Final Reflection

The best experience we had this year by far was going to New York City.  We had so much fun walking around and taking pictures.  It was really great just to explore the city, even when we weren't taking pictures.  There was a lot to experience there, and even more to photograph.  We got to go to museums and see the works of famous photographers and artists.  It was probably the best experience I've had in the past four years of high school.  I got a lot of practice taking pictures quickly, with a variety of angles and exposures.  New York is a fast paced city, and since we were moving we didn't have as much time to take pictures.  I had to learn to take pictures as I saw the composition, which was incredibly useful.  The museum exhibits we went to were also inspiring: the surrealist photographs we saw influenced my surrealist collage.

I also really enjoyed learning how to use photoshop more, especially in regards to tilt-shift photography.  I first saw a tilt-shift photograph a few years ago, and ever since then I've wanted to learn how to do it.  I got to teach myself how to imitate it, among other things.  This year, I got a chance to work on my own and teach myself photoshop, and I've become a lot more adept towards using it as a result.  I can merge photos well, I can imitate tilt-shift photography, and I can easily edit my photos like I want them.  This year was very independent, and I've definitely been given a huge opportunity to grow and learn because of it.

Swordfight/The Fall

Visual Story Stop Motion Gifs

Visual Story

The feedback I got for my visual story was mostly positive.  A few of my photos were a little bit too overexposed and lacked definition, but for the most part they were pretty good compositionally and the tone fit the story well.  I added the third photo because my classmates liked it and thought it fit in well, and the 7th photo was changed on Elise's recommendation.  Overall, there wasn't much I had to change, but there were a few photos that I changed from my original choices because they had better coloring or composition.

Final Project

For my final project, I want to emulate the photographs of Sally Mann.  Not just the portraits, but her style and full body of work.  I want to do black-and-white portraits, black-and-white landscapes, and abstract art using body parts and alternate ways of showing scenery.  She's weird, but her photographs are interesting and I'd like to try and emulate them.  It's possible that, in order to properly emulate her, I'll need to try film photography, but my plan is to do digital for most of it and see how far I get, and possibly include film as an addition.  I like her edgy, strange portraits and photographs, and that's what draws me to her.  As such, I want to take pictures in an interesting way that show different situations, and take careful use of light as that's a huge part of her photography.  A few of my friends agreed that they would model for me, and it should be fairly easy to find somewhere I can use for a landscape.

Still-Lifes

All of my objects I chose because they have personal connections.  I have my ribbon from my only horse show, nail polish, an acceptance card from my college, and a key that I like to use as a necklace.  Later, I even decided to include my show.  Some of these objects hold more significance than others, but they are all connected to me.  They are all things I like or need, things that make me happy, and overall, things that are a part of me.

I was fairly successful in capturing my images.  I tried to be creative in placement and how I used the different objects – after I felt I had exhausted angles and placements of what I had, I added dandelions to create more interest.  I experimented with a lot of different angles, exposures, and focal lengths.  It’s hard to create an interesting photo with only objects, but I think I was able to do that with at least some of them.  Next time I think I’ll bring in more, smaller objects.  It’ll be easier to rearrange them in interesting ways, and being able to add or remove objects as needed would help change the way each photo looks.

Free-Choice: Tilt-shift/selective blur

My assignment to myself was to experiment with selective blur, especially in the context of creating false miniature photos.  I’ve seen pictures of them online, and always wanted to learn how to do it myself.  The challenge for me here was finding out how to edit photographs in photoshop so that I could create this effect.  The way that tilt-shift photography works is that in creating blur on both sides of the photo, it mimics a shallow depth of field that makes things appear to be far smaller than they are.  It was really cool to learn about the different tools photoshop had that I’ve never used before, but will be incredibly useful in the future.  I had to figure out how to use them myself, and so it was challenging, but much simpler once I learned.

The biggest impact of this assignment was teaching myself even more about photoshop.  I learned how to use quickmask with the gradient tool, which creates a gradient that functions as a layer mask; I learned how to use different types of blur – guassian is my favorite, but lens blur and box blur also create an interesting effect; and I learned how to use the history brush, which undos certain edits to a photo.  I also found out what, exactly, tilt-shift photography is and how it works.  I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t figure out what made it look the way it did.  Since starting this, I’ve put together how it works and, possibly, how to do it without the use of photoshop in the future.  If I can create a shallow enough depth of field, I may be able to create photographs like this on my own, using just my camera.  I plan to experiment with it more in the future.  Another thing I learned is how to create a fals focus, and how to best choose a subject of a photograph through blur.  In this case, I had to carefully select my photographs, looking specifically for ones that were looking down and had a fairly interesting composition.  As a result, this project gave me an even better understanding of photo composition and how it relates the the type of photography one is doing.