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!