Old images from the park

Here are some images from Mill Creek Park that I never uploaded.

Final Project 2

More images from my Final Photo Project.

Final Project

It has been a while since I have posted. School is crazy and I have had no time for photography. I have been working toward my final project which I do no believe I have actually explained.

I am attempting to photograph the dark side of bullying in regards to suicide and the positive side of prevention. I am doing a series of diptychs. One side is positive and the other is negative. These are my first attempts.

I have been messing around a lot with the setting and editing of the images. The first two are different versions of the negative. I like both of them and I am still working on deciding which setting to use.

 These images are designed to be positive. I tried using bright colors to make them more appealing but It just went way over the top in the right image. My classmates suggested that I need to have more interaction with the main subject. I have the emotions somewhat there for the background people but they need to try harder. The main thing is changing the main person to be responding. It needs to show how it is working. I had originally wanted to have the main person the same but I think it does not work well like that. It was a very helpful suggestion and I will be changing that.

More School Work

Spent part of my day today at YSU working on printing digitally. Not really time consuming or hard but it just took up part of the evening and working on more school work now. No post with content today.

Busy with School

Being slammed with school work right now. No new post today.

Conversations with myself 6

This is the crowning achievement in my Conversations with myself assignment. It took hours to do this image. I had almost an hour long set up time to get everything ready, about 40 minutes of shooting, and 5 hours in Photoshop. I was aiming for a 1970's summer party look. I know I did not get it quite right. If I had the money I would have purchased clothes in the style of the time period as well as props. The car is from the 90s and the grill is propane. So Anachronism but it will work for the scope of the class. I do want to do more post-processing on it but first I need to figure out what to do to get the right look of the 1970s photographs. I want that vintage look.

A few things I did learn:

 1) As awesome as the ability to mass process images in camera RAW is, you will have different lighting between images.

2) The masking does get a lot easier as you get use to it. By the end I was flying through masks.

3) Watch Shadows.

4) Layer the images with the closest figure at the top.

I would like to redo this image but I do not have the time right now. I mass processed the images in raw and should have done each individually. Some have dark spots now and some have bright spots. If I can figure out how to copy a mask I should be able to do it within a short amount of time.

I had a lot of fun with this. I was shooting several images and then running back behind the camera and grabbing a new shirt and throwing it on and running back and shooting more. I shot more than I used because I wanted to have different options to chose from. I loaded all of the images into this one image and masked them very roughly. I them stacked the images with the person in the same location and toggled them on and off to pick which one I wanted. For the most part I used the first image I had shot but at least once two of the images overlapped and I had to cut one.

I can not wait to do more images like this and to start putting more effort into it.

Conversations with myself 5

I have been working on my Conversations with Myself more. I wanted to do a detective scene here and was not as happy with it as I wish I was. The tree ruined it and I shot from right to left and the left side ended up being wet and muddy and I did not feel like getting in it at the time. I do like doing this editing though. How many of of me can you find in the image.

Water Birds at Mill Creek Park

While photographic fish I also photographed the geese and ducks. The birds were everywhere and did not mind me getting to close. Most images I shot with a 300mm lens though because I did not want to disturb the birds any more than I needed to.

Fish in Mill Creek Park

I spent some time at Mill Creek Park photographing nature. I am not much of a wildlife photographer but I had a good time. I shot these images of fish using a polarizing filter to reduce the reflection of the light on the surface of the water. Some of the images were ruined by ripples but I am happy with these. 

Conversations with myself 4

Still having a lot of fun with the conversations with myself. I have so many things I can do. Soon I want to start  going out and doing some bigger projects.  

My Eighth Weekly Assignment

This week is an oddly timed one. Self Portraits. What could be a better time than when focusing on self portraits. I am sure I will have plenty to do for this. Here is to me.

My Seventh Weekly Assignment Results

This is the result for my Rhythm assignment. I really like the repeating images in a line. I think it works well and leads you through the image.

