What Materials Did I Use?

What did I use/have access to while working on my project?

Camera (Canon EOS)

Here is the camera I used for my digital photography. I used it quite a bit for about three quarters of my project—the last quarter, I used it less as I focused more on editing. I do wish I had become more familiar with its many settings, however, I think I became familiar enough with it to still learn from this project and capture some good images. I can't quite compare it to other cameras, since I'm a beginner and this is the only camera I've had besides iPhone, iPad, and laptop cameras.

iPhone XR

While I avoided using my phone to capture images at first, later on I found it to be a fun challenge to take older images from my camera roll on my iPhone and try to make them better. I also used my phone when I didn't have my other camera with me, or when my other camera had run out of battery. It has a better camera than my last iPhone, which was quite old—the iPhone XR includes lots of cool features such as long exposure, portrait mode, and more that I didn't have on my tiny, older iPhone's camera a year ago, so it definitely wasn't the worst camera I could have.

Zoom Lens

This particular camera lens is what allowed me to take a lot of my photos of the wildlife in my backyard during my project. Images of bees, butterflies, chipmunks, etc. were made easier with this lens. This is because it allowed the camera to zoom in a lot more on smaller subjects that were farther away.

Adobe Photoshop 2020

This application on my school laptop was where a lot of my photo editing improvement occurred as I learned how to better use all of the tools available to strengthen the composition of my images. I became much more familiar or comfortable with things such as layer masks, removing objects, layer blending, the burn and dodge tools, and more. How the application appears on my laptop is shown above.

Photos

This application on my school laptop was useful for adjusting the overall contrast/lighting of my images, putting them into black and white, putting the finishing touches on cropping images, adjusting saturation, and more. For all of my images, I started out in Photoshop, then finished the image in Photos. It was from there that my final product was moved to my Edited Project Photos folder on my desktop. How the application appears on my laptop is shown above.

Organization

While my desktop is not typically very organized, AP tests earlier this year forced me to regain some sense of organization. That's why when I found myself halfway through my project with my desktop returning to its usual messiness, I took some time to create some folders. My most important folder, I would say, was my Edited Project Photos folder, because it's where I kept my final products. I could pull images from the folder easily to use in my journal or on this website. Potential Editing was also convenient, especially for days with more photo editing, because I kept images there that I would consider editing to make them stronger. In the general folder Photography Explanation, I kept mostly my .psd Photoshop documents that I saved for each image I edited just in case. There were also more folders inside that one titled June _____ Photos depending on the day, where I would upload every image I took on my camera that day. I would further sort through those photos and pick out the best ones to move to my Potential Editing folder. Random Photos was filled both with images imported from my iPhone and image documents that had gone through my Photoshop editing, but had yet to be imported into Photos for the final edits.

Report abuse