Photography II

I think that if my work at the beginning of the year, in Photo I, is compared to the work from Photo II, my work has improved. At the beginning of this year, I was really unfamiliar with a camera, and just photography in general! However, I think what makes my current or more recent work better than my others is the amount of effort that I put into my images in this semester. I think with having only one image due per class I was able to focus more on what I actually wanted to photograph and perfecting how I wanted my final image to come out. I definitely played around a lot more with color, as was required with some assignments, and with editing out imperfections, because I was gradually becoming more advanced in Photoshop (I still have a bit of a way to go with that though)!

What was most challenging to me was keeping up my concentration. I struggled at the beginning of this semester with finding a comfortable and interesting concentration for myself, because I had never really thought about a photography concentration before and had no idea what I liked photographing the most. I ultimately ended up choosing water/liquid, because I thought it could provide some versatile images, and while it definitely did at some points, I found myself becoming a little bored and uncreative with it! So, I took a little break from it in a few projects and came back to it in the end, which helped me refresh and come up with new and better ideas. What I also found challenging was still my camera!! I didn't spend a lot of time in the first semester really trying to figure out all of the techniques and buttons of my camera, so when I wanted to employ them and explore in Photo II, I had no idea how, and had to learn those skills on the fly!

I think I'm definitely most proud of my unique lighting images, and my monochromatic color images. Those were two projects where I just really found myself getting involved in the images that I was taking and spending a lot of time to make sure that they were unique and visually interesting. I really really like the end products of them personally, because they were both processes and types of photography that I had never tried before, so it was really cool to expose myself to a new side of visual art that I really enjoyed and will definitely do again!

I believe my work demonstrates my weaknesses in how sometimes I can get impatient with an image or project and don't take the time to make the image (in the moment) as I originally planned it in my head or on paper, because it would take up too much time or because I get impatient, and that may reflect itself in some of my images. However, I think my work also demonstrates my strengths because when I do have a really good idea that I'm absolutely set on or a technique that I really want to employ, I give those images my all so that I can really get the desired affect and learn more from the experience of taking the image!