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.

Sick

I have been sick. Haven;t left the house. Haven't even really left bed. No post today

Architectural Photography

I have been really busy with classes so this is another short post with a few images. I did a little photographing of buildings on campus. I decided to share them with you and I may set a goal of starting to photograph more buildings on campus with interesting views. It might be fun.

Random Shots from Campus (Round 2)

I spent some time on campus after my photo class in Wednesday. I decided just to showcase some of the shots I liked.

This thing stood out to me from the bushes when I saw it. The red color jumped out of the green bushes so nicely. I need to go back and figure out what it was though.

I shot this from ground level. The plants were just hanging over so perfectly creating this tunnel. I wish I had shot from a little lower. It might not have been better but everything is about seeing stuff from a different angle. 

I liked the symmetry of this standpipe thing. The chains hang down nicely creating a winding path through the image. I shot it off center because I did not want it just sort of being there but I think I needed a little more space around the edges.

While sitting around I saw this image. The sun was reflecting off of the building behind me into a shadowed area and light this up perfectly. I love the way it looks.

My Fifth Weekly Assignment

My Fifth Weekly Assignment is using negative space. I am really looking forward to doing this assignment because I think it will be interesting. Negative space has so many uses and is used so often but to try and make it an integral part of the image will be the fun part.

No blog post

There will be no blog post today because I spent way to many hours at the fair and 2 hours just to get home and I am way too tired to work on any images. Resumes on Tuesday.

Random Shots from Campus

I had some free time between classes and decided to shoot some shots of a nice area of campus. 

I tried using the light to give a nice frame effect on the right side of the image which I think worked well. It sort of frames it but it is also a focus. The background just feels sort of bland to me though. I think a small depth of field would have worked much better.

I love the shadow on this image. It crosses the plant nicely but the plant it still vibrant. The texture of the building gives some nice lines that the plant mimics. I think it works nicely being slightly of center. I also shot one center but I think centering the focus on really works when the image is mostly symmetrical

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I really like the texture of the bench in this image. The lines lead nicely across the image but I think the left side feels a little empty. Something there might improve the image but it also might set the balance off.

I like the color in this image. I think the purple works very well with the green and blue background. A bokeh effect might make it even better though. A stronger purple could also improve the image.

I actually edited this image a significant amount. The colors were lightened considerably and I remove a light pole and telephone wire that crossed the image. I feel I did a decent job without to many artifacts or noise showing up.

Digital Photography class assignment 2

I decided to post what my next asignment is. It is very open to interpretation and will involve a lot of shooting. It is called a scavenger hunt because it is 20 words or ideas we need to shoot.
THE TWENTY SUBJECTS:
01. Monochromatic.
02. Crazy color pattern or color relationships.
03. Stark.
04. Intricate texture utilizing color.
05. Rough texture utilizing color.
06. Calm color combo.
07. Circles.
08. Squares.
09. Symbol or symbols.
10. Contrast with complimentary colors (opposite each other on the color wheel example: blue next to yellow,
red next to cyan, and green next to magenta).
11. Harmonious color – next to each other on the color wheel.
12. Warm.
13. Cool.
14. Really hot.
15. A part of a head – close up.
16. Disturbing.
17. Smelly.
18. Just plain weird.
19. Something rendered out of focus but still with enough contextual information to discern what it is.
20. Something that is rendered so out of focus that all that is left is the color information.

This is right from the assignment sheet. Some of these will be very interesting to shoot.

My Fourth Weekly Assignment

The fourth weekly assignment is going to be painful for me and I was thinking about skipping it but I need to do it. The fourth assignment is using a high ISO. I really hate using a high ISO but I am going to put a lot of effort into thinking about how to make it work with the image.

My Third Weekly Assignment Results

I am unhappy with my results this week. Going back to school has been keeping me busy and I didn;t have nay luck with the shots I wanted to do.

Even though my dog is not sleeping, she sure was trying. She kept looking at me every time the camera made noise. But I think it fit with my sleep habits anyways because sometimes you can just lay there with your eyes open waiting to sleep.