have the progression of my photographer's eye as I became more experienced. Below are my panoramas.Another thing I progressed over, was becoming familiar with the manual exposure exposure settings, which include shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. When we first learned shutter speed and aperture, we had to demonstrate our knowledge by taking four pictures of an object in motion at different shutter speeds (with a big difference visible). Similarly for aperture, we took four photos of an object with 'long' background (so the depth of field of the object could be noticed) at different apertures. For starters, shutter speed is the how long the digital image sensor is exposed to the light (or how long the shutter is open). The longer the shutter speed causes more light to come in and, the creative aspect, more motion to be blurred. The quicker the shutter speed causes less light comes in, and more motion to freeze. Then aperture is how much of the lens is opened up to the digital image sensor (once the shutter swings back). The larger the aperture is in size causes more light to come in, and a large depth of field. However, the smaller the aperture is in size causes less light to come in and a shorter depth of field. Finally, ISO is how sensitive the image sensor is to the light. The larger the ISO is the more sensitive it is to light (more light) and the photos will become more grainy. The graininess can be avoided with lower ISO's but not as much light will be let in. At that time it was about learning what the settings are and what they do, but as I progressed as a photographer I not only learned o properly expose my photos, but I also took advantage of the creative components of shutter speed and aperture to create unique photos. In terms of shutter speed, I was able to utilize its advantages in light painting. When I was painting the light lines (or where the light had been), the shutter speed was so slow ~30 seconds that it could capture all the places the light was over the course of 30 seconds. The next week I wanted to try to use the freeze motion aspect of shutter speed with water splashes! Now to freeze the water as it was splashing I would need a lot of light to make up for the fact of the super fast shutter speed (there was not enough aperture and ISO to compensate for this problem). The results of this photo shoot turned out really cool with the freeze motion effect. In my final photo shoot, I used the blurred motion effect to capture car light trails of headlights and taillights of cars. This was the opposite of the water splash settings, which was to take photos of both techniques. Below are the photos from all of the photo shoots I mentioned. The two galleries below are the shutter speed and aperture assignments I mentioned.Above is my motion photos.Above is my night photography, "car light trails" photos.Below is my best and worst photo. At the beginning of the this class I had a hard time getting pictures in focus let alone playing with manual settings and capturing cool photos. By the end of this class, I was capturing crystal clear shots, using the manual settings in my camera creatively, and capturing inspiring photos. Below are other favorite photos of mine. I did not want to leave them out.
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This past weekend was the last photo shoot of Digital Photography 1, so I decided I would do the open assignment. For my open assignment, I wanted to try out night photography because it fascinates me. From downtown settings to the night sky there is so much diversity of composition, lighting, effects, and motion! Unfortunately, I was unable to convince the weather to permit for night sky photography, so I stuck with city landscapes. In this photo shoot I learned so much. First of all, night photography is really hard with so much diversity in lighting it is hard to capture it all properly. I learned that too many bright light sources can be very distracting. For example, the headlights of incoming traffic is too overwhelming in these photos. Another example of overwhelming brightness was when I had the white sidewalk in my foreground. Another thing I found was the best lines of light (car taillights/headlights) came from shutter speeds of 5-6 seconds (too much below and the lines stop in the middle of your photo, too much above and your photo becomes over exposed). One of the techniques I tried in this photo shoot was getting a panorama of the city landscape. When I was doing this however, there was so many cars driving by (motion) even at a quick shutter speed the same cars at different positions/on top of each other were off were in the panorama. Finally, I created the starburst/bokeh effect in the street lights. I did this by closing the aperture down in the 20's. I had a really fun time playing with the composition elements of night photography and the lighting. I especially liked incorporating lines to draw viewer's eyes! Shutter speed: 5 seconds (I used a tripod)
Aperture: f/stop 25 ISO: 800 The editing I did in this photo was I increased the contrast (to really separate the dark areas and bright areas). I also brought up the vibrance, just enough to make the reds and greens pop. In addition, I used the healing brush to get rid of some of the light spots o the photo. Finally, I increased the clarity a little bit to make the photo a little more edgy in some places. The photoshop project this week was portrait photography. In this project, we did two different light settings. One was window lighting, in which we used a bounce card to reflect the sunlight onto the other side of a person's face. We did this so one side of the person's face was bright and properly exposed, and the other side was not too dark because of the shadows coming from their nose. The other light setting was a 3 point set up. This includes a main light (where most of the light comes from), a fill light (the light that fills in the shadows of the other side of the face), and finally a hair light (which was behind the backdrop). The hair light was used to help separate the subject from the background. In this project, I learned how to change white balance properly in the manual modes. Basically, you want the whites in the photo to be white (not orange or blue). In the window light setting I used the cloud white balance because it was a cloudy day, and in the 3 point setting I used tungsten light. Another important component of portrait photography is to take the photos vertical, because that is the style of this particular type of photography. One very cool thing I got out of this project I got was to apply the skills I have developed in photoshop. At particular points I was really stumped and challenged, but eventually I was able to come up with a way. I really enjoyed this photoshop assignment because we got to go out and take photos, and be the photographer, not just the editor.
