Photo I Everett Sawyer

Reflection

Throughout the whole year, other students and I have worked on improving our photography skills by not just taking photos but also editing. This class taught the class and me how to use film and develop it and opened my eyes to different photographers as well as techniques for taking photos.

Editing photography was one of the first things that we did this year we worked a long time at this. We never really started taking photos till the second half of the year, that is when we got film cameras. But the editing part of the year we worked in Photoshop I had known how to work in Photoshop a little before this class but not at a high level. I would not say that I am a pro, but I am not bad either. We worked on the basics, which is great because I needed a strong foundation before doing more complex work in Photoshop. The thing that was great about this is that I was able to use Photoshop and the skills I have acquired from this class and use them in other courses like Social Studies and Science. The editing in Photoshop also I think helped me with telling what photos had and had not been manipulated in some way because I had seen how to make these edits first hand and know how hard it is to get your photos perfect 100% of the time.

The edits that I made were duplicating photos or elements in them and adding them to different pictures or image to create some various forms. One of my favorite edits that I made was this one that involved a guy on a Kayak that had the name Steve on his shirt I took two photos of him then later I mashed them together to create the effect of two guys on Kayaks in the water. That is one of my better ones, but I think most of them came out pretty well and you can see my progression because as time went on, my edits got better and better. The most challenging edit was the college because you had to put things together that fit. I had taken this picture of an owl but did not know what other photos to match it with so I decided to grab such photos offline and add them I added a plane a rocket ship sticking with the theme of flying. But then I remembered that I had some old pictures of seagulls lying down. I added them, but it was getting crowded, and images were cropping each other off and not fitting, and this took me a while to get where everything would fit and look not messy.

Taking photos and learning how to develop was the next skill that the class and I had to work on. This was during the second half of the year, and I felt it was way harder to learn than Photoshop. The reason being there was just so much to remember at first and so much to do correctly to get the perfect photograph on paper. I did enjoy taking film and using film cameras, but at times I wished that we were doing more with digital photography, but I still liked learning how film works and all the aspects of it. Taking photos was the most natural part of the whole thing the hard part was getting it out of developing your film. It was just time-consuming, and you just wanted to develop and find out if your pictures had come out right or not.

I ran into several road bumps during this part of the class one being my light sensor did not work 100% of the time, and this made it, so some photos did not come out that well. But I worked around it, and Mr.Anderson helped me figure out the issue which was the batteries were dying, and I needed new ones. After that had been fixed, there was a massive difference in how my photos looked and how they came out. I think this was evident as my Shadows and Reflections was much better than my Walk Around because my light sensor worked. But after the light sensor issue, you could see the difference in my work overtime as I learned to technique and became a lot more familiar with the camera and the darkroom.

The dark room was where most of my time was spent though I worked many times after school trying to complete projects and improve them. The dark room seemed scary at first because there was so much to remember as I stated before and there was a lot of different things that could go wrong while making your print. I had plenty of mistakes, but that lead me to become a better photographer and more used to how the system of the dark room works. This leads me to make some very great images, mainly the shadows and reflections and my leading lines, which both came out amazing.

This class has taught me so much, and I have grown as a learner. My photography skills have improved so much and learning how to take film a developed it has led to a new appreciation for people who did this before digital photography. I will be taking this class next year, and I can not wait to see how I improve and struggle and learn next year.