My Final Photoshop Assignment

For the final photo assignment I chose black and white as the subject. Being my final assignment, I decided that it would be appropriate to choose it because it is more laid back nad I spent less time taking photos than on anything else. Most people have already done it anyways, because they forgot to take pictures on week. My goal was to get exactly ten pictures for the assignment, and I definetely reached it. The only real issue I had with getting the photos was making the choice of which ones to put into the assignment. Other than that issue, this was definetely one of the simpler assignments. It also turned out nicely, because I would find pictures in my free class time, and instead of sitting around or not using the computer properly, I was actually using my time wisely. This assignment was a great way to end off the trimester.

My Best Photo: ISO: 400 Shutter Speed: 1/60 Aperture: 5.0

My Ten Best Photos:

My Free Photoshop Assignment

The last photoshop assignment of the trimester was our choice, and this assignment brought out the individuality and exposed the skills of the entire class. We had to find a tutorial on the internet on Adobe Photoshop cs2, and then we would complete the tutorial accordingly. For my tutorial, I chose mono with a dash of color, which is where you take a photo with great color, turn it black and white, and then you can paint the spaces with the most interesting color with the history brush tool. For my assignment, I painted a picture of the Michigan Football Team charging onto the field, and i colored only them and their banner, to bring out a huge amount of contrast.

To learn about this tutorial, go to http://www.digital-photography-school.com/mono-with-a-dash-of-colour-photoshop-cs2-tutorial.

This is the photo I made of the Michigan Football Team:

Inspirations for Assignment Seven: Black and White

This week for my last assignment I have decided to complete the black and white assignment. I chose this because this is my last week, and I would prefer to focus on other things rather than spend time shooting more photographs, especially since I have been working on identifying many of the photos that I could put into a black and white assignment for about three weeks, just in case i had a week where I wouldn't be able to complete a photo assignment. Also I referred to flickr to get an idea of which pictures in my library will be the most ideal for a black and white photo assignment.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21644167@N04/3727478858/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubagallery/3368329653/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubagallery/3368338135/

My Sixth Photo Assignment: Motion

This week my assignment was motion. In this assignment I had to capture images of motion. Although the concept of the assignment seemed simple enough, this assignment was probably my most challenging. I faced many issues, and my goal was to have ten high quality pictures, and I didn't completely reach this goal. The greatest issue I had was getting pictures of motion, because most of the events in the assignment that I could take pictures of had split second windows to be captured. Another issue I had was digital grain. For this assignment, I was frequently changing the camera's settings, and it made it difficult to get a clear image. Most of my pictures were taken at the wrong time as well, because I went outside and only had a few minutes before it got dark. Although the assignment was very difficult, I still got a decent enough picture that I chose as my best. It is a picture of a car moving by me on Michigan Avenue.

My Best Photo: ISO: 1600 Aperture: 4.0 Shutter Speed: 1/10

My Ten Best Photos:

My Pun Assignment

For the past two days I have been working on the pun assignment, in which we find some clever puns out of our own ideas or from the internet, and we incorporate them into a photoshop image. For example, my visual pun was spam, and I had computer sitting next to a pile of spam (the food). This was really interesting because it challenged the class' creativity and tested the skills that we have learned during the trimester regarding photoshop. I enjoyed it and found it to be very simple and straightforward.

Photoshop Dictionary Assignment

This week's assignment was the photoshop dictionary assignment, where we had to find an interesting word, define it, and use our photoshop skills to represent it in an image. I thought the assignment was fun because we got to use our creativity and humor in it. As well as being funny, some of the pictures were very well thought out, and it was a great way to hone down our photoshop skills. I enjoyed this assignment and would do it again in a heartbeat. These are the three pictures that I completed for the assignment, the words are gormless, bamboozle, and dispendious.