This weekend, I took pictures of objects in motion. When I was doing some pre-shoot research I saw really cool photos of objects splashing water, and in the photo, the splash was frozen! I thought that was really cool, so I thought that I would try it. I knew in terms of set up for the photo shoot I would need a lot of light in order to have a slow enough shutter speed to freeze the splashes and still not have the ISO too high where it would get too grainy. To do this I found 3 heavy-duty halogen work lights laying around my house and set them up around a large Mason jar filled with water. Each light was 500 watts each! Something else that I took into consideration was, once the water splashed it would have to go somewhere, which by gravity is down to the ground. To avoid ruining anything in this shoot, I set up on my basement concrete floor, and put a tarp underneath the jar. Then was the moment of truth, would the amount of light be enough to freeze the motion of the water? Click, the splash was frozen, the photo was properly exposed and it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen on the back of my camera screen! As I continued to shoot, I found that a black background brought your focus to the subject better. I also learned during the editing process, that sometimes all you want a person to see is the splash, the jar, and the object that made the splash (nothing else). Originally in my photos, I had my dad's leg, the tarp, and all the background stuff that was in my basement, but I learned you can use the brush tool to edit a specific area. With this brush tool, I selected the background to lower the exposure and make the blacks more black. I also learned another tool in Lightroom called the healing brush, which with it you can get rid of any unwanted spots. I used it to get rid of the distracting dots and specs that took away from the splash. Shutter speed: 1/1000 of a second
Aperture: f/stop 5.0 ISO: 1600 In the photo above, I did a couple of things in Lightroom to enhance the photo. First, I cropped the photo so there was still some space off in the right third and the subjects were on the left third (the apple on the bottom left and the splash on the top left). Next, I brought up the vibrance to enhance the colors of the apple and the reflection of the wiffle ball. In addition, as I mentioned above, I used the healing brush to take out distracting spots. Finally, I used the selection brush to lower the exposure and make the blacks more black in the background. This weeks Photoshop assignment is called Multiple Me. In this project we got to compose a photo with multiple of the same person in it. You can do this by taking multiple photos and putting them on top of each other in Photoshop. This person can be yourself and someone else. If you are doing yourself, though, you have to set a timer before you take the photos because you have to be in them! When taking the photos, you have to set up your camera in all manual settings for each photo. This includes, all the exposure settings (Shutter speed, Aperture, and ISO), white balance, and focus. The person should be in a different pose and position for each photo (also take a photo without anyone in it). When I was shooting, I took six photos of myself in different basketball poses in front of the high school gym. After the shoot, you get to import the photos into Photoshop and compile them onto of each other. Obviously, when you put all the photos on top of each other you will only be able to see one photo at a time, so you have to layer mask each of your positions out and use the paint brush to clean up the edges of the masks. In this project, we learned how to make a smart object/layer so you can adjust the levels, clarity, vibrance, and other basic control settings of the whole photo at once, and not just one layer at a time. These skills will be very helpful to fix/create my photos in the future.
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November 2018
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