Photo 2

Welcome to my Photography 2 Page

Below are photographs I have taken for assignments in the class.

Reflection

I have enjoyed taking this class, because it has been my first experience with a visual art class since my freshman year of high school, when I took Photography I. It has allowed me to improve in multiple ways. First, my understanding of different elements of composition have strengthened. Through trial and error in my work, as well as through looking at my classmates' work, I have gained a better understanding of what makes the composition of an image appealing. I now have a better understanding of my use of color, light, contrast, positive and negative space, repetition, and more in my images. I can analyze the use of these in other images and recognize them in my own. I can understand how they relate to the meaning or strength of the image. This is a skill that I was hoping to improve upon for the future, where I hope to further explore photography simply for personal enjoyment. I also have a better understanding of photo editing, and the choices that make an image stronger. Again through some trial and error in my classwork and assignments, I have been able to explore applications such as Photoshop for editing my images and hopefully changing elements of them to make them more interesting and appealing. I've learned about many ways to do this, and improved my understanding of how to achieve this through photoshop tutorials and exploring it myself. I have tried to edit my photos in various different ways to contribute to their appearance and deeper meaning, and I believe I've improved on this throughout my experience with Photography II. Especially in some of my later images for my photojournalism unit, I see that my understanding and creativity relating to composition and meaningful photo editing has improved since the beginning of the semester.

One of the most challenging parts of this class was my personal concentration. I really loved the idea of connecting photography to literary devices, but avoiding running out of material by constantly finding those connections and then also having to figure out how to portray it through my original image as well as its photo edits was difficult a lot of times. I struggled with keeping up with this concentration, but I believe it has helped me improve in the long run. Becoming more familiar with Photoshop and how to edit images was also a more challenging part of this class. Sometimes, creativity became an obstacle as well—running out of concept ideas, not having a clear plan for what you want in an image. However, these challenges have led to some of my most important improvements outlined above, and will allow my future attempts at photography show that improvement.

I am most proud of both what I have gained from this experience and my select favorite images I created along the way, which serve as proof of my progress. I am proud that I have gained experience in photography from facing its challenges and making mistakes along the way. I am also proud of some of the results of overcoming these challenges, shown, in a few of my favorite images. Some examples include my Future and Sanity images in the photojournalism unit, as well as my Abstraction and Love Is... images from the digital unit. I believe that these photos show some examples of how I began to figure out stronger compositional and photo editing techniques. These images that I am proud of also show my strengths in finding improvement within challenges and persistence in trying to keep creating images and keep learning throughout the process. The images I am less proud of may reflect my weaknesses as a learner: my poor use of time management with those images, and my reliance on similar compositional and editing techniques that I struggled to move away from. Overall, however, even with these strengths and weaknesses reflected in my work, I am happy to have taken this class and excited to move forward into my two-week junior exploration project centered around photography—hopefully I can continue to grow and improve.