Digital Photography

At the beginning of this photography class I had very little experience in photography. I had just bought a camera a month or so before school started, because I knew that photography was something I was interested in and wanted to explore a lot, and because I wanted to extend my skills past taking pictures on my phone all of the time. Even in the two months or so of class I feel like I've really learned a lot about how to take better pictures! I was a little intimidated at first by all of the composition rules and techniques that make a good image, but then when I was out taking pictures I discovered that it's pretty fun finding ways to apply the techniques. It's even cooler when I take an image and look at it later only to find out that I applied a rule or technique without even knowing it!

The images that I chose to put on this page represent my best work from each project, and now that I look at them I think that they get better as they go along. My first image is from the Compositions and Techniques category, and is a picture of a bee. This picture isn't my best image, but I really like it just because I like the color yellow and I like bees. In this image I wasn't really thinking about composition, I just saw a bee on a flower and got really excited and decided to take a picture of it. Luckily for me, it shows the techniques of high key lighting and close distance! I also like this image because I like the way that with the selective focus it really focuses on the details on the bee. However, one thing about this image is that I didn't edit it. I didn't really start editing photos until the Artist Inspired and texture projects, so that's another skill that I developed in this class and that I can definitely keep working on.

The second image is from the Capturing Compositions project. I like this image the most out of all of the other images I took for this project because I like the way the dinosaur looks almost. During this assignment the process was pretty rushed, or at least for me because I was scrambling around like a chicken with it's head cut off, but it taught me that I really should focus on what I'm taking a picture of, why I'm taking a picture of it, and how I can make sure that the picture comes out well and is really the best of my ability. The third image is from my Artist Inspired project and is inspired after the photographer Scott Fortino. I really liked taking and fixing this image because it was the first time where I really really tried hard on taking a photo and tried to find the perfect place, angle, and lighting to get the specific image that I wanted. It was the first image that I really spent time editing too, so I'm happy with the way that it came out and how it taught me that sometimes you just need to accept that your picture isn't perfect and that you can edit it to make it good. The fourth image is my texture image, and I really like the way that this one came out. The lighting of the sun on the leaf was just perfect so this image came out with some high key lighting and sharp focus. I also edited this image to make it more sharp and less blurry. What I learned with the texture project is that sometimes getting closer to an object can bring out the coolest and most interesting results.

The Cloning and Overlay and Multiplicity and Selected Color projects really helped me improve my editing skills and also tested my patience a little as well! Making these images required photoshop, no way around it even though I hoped there would be! I really liked the outcome of these projects because on the image of my sister, Claudia, I liked being able to take out something that bothered me in the picture, like her hair tie. I also liked the multiplicity project because I think it is a really cool effect. However, the multiplicity project definitely required a lot of messing around on photoshop and discovering alternative ways to complete a task to make an image turn out the way that I wanted it to.

Finally the Silhouette and Extreme Perspective images that I chose to represent their projects are probably my two favorite images out of the whole bunch of photos that I've taken. I really like the silhouette image because that project was probably the one where I pushed myself the hardest to find unique images and angles for the photos that I was taken, like the picture here. I also like the the Extreme Perspectives picture because it was really fun looking for unique places and angles to take pictures at, and I think they show my editing skills and represent the idea of my photo portfolio pretty well.

Overall I really liked this photography quarter because at the beginning I had no idea what I was doing, but now I understand more of what it's like to take good quality pictures and what the whole process of creating a good image is.