Final Reflection

Through this second semester of my independent study in photography, I have really learned a lot and increased my skills as a photographer! I feel that throughout the semester, a lot of my work was trial and error. I may not have made a ton of product, as in assignments, but I still did do quite a few. But I motley practiced practiced and practiced taking lots of pictures and teaching myself what types of things worked in certain settings and what types of things didn’t work. The first assignment I did was using the skills I had developed during the first semester to work with motion and long exposure in images. I would say that this first project of the second semester was a huge, huge success. I made some great pictures and really developed and executed the knowledge I learned about my camera and how to take long exposure photos. My skills in the knowledge how how to use my own camera, and even friends' cameras, have improved immensely through this whole year and the second semester, and now, by knowing how to utilize my took much better, I have been able to take very good pictures and feek far more confident in my ablitities. The final Project of the semester I did, I think, was my favorite. I taught myself how to take very good portrait photos during golden hour, in the type of way that people usually take their senior photos. I really enjoyed this project because I really got to capture a moment, an expression of someone, and the lighting was very nice. During this project, I also really got to use my knowledge of cameras because, since the lighting was so bright I used manual mode and adjusted all the features such as the aperture to the way I wanted it for the imag,e and the reason I know how to do that is because of all i tought myself during my independent study this year. Another skill of mine that has definitely improved is my editing skills. I feel that I am a very well-rounded photo editor now. I know how to use photoshop a lot better that i did before and i also know how to use basic aditing features in the photos app to really enhance a photo to the best it can look, and I even started to learn how to edit using lightroom which is a great editing app as well with sime super helpful features to it. What I am going to continue working on is basically everything I've learned that you can always keep improving as a photographer, but I think specifically I want to learn how to edit even better because the power of editing in images is really just incredible, and I find it very interesting so i will keep working and hope to improve even more. Overall, my independent study this year has been great! I learned so many new skills and definitely came out a much much better photographer than I was before. And most importantly, I had a ton of fun learning new things, even when things were sometimes frustrating, I always figured them out and learned!