School Context Assignment

In this assignment, we were given the freedom to take a picture of somewhere in the school, then edit the photo to make it appear there's something going on in/with the school that isn't actually real. For mine, I decided to take a picture of a hallway, then add a portal from the game Minecraft to the end of the hallway. This assignment was a bit annoying for me, just because things weren't working for what I envisioned in my mind. Oddly enough, in the beginning of the class I liked Gimp, and slowly I'm starting to dislike it.

Black and White

For my last photo assignment, I chose to do a black and white photo shoot. What I did was I went around my house, taking pictures of things that I thought would look good in black and white. What ended up happening was I would take a lot of pictures of something, then right as I finished up taking pictures of that scene, my eyes suddenly saw something else I could take photos of.

My best picture is a picture of a shelf of old books. The reason why I think this photo is my best is because a lot of people will associate old with black and white, and so I feel that these two things match together. Also, the angle and lighting of the books on the shelf looks good to me. When I turn the books straight, they actually look off.



ISO: 400
Fstop: f/2.6
Shutter: 1/8

Motion

For this week's photo assignment, I decided to do motion photos. What I did was I took pictures of different objects while they were moving, either freezing one small moment, or letting it blur together over a longer period of time. Usually I don't add multiple pictures of the same object, but with the pictures of the chocolates, I just adored them and how they looked, so I decided to include them as well.

My best picture was a picture of a fan with the blades moving. The reason I chose this photo is because even though you would see this normally when looking at a fan, it really shows the motion of the blades moving inside and creating a white, blurry circle. It's also with that common image that people are just used to it and never actually take much time to actually look at the whole picture. When you do, however, there's a pretty appealing-to-the-eye photo.



ISO: 400
Fstop: f/2.6
Exposure: 1/10

Open Assignment: Food

This week, I chose to do an open assignment. My idea was to take pictures of food and make them look appealing to the viewer. To me, this assignment was decently easy, since my parents love to cook and know how to make things good, so over the break I would get up early with them to have breakfast and then take more pictures at dinner. The hardest and most annoying thing about the assignment, however, was not about taking the pictures, but more on how I had to take pictures before I could eat my breakfast/dinner.

My best photo in this set was hard to choose. I really liked three pictures, and I wish I could call them all my best, but I finally narrowed it down to the picture of a French pastry that is eaten for breakfast. It is dough that is fried, then a light sprinkling of powdered sugar. The reason why I prefer this picture is because it's clear, you can see the texture of the powdered sugar, a little bit of texture of the pastry, and I like the lighting in the picture. To me, it looks pretty tasty and I've made myself hungry, which I think is the main goal.



ISO: 400
Fstop: f/2.6
Shutter: 1/60

Motion Picture

For this assignment, we took pictures of Mr. Bush riding on his bicycle. Our goal was to have Mr. Bush still while the background was blurred. This was only a practice, however, so it was a mixture of skill and luck, but for this one it was more luck. For me, I continually tried, but the best I got had Mr. Bush blurry. One problem was that even though my camera hadn't warned me of it, my batteries were almost dead and ended up dying near the end of the session, so there wouldn't be time to head back, get batteries, and then take a few more shots. This picture isn't very good, but I feel pretty confident that if I tried again I'd be able to get a better shot.

Still Life

In this assignment, I took pictures of things against a black background, which I set up using my desk, some black fabric, a piece of plexiglas, a desk lamp, and a tripod. The most difficult part of this assignment was just setting up my desk, which took about a half an hour. Taking the pictures was just a matter of finding items to take pictures of and setting up. Though it was annoying with some items such as my iPod, which refused to stand up, and my white board markers, one of which kept rolling away. Needless to say, tape is an amazing tool.

My best picture was a picture of some Lindor Milk Chocolate Truffles, in which there is one in the front and then a bunch more scattered in the background. How I did this was I actually just dropped all the chocolates from above to get a scatter, and then I noticed how one just moved to the front all alone, and I decided to take a picture of that. I really like how there's that single one in the front showing the name, then the rest of them just randomly across the space in the background. It reminds me of an advertisement, and after asking a few friends what they think about it, they agree.



ISO: 400
Shutter: 1/8
f-Stop: f/2.6

Panoramic Scene

We were told to go out and take three pictures of a scene, and have 10% to 20% of each picture be the same as the one that follows. We then used Gimp to combine the photos together to make one panoramic scene. I personally thought this assignment was pretty easy, once I was given some guidance after seeing the demo. I'm pretty happy with the end product, though I am annoyed by a few things that I noticed don't quite match up. I tried to fix them, but I couldn't without needing to do a whole bunch of other stuff. They aren't too horrible and they're only things that someone would notice if they were looking at the photo closely, so oh well.