Photo Assignment #7: Open

After many photo assignments, I was finally able to do an "open" assignment for photo assignment #7, which meant I was free to choose whatever photography theme I wanted to do. For this assignment, I set it up so that the photoshoot would be a color themed display of items. Each photo is made up of multiple objects that are similar in color and captured on a white background, so that the light would reflect the color back onto the subject. Although I had many great photos, this one was by far my best one:

Original:

Edited:

ISO: 100
Shutter Speed: 1/18 seconds
Aperture: f/3.6



I had a lot of fun with this photo assignment, and I feel as if I showcased my best photography skills in it. I liked how everything turned out, and how I was able to apply skills learned from previous photo assignments into this one. My first photo assignment, macro, also taught me a lot about how to capture different angles and views to make a photo look more three dimensional. I didn't struggle with anything, except for running around the house, trying to find objects of a certain color (and cleaning up!) This photo assignment was a great way to finish the 7 Major Photo Assignments.

Photoshop Assignment: Visual Puns

For this week's photoshop assignment, we had to photoshop two or more things together to form three visual puns. Here are the three that I did, though you can probably guess what they are: 

For not googling any of them, I thought  these were pretty clever puns. However, I was kind of disappointed that I couldn't photoshop to my full potential, due to lack of time and other assignments I had to finish. There was nothing in particular that was hard to do, but photoshop was being kind of glitchy and not allowing me to use the text tool for the first pun, so it took me at least 15-20 minutes to figure out how to enable the text. I also think I could've done a better job with the third pun, but the picture is still guess-able. 

Photo Assignment #6: Still Life

This week I wanted to take pictures of subjects using still life. It seemed artistic, yet simple. What I did for the background of these photos was put a black T-shirt behind the subject for some of the photos, and use white or green cardboard for the other photos. Here is my best photo from this album:

Original:

Edited:

I edited the mancala marble to look sharper and clearer.

ISO: 100
Shutter Speed: 1/10 seconds
Aperture: f/3.7




This was the easiest photo assignment I have done so far (technique-wise), but the only difficult part was finding the subjects needed to be captured and finding the right camera angle. I really liked how these photos turned out, and how they didn't need much editing because of the window light technique I used.

Photoshop Tutorial Assignment: Phantom Deer in a Nature Landscape

This week I was instructed to follow any free, simple photoshop tutorials online that was within my reach, so I decided to go for a ghost figure in a nature landscape. Since I could only get the deer picture they provided me with, I had to use one of the landscape pictures I took myself from my nature/landscape photoshoot. I wanted a misty, blue sky background behind the landscape, so I had to edit that in before I made my phantom ghost.

I consider this tutorial to be intermediate. I struggled a lot with the layering of distortions to make the deer look translucent, and I go seriously annoyed with the quick select tool, which really wasn't all that quick.
 Looking at the final photo, I decided that I could've done better, but I just needed to get this tutorial assignment done and move on to the next one. The next time I do this tutorial, I will highlight the phantom deer much better!

Tutorial Link: http://www.photoshopstar.com/effects/ghost-in-the-landscape/

Photo Assignment #5: Light Painting

This week I decided to try to take pictures under the theme of light painting. I had a neighbor pose as the Statue of Liberty while I set the long exposure to 15 seconds, then sprinted behind her and outlined her figure with a small flashlight. I then took it to photoshop to make it darker for contrast and bluer:

Original:

Edited:

ISO: 100

Shutter Speed: 150/10 seconds

Aperture: f/2.7

This photo assignment wasn't difficult, but it wasn't exactly easy either. I had a lot of trouble getting started, such as figuring out how to set my dad's camera (because mine doesn't have the ability to set the camera to manual focus). I also kept drawing too quickly, so the lines weren't as neat as I would've liked, and the drawings were sometimes unidentifiable. Once I was able to figure out how to set up the camera (with help from my dad and the internet) I had a lot of fun tracing subjects and doodling in the air.

Motion Demo

This was a quick photo assignment that was given to teach us how to take photos of subjects in motion. What we did was move our camera with the subject still in the center, and snapped the photo:

This assignment was relatively difficult for me. I had to take several pictures before I found one that was clear. However, whenever the subject was clear, the background would be also, and often times half out of the picture. Others were extremely blurry. I finally decided to set the camera to an ISO of 100, shutter speed of 1/240, and an f stop of 9. Although it darkened my photo, I was able to take a clear photo of the subject while the background was blurred out.

Panoramic Photographs

For this in class photo assignment, we were instructed to take 3+ photos of a place inside of school or outside, and merge them into one photograph. My best two panoramics were of the third floor balcony and the sidewalk:

In my opinion, this was by far the easiest photoshop assignment because photoshop did most of the merging. In a few of the panoramics I did have to recolor the edges of the photo and the places were lines were visible, so photoshop didn't do all the work for me. In this photoshop assignment, I learned how to merge several photos together and color photos to enhance the panoramics. I didn't find this assignment difficult, except for making sure the camera didn't move (even with the tripod, my camera was pretty unsteady.) I really enjoyed this photoshop assignment!