A Slew of Photographs

Over the course of the last week I’ve taken quite a few photos, which is nice because I hadn’t accomplished much with regards to this project earlier in the semester. As of now, I’m about two-thirds of the way done, and hopefully I can close out the last third sometime in the next couple of weeks.

As for this week, I’ve had some mixed results. I already wrote about the guitar shots (many of which were amazing!), and between now and then I captured four more sets of shots, which I have mixed feelings about. The shot below represents the first of these sets. I’m fairly pleased with it, and the lighting turned out better than I thought it would. The composition isn’t quite what I hoped for, though. The idea is that the subject is holding some sort of glowing entity in her hands, but you can’t see enough of the glow on her hands to consistently get that idea. It’s a little easier to see when the picture is larger, but I may nevertheless want to reshoot this and fix the problem. Also, as of now this photo represents the entire set, so I want to develop some ideas to make the concept more elaborate and involve more pictures. Those may be in by next week, so stay tuned.

Two of my other sets were a bit rushed, so I’m not as pleased with them. My lighting wasn’t perfect for the second set, which was themed to creativity, but it’s adequate. If I had more time, I might have tried to diffuse the light more or bounce it off of some surface above the camera so I didn’t get so much glare, but alas, I was hurrying too much to do that.

I dunno, part of me likes it anyway. True, it’s not what I pictured, but I still think I captured the spirit of the concept, maybe even in ways I hadn’t considered. I had wanted these shots to look incredibly clean and organized, and they’re still organized and relatively clean, but the fact that there’s a bit of hard glare and even a little noise (I accidentally shot on 1600 ISO!) lends itself to a harder, grittier aspect of art and creativity.

I imagine that I’ll do a little Photoshop work to clean up the shadow at the top of the picture and make that area more even, and I definitely need to cut out some of the glare on the protractor. No kidding, it looks horrible!

Anyway, on to the next set. My intention was to shoot a subject looking gloomy and depressed in the backseat of a car in order to capture the emotion of (what else?) depression. I was waiting for a cloudy day so that the gray clouds would match the theme, and lo and behold come Tuesday I got one. Then, to my chagrin, the sun came out right as I was setting up. Curse you sun!

Irregardless, my subject showed up, so I decided to go ahead with it, and the shots actually don’t look too bad. I did a little post work to bring down the colors and warm tones, which helps the pics out a lot. In fact, in the shot below you can’t even tell that the sun was out (and I guarantee that it was!) So I lucked out this time.
For this set, arrangement on the page is going to be a big deal. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the shots exactly the way I wanted them in order to achieve the arrangement I had in mind. I was afraid that sort of thing would happen considering how hard it is to shoot in a car. Hopefully things will work out anyway, but I won’t really know until I actually go in and do the book work next month. We’ll see…

I don’t have anything to show for my fourth and final set as it requires a lot of Photoshop work. The concept behind the set was to have playing cards slowly floating down through the air against a black background, and that turned out to be really hard to capture on camera. I tried throwing the cards in the air in front of the camera, which didn’t work at all. If I was lucky, I could see a couple of white streaks in the frame. So instead I took pictures of each individual card held in a “floating” position. I’m currently in the process of cutting out each card that I want, cleaning it up, then compositing against the black background shot I took. So far it’s looking good, but I’ve still got a little ways to go. It’ll be done soon.

So as of now, I’ve got a quick shoot over the weekend and maybe a reshoot next Tuesday. In between, I’m sporadically doing Photoshop work and slowly getting this thing done! I made a lot of progress in the past week, so here’s for the final push!
T.H. Excellence

The Look of Rock

Last night I began photographing once again, and for the first time on the project I took the camera into a studio setting. After capturing the themes of nature and industry, I wanted to capture the concept of high-energy music, a theme that has an edge yet still maintains something of an artistic side.

So I brought in one of my friends, set up a few lights, and had him strum around on my electric guitar while I got a few shots. The first picture shown here captures the spirit of what I was going for. Much of the technical work is actually similar to my industry theme. High contrast, which is emphasized by the black-and-white nature of the shot, as well as a solid black background. I set up the lighting to be fairly direct on the subject to create harder shadows as well.

After a first round of shots, I put together a harsher lighting set-up that essentially backlit my subject entirely. I was hoping to get a progression of shots moving through an epic jump, but I discovered that my camera was far too slow to capture anything between the peak of the jump and the beginning and end of the jump. Instead, I opted for a variety of jump shots provided by my friend, the shot above being my favorite.

All-in-all, I think the jump shots turned out surprisingly well, and enough of everything else I got was at the very least decent. Tomorrow I go in for a little more studio work, so we’ll see if I fare as well as today. Here’s hoping!
T.H. Excellence

Horizons

Recently I discovered a long-gone attraction at Walt Disney World's Epcot that I found to be quite incredible! Located in Epcot's Future World, the name of the attraction was "Horizons". Boarding omnimover vehicles (much like the Haunted Mansion's doom buggies), guests were taken on a fifteen-minute journey through the future. The experience began with visions of the future as it appeared to those of past generations, then continued with glimpses of our own future. The elaborate detail is quite stunning, and you can see the entire ride in the two videos below:





And for those who are still interested, here's a great site full of details regarding Horizons.

T.H. Excellence

The Photographic Journals

All this semester I'm working on a massive photo project covering a wide variety of themes that will eventually end up in a bound book. I'm also writing a journal of my efforts to track where I've been, and I recently realized that such material would be perfect for this blog. And so I present the first entry of many to be featured here on this blog.

10/8 – Lessons in Lazy Observation

Today I learned to do a better job cleaning up my frame. Yesterday evening I headed out to wrap up my collection for my “Nature” theme near a stream that flows alongside campus. I took a few shots here and there, including a shot of the cattails I had been eying for a while. (note that the cattails shot didn’t really turn out how I hoped) Then I stumbled across a cluster of lovely blue flowers and decided to try my hand at photographing those. To my surprise, the photo turned out really well, and I left satisfied.

Earlier today, I uploaded my pictures from the outing to my computer to take a look. At first glance, the “blue flower” picture didn’t disappoint. Good colors, good lighting, good composition, interesting background (which has been problematic in the past).

Then I noticed the, um, errors. See those little white hanging things? I have no idea what they are, but one crept into the edge of my frame and was now sitting very close to the front of the picture, out of focus to boot. It wasn’t highly noticeable, but good photography is like Mary Poppins – practically perfect in every way. “If I’m going to be a good photographer,” I thought, “that thingy has to go.” So I cropped the picture. I hated to do it, because that limited the scope of a picture with a pretty elaborate background.

At that time, I noticed culprit number two: a couple of dead, withered flowers hanging lifelessly just to the right of the big blue cluster! At this point, I couldn’t crop any more, so those simply stay for now. By this time I’ve learned my lesson, however. Whenever you’re looking through that itty bitty hole that represents your frame, check it to make sure everything (repeat: everything!) unsightly is gone. No dead flowers. No white thingies. Nothing else that will compromise the perceived perfection of the picture.

I might go out and reshoot this, although I may still end up using the original. I’m seldom satisfied with reshoots. Some how the spontaneity of the first time is lost, resulting in an inferior piece. But this picture wasn’t too hard to get, so we’ll see…
T.H. Excellence

Tilt-Shift Photography

Ever hear of tilt-shift photography? It's an interesting type of photography that makes everything in your picture appear to be a miniature. Disney recently posted a video comprised of tilt-shift images on their blog, which you can find by clicking here.
T.H. Excellence