What Did I Learn?

Some of my biggest takeaways from the project were related to my photo editing skills. Through messing around with the applications myself or watching tutorials, I was able to better use my photo editing applications and their many features. Some features I hadn't used as much before were ones I discovered were fairly easy, and others that I thought had little to no effect on an image really made such a difference. For example, layer masks in Photoshop seemed complicated to me at first. I don't know why, because in reality, they're very useful and once you get used to them they're quite easy. The sharpen tool was one that I didn't use often before, because I couldn't quite find an obvious difference before and after using it. In reality, it was incredibly important, especially when I was working with images taken on my iPhone was were less sharp than the ones taken on my other digital camera.

Videos on tips for beginner photographers, at first, didn't seem like they had a noticeable effect on my photo-taking process. In reality, though, some of the things mentioned in them really stuck with me. Later on in my project I found myself consciously keeping in mind if the horizon in my images was level (or, if it was more diagonal on purpose). I began to understand just how important it was to have sharp images, and kept in mind while taking and cropping photos that although the whole landscape may be pretty, narrowing it down to its key elements may create a much stronger or meaningful image. Another way I kept myself working on the project while being a little stuck was looking at inspiration. I scrolled through websites and google images looking at other images people created to come up with some ideas of my own or take inspiration from the techniques/composition in the images I saw.