My Inspirations for the Motion Assignment

This week for my sixth assignment I chose motion. Motion will be a fun assignment because of the actions involved to take pictures. I also have many ideas for the pictures I need for the assignment. One of the ideas that I want to follow is going to the gym and getting photos of people shooting at the basketball hoops. I might also get a picture of a few other sports, like maybe a soccer or lacrosse goal, or people playing racquetball in the gym. I could also get many other pictures regarding motion. To get an idea of what I need for this assignment I went on flickr and found these photos, which I have linked below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackeycove/5605072224/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jorritkrijnen/3404726767/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/formica/281525485/

My Portrait Demo

This week's class demo was the portrait demo, in which we took pictures of each other, in the library where we had a miniature photo studio set up on Tuesday until Thursday. This "studio" had all the artificial nights necessary to take pictures for this assignment. The second picture that we had to take was outside of the studio, where we used a poster board to reflect sunlight passing through the staircase windows onto the face of the person who was having their picture taken. This would give a similar effect to what we had in the library. After we had two quality pictures, one of each technique, we went into photoshop and made an assignment that incorporated both of the pictures onto a sheet which was similar to how we get school pictures. I thought this assignment was not too difficult, although it was a small challenge to take the pictures. The photoshop part was not difficult at all, and I did it in the last five minutes of class, after I had taken all of my photos. This photo was the final result of the assignment.

My Fifth Photo Assignment: Architecture

My fifth photo assignment ended up being architecture. I enjoyed this assignment very much, and I thought that it was the most fun out of all of the assignments that I've completed so far. It was not easy, but I got to go around Ann Arbor and take some pictures of the familiar landmarks there. Originally my goal was to get only about fifty pictures but I ended up getting ninety pictures because I had so much fun with the assignment, and I decided to take a lot more time on it. Most of the pictures that I have featured in the slideshow were taken after I cleaned the lens thoroughly. The picture of the Michigan Plaza gate was an example of a picture that I had taken before this, because I didn't realize that there were fingerprints all over the outer lens, and for around half an hour I was taking pictures with the dirty lens thinking that I was making mistakes adjusting the composition triangle. This caused huge problems for me because it wasted a lot of my time. Another problem that I had experienced was the fact that some of the buildings were in a very corwded and busy urban environment. The picture that I took of the State Theatre sign was an example of this because I had gotten my camera ready at the right position to take it, and then a bus pulled up in front of me and unloaded its passengers, and I had to wait to snap the photo. I even had a situation where another photographer was taking pictures everywhere on the campus, and I didn't want to get in the way so I had to wait for him too. Although these were issues, I had very little trouble with the composition triangle, and most of my pictures had great shadows and light sources there wwasn't a real challenge with that.

My Best Photo: ISO: 400 Shutter Speed: 1/1600 Aperture: 5.0

My Ten Best Photos:

My Inspirations for Architecture

This week I will begin the fifth assignment, architecture. I chose this assignment because we have such a great community with many examples of architecture. I could go downtown to Ann Arbor and take some pictures of the campus, the stadium, and maybe even go inside some of the historical buildings for these pictures. On flickr, i found many photos that have techniques that could be applied to the buildings I see in Ann Arbor.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidgutierrez/4889285948/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/5888966736/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidgutierrez/3807929315/

Food Assignment

This week my photo assignment of choice was food. In this assignment I had to take pictures of  food that would use certain elements of composition. I enjoyed this assignment, but not as much as the previous photo assignment, because it was difficult to get a lot of pictures of food. Beyond that problem, I also had trouble getting the pictures of foods that looked interesting. What I did to complete this assignment was take pictures of everything that I was going to eat over the course of the weekend. Although I had far less photos than the previous project, I still had enough to complete the project, and reach my goal of fifty pictures or so. My best picture was a picture of a pumpkin pie that I had taken a week ago. It was a little bit grainy, but I liked the way the light reflected on the pie glaze.

