Final Reflection

What skills have you come into this class that have been helpful? What skill have you most needed to cultivate?
I came into photography class with minimal experience in taking pictures. Disregarding my experience, I had an eye for what would look good as a photograph and had a general knowledge of photography. Over the year, I've gained a knowledge of the different terms involved in the class such as aperture and shutter speed. I also didn't have any experience using film whatsoever.

How have these skills been helpful?
My eye for photography has been helpful while taking pictures. I could see a lot of detail in the image and I was very interested in taking pictures with a shallow depth of field. My skills were particularly helpful when we were asked to take pictures of still life with specific criteria we needed to fill.

What skills did you realize that you need to improve in order to be successful in this class?
I need to improve my landscape pictures such as the urban landscape project. I didn't really have an eye for this type of picture so I needed to develop my skills in this category.

What steps have you undertaken to improve these skills?
To improve my landscape pictures, I have looked and critiqued other urban landscape photographs from both famous photographers and people in our class. This has helped me realize what a good urban landscape requires.

What excites you about photography right now?
Photography is exciting because there are so many different projects so we can get a sense of many different photographic elements and styles. I also really enjoy working digitally and with photoshop and putting different effects onto the pictures.

My favorite photograph that I've taken this year is an image of water on a wooden base that I took for the digital abstract project. I really like this picture because of all the editing I did to the picture using Photoshop.

My favorite project was the still life project. I really enjoyed changing the lighting and experimenting with different techniques. I thought many of the photographs that I took for the project turned out really well.

My least favorite project was the portrait project because many of my pictures didn't turn out as well as I wanted when I developed them. I also didn't really like the style of portrait photographs because it requires a model.

Abstract Darkroom

For the darkroom abstract project, we had to take abstract pictures using our film cameras. While we were developing our images, we had the option of either solarizing them or making them sepia toned. The first image is solarized and the second image is sepia. The other photographs have nothing done to them. I think the solarized photograph worked very well because it is such a contrast to the unsolarized version. 

Digital Abstract

photo filter

vignette

cyanotype

solarize

photo filter/solarize

sepia

vignette

For the Digital Abstract Project, we had to take our abstract pictures and them edit them to various specifics using Photoshop. The first image used a Photo Filter, where I put colors into the bubbles. The second photograph used a variety of random tools in Photoshop, including a vignette effect. The third photograph is a cyanotype. The fourth and fifth pictures used solarizing techniques. The sixth picture used sepia and the last picture was vignette. I think most of the Photoshopping working on the pictures. 

Still Life Project

The photographs that I think really worked for the Still Life Project were the four pictures. They all fit the guidelines of the project and the lighting turned out really well for the setup of the photographs.