Self Portraits

Purpose:

• To learn how to put text with your self portrait to communicate something positive about “you”..interests, passions, etc.

• To think differently and creatively about your photographs;

• To become familiar with basic photoshop tools.

From the beginning, the goal was to take a self-portrait using a manual camera in the manual settings. Learning to get the right lighting in order to make the image look perfect. Once uploading all the self-portraits that were taken I then had to choose two photos to upload into photoshop. Then using the dafont website provided to us in class I chose two fonts that I felt fit each quote that I picked. The purpose of the quotes was to be connected to the image and myself. The first quote I chose was the team cheer my field hockey team would do after every practice, this cheer was created by our coach Molly Saunders who is now resigning and taking a higher position within the sport. The second quote I chose was applicable to me because I feel that I get overwhelmed with schoolwork and don’t know when to finish it to feel less stressed but once it’s done I know I can do more. After downloading each font, I then went into photoshop and made each word or segment of words its own layer. I did this so I could apply different layer styles to each word. In the quote by Molly Saunders, I applied an outer glow effect to each line of words with an opacity of 35%, along with giving the text a warped wave style to create the curves. Then in the quote by Nelson Mandela all of the words that are in a lighter color, I applied a gradient overlay with 50% opacity, along with an outer glow with an opacity of 35% and in a size of 10px. Then in the one word that is darker which is the word ‘done’ I wanted to emphasize that word so I chose the same effect just adjusted the percentage of opacity from 50% to 26% and kept the opacity for the outer glow at 35%. For all of the words in this quote I gave each word a text style of inflate to make it so the words would fill each brick in the wall.

Overall I feel that the process of making these photos was really fun because I was able to experiment with the different layer styles and different fonts rather than the basic ones that are given to you on the photoshop platform. I personally liked the process of making my photos rather than the final result. I like the result of how the quotes look but not the result of the overall image.