My Best Picture: ISO: 400 Aperture: 2.75 Shutter Speed: 1/13

My Ten Best Photos

School Context Assignment

The school context assignment was very fun and I believe that the entire class had a great time with it. We were to take pictures from around the school and photoshop some things that you would never see in the school, and follow a theme with the images that we chose to put in. I had fun with this project, but it was difficult to get school pictures indoors with low digital grain. It also took some time to find a theme for the picture. My theme was the olympics, and the picture in the background was taken in the band hallway.

My Inspirations For the Food Assignment

This week I have decided to take pictures for the food assignment. I thought this would be an interesting assignment because I expanded my knowledge of aperture, and my assignment will be much better this week because I know how to get good close-up photos. I had some great ideas to begin with concerning food, so I'm ready for this assignment. This week I will also try to take pictures every night. These are some inspirational photos that I found on flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubagallery/4670737336/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danjunflick/6143270624/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iweatherman/5349283233/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crystoll/4944340682/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crystoll/4944321346/

Photo Assignment Three

The third photo assignment was very enjoyable in my opinion, and I had an overall great experience with it. I really enjoyed going out and taking pictures of the area where I had spent the weekend up north, because I had so much to take pictures of. My goal was originally around fifty or sixty pictures, and I met that goal right away. I actually just took a few hikes to get pictures, and some of the pictures were taken miles apart. Because of this, i had hundreds of pictures, and it was a very difficult choice to make on which ten were the best, and it was even more difficult to select my best photograph out of all them. The assignment was more difficult than the last one in terms of how much I needed to adjust the settings of the camera, because each picture had a different environment in a way. One of the difficulties I had with this was the ISO, because the lighting was very unpredictable in the woods, where I would walk through a clearing and to take pictures there I would have to adjust the ISO and the aperture. The biggest issue I had was the digital noise in my pictures. I fixed this for the most part with levels adjustments, but it was still detrimental to the overall quality of my assignment. I really had a hard time choosing my best photo, but after a long consideration, this one of a two mushrooms was my choice. I liked the color it brought out, and it had near perfect settings regarding aperture. I really enjoyed this assignment, and I hope the next is as memorable.

Best Photo: ISO: 400 Aperture: 2.6 Shutter Speed: 1/320

My Top Ten Best Pictures:

Panoramic Assignment

During the panorama assignment, we took many pictures that were included in one large wide one, which created a panoramic view of an environment. This was a very fun project, but there were many obstacles. One of the issues that I had faced was connecting the pictures without overlapping them too much, or not overlapping enough. I fixed this by overlapping a third of each picture. I thought that a fun thing about the panoramic assignment was that you could take a picture of the same person standing in the way of the camera, and they would be "cloned" all across the panoramic picture. My panoramas are featured below.

Inspirations of Nature and Landscapes

This week I have decided to choose landscapes/nature as my new photo assignment. I have been longing to finish this assignment for a while now, because I have a small window of opportunity to still take pictures of landscapes that still retain the traits of summer. Also, over the long weekend I will be visiting the family lake property in northern michigan, and I thought that instead of just getting the pictures of Mill Pond Park or other local areas, I could take pictures of scenes on the way to the lake house, and take pictures there as well. I spent some time browsing pictures of landscapes and nature on flikr, and these pictures have inspired some ideas that I will use during this assignment. One of the things that I enjoyed seeing in these pictures were the points that they were taken, and if they were changed the pictures would otherwise be worse than they are now. Another thing was the implication of color and texture, which will be important to be aware of.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubagallery/5397153141/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kurdistan4all/4543929183/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/igoorjumper/3254757863/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99996011@N00/2553883306/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kurdistan4all/4667734028/

