C L A S S E S of L O O K
Hyper-Realistic
Below are the "Before" images I took. I was visiting Camp Solomon Schecter near Olympia. I looked again at how over the top you can get away with on the Hyper-Realistic style and I very well might come back to this and go a bit more crazy next time. I shot RAW NEF and then imported to Photoshop CS6 using HDR. I had some more of these but the ones above are my favorite three. The photo with the fence had three "before" photos that were each a bit different; I had bracketed six but my camera had moved pretty badly for some of those so even though there's only one "before" image showing below, trust me - there were a lot more than that of the same fence. The third image above I went nuts with contrast and things to bring out more detail.
Enriched
This was a lot of fun, going all the way and turning the color up to 11 as it were...
Drained
Above are the "Drained" images, below are the unmodified "Before" versions.
Luminous
Again, the unmodified original images are below. These have been reduced in size for the web. If you look close at the sunset photo on top right, you'll see a helicopter. For Luminous I added lens flares. J.J. Abrams would be proud, or maybe insulted... He's the lens flare master in Star Trek and other works.
What do my photographs say?
Photo Analysis
Feelings/mood: I was trying to communicate a sense of fun, maybe even adventure. I took a couple of days off of work in order to focus on school and I also managed to go a bit further afield than usual.
Subject placement: The areas of the images that are important to me are contextual an holistic in a bigger way now than before after considering what I've learned in previous assignments. I look at light and dark, empty and full space and think of shapes. That being said, I did some heavy cropping to get the photo a bit closer of that bird, and the helicopter is pretty far away. My close ups tend to disregard the background and focus on the foreground image.
Multilayered: I chose to go ahead and use the black bird during the editing process after seeing an Edgar Allen Poe work prominently displayed at a bookstore earlier today, so that has some symbolism. The water, camp, trees, the sky, a garden -- these are universal experiences of beauty. Maybe somebody will look at these images and get inspired to actually step away from their computer and go outside. That somebody was me when I took those...
Depth of field: The close-ups have the foreground images in focus, while the background is not. Part of this is the camera itself when I'm using macro mode. I do use a tripod but the wind and even just pushing the shutter throws it off a bit for bracketing focus. So there's an aesthetic reason (to keep the focus on the subject) and I know how to overcome the technical challenge of getting the background in focus (using HDR for example) but I don't always choose to do that.
Light: All of these images used natural light. In some cases this is supplemented by my camera's built-in flash, which occasionally goes off at times I would not expect it to. The only time this happens is when I'm in a really dark spot, maybe a shadow - or if I'm bracketing. Usually I'll force it off and bracket some more because I do prefer natural light. Occasionally though the flash gets more light on the subject and that really is what I want. For example with HDR what works great is to have a super light and a super dark photo so you can get the best highlights and shadows.
Improvement: I might be going back and adding some more HDR hyper-realistic images at some point. I shot about 200 photos with a lot of set-ups and situations in multiple locations for this assignment because I wanted to make sure I would get enough variety of color and shape for the four components. If I could have been two places at once, I would have gone to Shelton's downtown Forest Festival parade and taken some images at that. Getting to the best subject matter is a big deal, it's got to be the biggest deal for a photographer. That being said, I'm learning a lot of techniques for processing and editing images. This semester has been incredibly educational and fun for me.
Subject placement: The areas of the images that are important to me are contextual an holistic in a bigger way now than before after considering what I've learned in previous assignments. I look at light and dark, empty and full space and think of shapes. That being said, I did some heavy cropping to get the photo a bit closer of that bird, and the helicopter is pretty far away. My close ups tend to disregard the background and focus on the foreground image.
Multilayered: I chose to go ahead and use the black bird during the editing process after seeing an Edgar Allen Poe work prominently displayed at a bookstore earlier today, so that has some symbolism. The water, camp, trees, the sky, a garden -- these are universal experiences of beauty. Maybe somebody will look at these images and get inspired to actually step away from their computer and go outside. That somebody was me when I took those...
Depth of field: The close-ups have the foreground images in focus, while the background is not. Part of this is the camera itself when I'm using macro mode. I do use a tripod but the wind and even just pushing the shutter throws it off a bit for bracketing focus. So there's an aesthetic reason (to keep the focus on the subject) and I know how to overcome the technical challenge of getting the background in focus (using HDR for example) but I don't always choose to do that.
Light: All of these images used natural light. In some cases this is supplemented by my camera's built-in flash, which occasionally goes off at times I would not expect it to. The only time this happens is when I'm in a really dark spot, maybe a shadow - or if I'm bracketing. Usually I'll force it off and bracket some more because I do prefer natural light. Occasionally though the flash gets more light on the subject and that really is what I want. For example with HDR what works great is to have a super light and a super dark photo so you can get the best highlights and shadows.
Improvement: I might be going back and adding some more HDR hyper-realistic images at some point. I shot about 200 photos with a lot of set-ups and situations in multiple locations for this assignment because I wanted to make sure I would get enough variety of color and shape for the four components. If I could have been two places at once, I would have gone to Shelton's downtown Forest Festival parade and taken some images at that. Getting to the best subject matter is a big deal, it's got to be the biggest deal for a photographer. That being said, I'm learning a lot of techniques for processing and editing images. This semester has been incredibly educational and fun for me.