(4:16PM, Paranaque)

Given that in my last assignment I'd stated my smartphone's auto settings is terrible at picking up motion, I knew I needed to throw something for the fast shutter speed. A shutter speed of 1/2500 was what was necessary to snap Karkat completely in place as it was tossed around - any faster made too much noise that the other settings couldn't compensate for. ISO 1250 made it so the darks were as dark as I liked without being overbearingly noisy. (f/1.79 is my smartphone's default aperture.)

A portrait orientation was a given to help sell the upward motion, even as Karkat is stock-still in the picture, and cropping it to 3:4 proportions allowed the elements of the picture to fall into the rule of thirds. I'd nudged the white balance a little bit cooler to around 4000K just to wash the colors out, so even the most saturated color in the picture - Karkat's orange horns - would be desaturated; I wanted it to feel mundane and not bright. 

(4:19PM, Paranaque)

The most frustrating thing about testing out shutter speeds is choosing the one (and then calibrating the rest of the settings to match) that allowed for the "proper amount" of motion blur - fast enough that the subject is still recognizable, but slow enough that it streaks with motion that it at least looks somewhat deliberate. 1/30 was the speed with a decent amount of "deliberate blur" and the ISO50 was just chosen for the same reasons: as little noise as I can get with dark enough darks.

This little tossing session involved dozens of snaps trying a lot of settings - as well as a lot of trying to make Karkat fall in a decent position - and I frankly still think this looks unintentional in a bad way. I'd chosen to crop this instead down to 9:16 so it also somewhat follows the rule of thirds. The slightly cooler white balance of 4000K remained.

(5:19AM, Paranaque)

I was getting ready to sleep around 4:30 - it isn't morning to me until the sun is up - and my cat had escaped onto our roof, and the time it took to cajole her down lasted until sunrise, at which point it was solidly (even by my definition) the next morning. What had appealed to me about ISO from reading the course manual and fiddling with my smartphone was its occasional ability in outdoor shots to obscure the actual time of day, so I'd decided to take a picture making it look like the usual hour I wake up. (9am. Shamefully.) It took ISO1250 to accomplish this, and while I do think it is a tad overexposed (especially when bringing the shutter speed down to 1/10 to keep Karkat's embroidered facial features essentially black but its hair and shirt lighter to sell how bright it is), I pushed it anyway as this level of exposure also completely blew out the electrical wires in the background, which I think serves well to contrast the next picture. As a simple portrait Karkat is just sitting, centered in the frame; I tried to align the house and the tree in the background to be around its eye level without creating tangents with its hair. The white balance was untouched at around 4400K.

(5:19AM, Paranaque)

There are those aforementioned electrical wires in the background. This was a touch brighter than the sky and surroundings were in real life; I'd only pushed it as low as ISO50 because I wanted the exposure level to - even in the sea of inky darks - still somewhat visibly show the cancer symbol on Karkat's shirt (the gray 69), as well as keep its shadow bluish instead of the borderline black it became when pushed lower. In hindsight I could've pushed the still 1/10 shutter speed a touch higher, but given that this was taken not even a minute apart from the earlier, high-ISO picture, I'm alright with it showing how even one setting being pushed can create a drastically different picture. I didn't touch the original 4400K white balance in either case as this already had a cool enough temperature to me to look a little dreary (which I wanted), and the low-ISO picture might've looked too saturated if pushed to be warmer.

(3:31PM, Paranaque)

A picture I'd previously taken by this window had appeared, by some whim of my phone's Auto settings, to be very desaturated; even though it is mostly beiges, creams, and greys in this area - thanks to the rusty grilles and lace curtain - it hadn't captured the warmth of the sunlight at the time. I wanted to manually recreate that washed out look as well as put Karkat between the grilles, as I'd always liked how they easily look like jail bars.

Again Karkat is positioned in the center and lower, framed between the bars with the symmetrical ironwork above it. To me they create a sort of V-shaped flow of the eye that allows Karkat to look smaller, more trapped by the grilles. The 1/40 shutter speed and ISO200 allowed for bright brights and dark darks for me, as well as making the shot sharp enough to see the little grimy bumps and spots on the grilles. I was surprised that despite being lit by afternoon sun I actually had to adjust the white balance to be warmer to wash the colors out, at about 5000K. I would've liked to further desaturate the orange of its horns but I couldn't do so without it actually pushing to make the whole picture noticeably orange. I wanted the picture to just be blacks, greys, and browns against the creams. Bland and boring, emphasizing that Karkat is trapped and grouchy about it.

(3:41PM, Paranaque)

Because Dutch angles introduce either energy or unease to shots I wanted to go with more of the latter, given Karkat's expression - but its small size keeps it from being actually creepy, and so I wanted to capture the vibe of being watched by a nosy but ultimately harmless little plush who thinks they're a bigger threat than they are. Thus, the colder white balance somewhere around 3400K, adjusting shutter speed to 1/200 and ISO125 so the whites in the picture would feel sterile but not too blue. I pushed Karkat to the edge of the landscape-cropped frame honestly to minimize the gumamela bushes behind him, which added a cheeriness (even with the cooler temperature) I didn't particularly want, although they do contrast with the rough and grimy brick wall.