Macro Experience

The assignment that I have completed today was the macro photo assignment, which would be my second photo assignment. In the macro assignment I used aperture and took pictures closer to objects than usual. All of my pictures were taken over the course of the weekend, and on friday I took pictures outside, because the weather was fairly poor the rest of the weekend. What I did to finish the assignment on the days that the weather was too poor to take pictures outside was taking pictures of miscellaneous objects around my house. I took pictures of many things, from household decorations to fruits, from my dad's guitar to an alligator head that was in my attic. I enjoyed this part of the assignment, because the environment was so easy to control, and I could get ideal conditions for my pictures whenever I wanted to, as opposed to taking them outside, where the weather could change in a matter of minutes. My goal for the assignment was to at least get fifteen pictures that I would consider "grade worthy", and I wanted about half of these from outside, and the other half from indoors. This goal was most certainly achieved, although I did better getting the pictures from inside than I did outside. Some problems that I had faced during this assignment were the application of aperture, lighting, and getting photos at the right times of day, especially when taking them outside. Aperture was difficult to adjust, because I had situations where I saw almost no change with the aperture being raised or lowered. Lighting was not as difficult, but it did cause problems when I was outside. My best photo was difficult to choose, but I loved the pepper that I had taken a picture of from my kitchen counter. At first it had lots of digital noise, and its colors were bland, but I knew that a levels adjustment would make it much more vibrant and colorful. After adjusting the pepper, I realized the value of using photoshop, and I will try to apply it to all of my photos.

My Best Photo: "Vibrant Pepper" Aperture: 2.6 Shutter Speed: 1/40 ISO: 200

My Ten Best Photos:

My Second Photo Assignment: Macro

After good consideration I chose to do the macro project as my second photo assignment. I already had many ideas for this assignment to begin with, so I thought it would be less confusing than doing architecture, which is what I had planned to do before. On Flickr I found many photographs of inspiration, and I enjoy a few of them especially, and I appreciated their detail. I found that the most interesting photographs had a mentally interesting subject, with an interesting, yet softer background as well. When I begin the assignment, I will use that as my template. Here are some photos that i found particularly interesting.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/6092413894/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/5888545397/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubagallery/5477930714/

My Fist Assignment: Animals

For the animals assignment, I had a great advantage as opposed to the rest of the class. My family owns four pets, two cats and two dogs, so I had the chance to get a lot of pictures for the photo assignment within my own home. What I did was let my dogs roam around outside at sunrise, and after I had adjusted the ISO I followed them around and tried to get pictures of them doing various things. The dogs had wandered all over my yard, and my yard and the yards next door, and I had received some strange looks from my neighbors. Some of the things the dogs had done were explore my neighbor's backyard, where there was work equipment that the dogs were curious about, which is visible in some of the pictures, and the dogs also ran amok all over my driveway, where I had taken some of the pictures with adjusted shutter speed, to capture them at play. The next day I also took some more pictures, and I figured that it would provide me with some more interesting pictures if I had taken some of the cats, but there were only a few situations that the cats were doing something worth taking a picture of.

I had gotten around one hundred fifty pictures in all, with one hundred of them being decent enough to save to the computer, and I had some very good pictures within that hundred. One of the biggest issues I had was balancing the ISO with the shutter speed in areas where there was abundant sunlight. This was probably the main cause for having to abandon fifty or so pictures that were either too bright, too dark, or too blurry. Another issue I had that was less significant was getting a picture of what the dogs were doing. I had a small window of opportunity to get into the right position to take a picture of the dogs, and about half of the time they would run off to their next activity before I was ready. My overall goal was to take at least one hundred pictures, and have at least twenty that would be worth putting in the power point, so that I would have a selection to choose from. I had more or less achieved this goal, and I had gotten near one hundred fifty pictures total, and there were a little less than twenty that were good enough to put into the slideshow. Although it was a very hard choice, I thought that my best picture was the one of my dog, Cali, sitting down in the grass begging for a treat. It wasn't blurry, and the balance was just right. I thought the picture was interesting because the grass she was sitting on was an interesting shade of green, and it made her stand out in the rest of the picture. Also Cali was siting in a position where the rule of thirds could be used. Overall, I thought the assignment was very fun, and i am looking forward to my next one.