Conversations with myself 3

I am still having fun with this assignment. As a test I decided to try stabbing myself. I have had problems with getting the camera in focus as the right spot and trying to get into position, and hold that position when I am not very accurate about the timer. A remote will help with that problem though.

Conversations with myself 2

I shot this image at the local Struthers Police Memorial. It is a very nice memorial and the light was pretty good. I thought it would be nice with the multiples paying respect.

Conversations with myself

My next photo assignment is caller Conversations with myself. We are taking multiples images of ourselves and combining them into one image. I have decided to try and just have fun with this assignment. The day I got home I shot this first test. It did not take a lot of time to do and was just for fun and to try the technique. I am really liking doing this.

More photos from YSU

This are some more images from around YSU's campus. I shot these between class. I am starting to need to go outside my comfort zone and find new subjects to photograph. This is hard for me but I will do it.

I am not so much happy with this image as intrigued by it. The angles actually make me dizzy when viewing it. It is a mostly level area so it is not on a hill but it really appears to be.

My Seventh Weekly Assignment

My seventh weekly assignment will be photographing Rhythm. I think this will be very interesting. I am looking forward to it. I like repeating objects. I think something musical might work out perfectly. I have a few ideas but I will have to try them.

School interference

I have a rather large test today so I was unable to properly prepare a post for today due to studying. See you Wednesday morning.

Second guest speaker, Dana Sperry

The second guest speaker came into my digital photography class yesterday. His name is Dana Sperry His presentation was pretty good. He gave a lot of good advice about looking for art galleries and shows to get your work in. He was very helpful and also spoke one on one with everyone in the class. I now have two ideas I am thinking about doing for my final project. I plan to do both of them though so I will have to see how the beginnings of each one starts and work from there. Soon I will be doing a write up of my plans.

I am currently looking into applying for art galleries. I have to apply to two as part of my class but I want to apply for more. I am running into the problems of finding galleries because Youngstown does not have a large art scene, and work to submit. I feel I have some good work mixed with a lot of learning experiences but I am not sure I have a collection of images that mesh together well. My final project would be great and I plan to use it later on but I need to submit soon. Time to look through images quickly and see if I have the basis of a collection to enhance.

I have added a new poll to the top right.

My Sixth Weekly Assignment

This weeks photo assignment is Rule of Thirds. This will be easy because I often use the rule of thirds but I might try to make it a subject somehow rather than purely a technique. The rule of thirds is an amazingly useful compositional guideline. Digital Photography School has an excellent resource on the rule of thirds here.

My Fifth Weekly Assignment Results

My assignment was Negative Space. I am not quite happy with this image as I feel I should be. I did not have time to perfect it. I liked my concept of the light just illuminating a little area around it and having the negative space pushing in around it. I did not have a light meter on me and it came out a little dark. When pushing it brighter in camera raw I got to much noise in the image though. 

Preparations for a final project.

First off is an apology for the last several days. I have been really sick and didn't even leave my bed for several days. Finally back up and moving and ready to resume. My last weeks photo assignment will be posted this Wednesday.

My digital photography class had a guest speaker today. Kerry Skarbakka came and talked about his work and spoke one on one with us about ideas for our final projects. His work is amazing and I highly recommend looking at it. My idea I am thinking about is going to address my fear of people. I have such a problem with stuff such as going to bars or other events with large amounts of people. I want to photograph my emotions. I want to show what I feel and maybe help myself at the same time. Kerry Skarbakka was very helpful with his opinions. I was glad to hear his opinions.

Constructed Color Part 1

The newest assignment in my digital photography class is called constructed color. It involves taking 3 images that are colored with a filter in red, green and blue and making them into cyan, yellow and magenta(opposite colors).

The three images are then combined into one image. Where the image is the same we get a solid image, where it is different we get the individual colors. My first attempt does not line up properly and one of the 3 differences does not show up.