(4:31PM, Paranaque)

It had begun raining while Karkat was being tossed around for the shutter speed shots, and I thought about wanting to try and capture the rain drops for this cool balance picture. I'd dialed the white balance down to around 3600K - I wanted something close to the palette of the early Twilight movies - and tried to adjust the focus of my smartphone (which, I belatedly realized, was not in fact aperture control) so the focus was more on the background, not Karkat in the foreground. Then, fiddling with settings, the 1/800 shutter speed and ISO320 allowed for the rain drops to appear as little white grains (with some motion blur, but it was the best I could capture), instead of faint grey lines or (if I'd pushed either shutter speed or ISO or both too far either direction) disappearing altogether. 

A portrait orientation would've shown much more of the house in the background than the rain drops (which wouldn't show against what was now a bright white sky with the current settings), but I still wanted the vibe of the picture to be "Karkat coming through the gates and it then begins to rain" and so went with a 16:9 landscape orientation. In hindsight I could have gone anamorphic widescreen with this as well, but an aspect ratio that wide wouldn't have captured enough of Karkat, the rain, and the gate without exposing unnecessary elements at the sides of the frame.

(4:27PM, Paranaque)

Taken just a few minutes before the raining picture above, I wanted to mask the rain and the naturally greyish sky that came with it by pretending it was nice and sunny and Karkat was going through Karkat-sized nature. Having learned a high enough exposure can blow out wires in the background, I pushed the shutter speed to 1/30s and ISO64  to obscure distracting clotheslines that would have otherwise been visible in the background as well as fake a warm sunniness without lightening the black on Karkat too much. I had to push the white balance up enough to get the picture golden at about 5800K.

I'd chosen a 16:9 portrait orientation to emphasize how tall the plants are compared to Karkat, positioning it between them for some symmetry and the natural rhythm the leaves provide.

(4:02PM, Paranaque)

Given the freedom afforded to smartphone photographers I felt like this would show my priorities in picture-taking when given mostly free reign, to which I believe mine are: novelty, and a mundane weirdness. Novelty in the sense that I wondered if being able to manually adjust my smartphone's settings could allow me to shoot better in low light, and mundane weirdness in that I think it's highly amusing to imply an angel would implore a plush of a troll - a gray-skinned, eye-bagged, horned creature in black - to pray - especially when surrounded with flamelike colors. (Is it warm? Is it sinister?)

Now. My phone cannot shoot in even moderately low light, as this was taken in some indirect afternoon sunlight with a red curtain draped over the table (and my head) to create some darkness, a lamp in the background to introduce some brightness and - I'd hoped - some rim lighting on the porcelain angel. I wanted the angel to be clear, distinguishable, and not just a mere silhouette, but surrounded by the inky black of Karkat and the table they're on; however if I wanted it to be as dark as I'd liked (I could not get a sharp picture, no matter what I did) it would also be really noisy. So, the 1/4 shutter speed and ISO50 were where I'd landed on to make it reasonably dark and noise-free, while keeping the light in the background from being too bright. As the raw picture was very brightly red, I'd taken it cooler to about 3600K: enough so the surroundings still read as red (and the light as orange), but without being such a saturated color.

There is an orange pipe in our backyard that my siblings and I have roleplayed, in our adult ages, the iconic James Bond intros through. Having enjoyed a classmate's work using a slinky as a framing device, I wanted to marry these two ideas by pressing Karkat's face to one end of the pipe and my camera to the other. It then looks like a strange moon with a face in a reddish sky if you're reasonable, or Karkat going down a birth canal if you're me. I'd also cropped it down to a square aspect ratio because it reminds me of album cover art.

I'd noticed while shooting through the pipe that how tightly it was pressed against Karkat changed the lighting conditions, and I'd settled for allowing just enough light for a faint glow around its face while keeping it somewhat in shadow. I think it's funnier than if it were glowingly bright. As usual: 1/125 shutter speed and ISO800 allowed the darks to be dark, the lights to be light (I needed just enough for the faint pipe glow without overexposing Karkat to be basically pure white) while not being so dark that it doesn't pick up his face. I believe it showcases a frame within a frame despite essentially being the only thing in the frame, although I did deliberately include some of the pipe rim in the foreground to add a small blurry splash of brighter orange against the sea of brownish orange, which would've been too uniform to me. The lighting was once again very distractingly saturated within the pipe so I cooled the white balance down a bit to 4000K - just enough to tone the orange down while still being readable, and having Karkat's eyes read as yellow instead of the muddy tan it'd be if made cooler.