Best Picture:
ISO: 125
Aperture: 2.6
Shutter Speed: 1/1000

My Photoshop Two Assignment

Yesterday we began to experiment with Adobe Photoshop. It was a very interesting use of class time, and we learned some valuable information in the process. The things we learned will be applied to our future assignments. Photoshop can be used to fix mistakes that we were not aware of at the time, or it could be used to edit a picture to fit the needs of our assignments. I might use photoshop every now and then before I turn in my photo assignments, to add an extra touch to make the photos more "polished". Some things I had learned were that photoshop can be used to fix glare on objects, erase unwanted aspects of an image, and even "clone" objects that are present in the image. An issue that I had with photoshop was that it had an extensive interface, and I had no idea what the uses of seventy five percent of the tools were, and if I know what they do I could use them in assignments. I thought that this was a fun experience, and I have learned things that I had no idea of previously.

Before:                                                                         After:

Motion Demo

During the motion demo project, we learned how to capture motion in pictures by taking pictures of Mr. O'donnell on his motorcycle. He would pass by us, and then we would take pictures of him at different shutter speeds. One of the issues I had experienced was my timing, because he must have been going at around fifteen miles an hour, and that gave me a small margin in which I could capture the image. Another problem was the fact that I didn't realize that at lower shutter speeds I would experience more brightness in the photograph. Some things I had learned were the importance of a tri-pod, because I could just swivel the camera on that in order to face the moving object that I want to take a picture of. Another thing that I had "re-learned" was that the shutter speed affects brightness and darkness. The ISO was important as well, although it was not difficult to adjust.

Inspirations of My First Photo Assignment

Yesterday I was notified that I would be receiving my first photo assignment in the class. There will be seven due throughout the trimester, and the first one will be turned in on tuesday, a week from now. Although I had a wide variety of subjects to choose from or this assignment, I chose the animal topic right away. The pictures that I had seen on flikr provided some insight, and I thought that this would be an easier assignment to start off with, so I won't be overwhelmed with what I should do. I also chose this assignment because I have four pets, and I can take many pictures of all of them for this assignment. Here are some of the pictures that provided an inspiration from flikr. When I begin my assignment, I will use these pictures as a reference for styles that I can choose from.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubagallery/4648457913/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30727685@N03/2905123642/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubagallery/4598445714/

Today I might start to take some pictures so I might get an idea of some of the issues and trends that I will notice later in the assignment. I hope a camera is available!

Tristan Long's Photoshop Popart

In this assignment we took a simple portrait of a person and experimented with photoshop. We used color and repeated images in our assignment, similar to that of Andy Warhol's technique. Being the first assignment that we were allowed to use photoshop, we have learned a lot about what we can do to our images. As opposed to the internet version that we are already familiar with, adobe photoshop has much more depth and options to use in our projects. I can see how fun and useful adobe photoshop will be in upcoming assignments.

Tristan Long's Compositions of Digital Photography

For the composition assignment, the class was sent out to take pictures of different scenes where the eleven different compositions of digital photography are present. In the composition project, I learned many things. Some of these was that a depth of field photograph uses distance and positioning to enhance the picture, that patterns can be more interesting when they have an interruption, that in a color style photograph bright colors excite the viewer, but can be distracting, and also I learned that balance style pictures usually have two subjects, that don't distract the view of each other.

Picture 1: Lines, Red Light Effect
Picture 2: Pattern, Cobbled Sidewalk
Picture 3: Depth of Field, Balcony View
Picture 4: Symmetry, Long Hallway
Picture 5: Rule of Thirds, Pay Phone
Picture 6: Texture, Bulletin Board
Picture 7: Framing, Artwork
Picture 8: Color, Tan Wall
Picture 9: Perspective, Kid In Staircase
Picture 10: Space, Security Camera
Picture 11: Balance, Field With Sewer Entrances