Finished at Last!

At last my work is finally over! Well, pretty much. I’ve finally shot every last photo I need and compiled everything into its proper page layout, with only a couple of minor edits left to perform on a couple of pictures. Tomorrow I’ll review my descriptions on each page and make any edits that are necessary there, but for now I am essentially done with this! I must say I’m mighty pleased with it too. I like a lot of the pictures I took this semester, and I think they all fit nicely into each section. I’m feeling like this book could be a strong portfolio piece if I apply for a position in photography or something similar, so I have definitely achieved something worthwhile!

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Getting Closer...

A couple of nights ago I tried out an idea I had earlier in the semester. I set my camera up in front of a console full of colored lights and zoomed in over the course of a long exposure. The results were something like this, which I found to be quite fascinating. The entire venture was pretty much just a big experiment of me trying new ideas. On some shots, I would pan or tilt the camera during the exposure to get some interesting curves in the lights. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
Ultimately, I got enough good shots to fill up an entire set, and I’m hoping to get a few more elsewhere. The theme for this will be “Alien Lights”, featuring photos with bizarre, unearthly lights such as this. The trick is to decide which shots are artistic and which aren’t. That’s usually harder to tell with modern art, but shots that still fall under basic photographic principles such as the rule of thirds are usually acceptable.

On a more conventional note, I also recently added a new theme titled “Heartbreak”. I felt like I underperformed when I shot the “Depression” set, so I created this additional set to either supplement or replace “Depression”. Right now I’m leaning towards replacement since all the “Heartbreak” photos together carry a story much better than “Depression”.


The picture above is one of the shots I plan on using as a main spread for one page. In this shot, you can see all the elements I’m using to tell my story. The flower represents the subject’s lost love, and she travels through a variety of emotions as she looks at the flower, strokes it, and finally leaves it behind. The books play a minor role. I simply used them to give the subject a little depth and establish her role as a student. Finally, I gave each picture in the set the overall look you see here, making use of colder, desaturated hues.

This project also marked the first were I slowed down and made sure my levels were perfect. Too many times I have shot a photograph too hastily and ended up with a picture that was too light or too dark. This time, I took a few test shots and checked my histogram to make sure my lights and darks weren’t peaking. The few minutes I took to do this ended up being very worthwhile, and I’m definitely doing this in the future.
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One Job Finished in Photoshop

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll just say that this picture was my first major piece of work in Photoshop. While I’ve dabbled around in Photoshop in the past, this is by far the most extensive project I’ve completed. Heck, I even learned a bit of new stuff in the process, making this picture a double-win!

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Wrapping Up "Power"

Today I headed back into the studio and did some supplemental work for the “power theme”. I wanted to flesh out the story of the original photo a bit since it seemed just a bit ambiguous. My immediate thought was to devise a series of photographs such as the scene on the right in which this glowing orb comes and descends to the subject in the chair.

It turns out there’s a bit of post work to do. The “glowing orb” was, of course, nothing more than a studio light mounted on a stand, and it seems that the stand was visible in some shots. Perhaps even more urgent is the distinctive glare present in some of the shots such as this one. It seems to be isolated against the solid dark areas, so I think it shouldn’t be hard to take care of, but it could be a tad problematic.

All in all, I’m satisfied with today’s work. In fact, just looking at the progression of shots is giving me chills. I think I’ve told a good, simple story here, so we’ll see how it holds up.
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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!
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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!
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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…
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A Miniature Splash Mountain

On a recent trip to the beach I found myself with little to do at one point, so I resorted to an act of incredible geekiness: I decided to try my hand at building a sand model of Splash Mountain. I'm not much of a sculptor of any medium, let alone sand, but I found I was able to carve out a rough replica of the actual landmark. No doubt my lengthy amount of experience around the actual thing was of considerable help. Anyway, when all was said and done, I felt my model was worth photographing, and thus the results are posted below.



Here's an aerial shot. I was so pleased with the front of the mountain that I decided to head behind the peak and complete the flume in that area as well.

One last close-up.

In case that doesn't float your boat, here are a few more pictures from the day.




Okay, that's all from me for now!
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Laid-Back Summertime PhotoBlog

Looking back over my photo archives, I discovered a few shots I haven't posted that, in my opinion turned out pretty well! These were all taken when I was out and about enjoying myself, so if there's a category for these pics, it's "laid-back summertime".


This isn't a great picture, but it helps set the mood.



Strangely enough, I was trying to photograph something else when I took this shot. I happened to look down at these leaves and release the shutter, and upon further examination discovered I had a pretty good picture on my hands. So I adjusted a few settings and took the pic again, quickly forgetting all about the photo I had set out to capture in the first place.




To end, here's a shot of a baseball that very conveniently happened to be lying in the grass. Turned out really nicely, actually.

Okay, that's all for today. Stay tuned for more posts, and keep commenting!
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Disneyland Mini-PhotoBlog

I've got a mini photo report to share today. And I do mean mini - three pictures! But I do think these turned out quite well, so I'm posting them here.






Keep your fingers crossed - I might have some new pics up by the end of next week!
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Some Recent Work

One of the classes I'm required to take as a film major is New Media. Quite frankly, I'm not sure why this class is required. The text is mostly just a rehash of my Mass Media work from last semester, and all of the projects are Internet-based. So far, we really haven't done anything film related.

But, on the plus side, I'm learning how to make small web sites, which could someday prove to be a profitable talent. I recently completed a very small site featuring a bit of my Disneyland photography, so if you want to see what I've been up to, check it out here.

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