C L A S S E S of L O O K
Hyper- Realistic
Above: The Hyper-Realistic style is all about detail and color, going over the top to get intense. Below are the "Before" images I took. I was visiting a summer camp near Olympia. I looked again at how over the top you can get away with color and texture with 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 favorites. I'm including most but not necessarily all of my "before" photos below. I did a lot of bracketing.
Enriched
This was a lot of fun, going all the way with color and turning it up to "11" as it were... Below are the original unmodified images.
Drained
So the idea on this is not to reduce the saturation to the point where they are black and white. You just dial it back. It sets a whole different mood. The unmodified versions of the above are below.
Luminous
Luminous photos go all the way with playing with light, often to putting lens flares in using Photoshop. I had no idea there was an entire style of photography based on this. The unmodified versions are below. In the top right image, if you look closely you can see a helicopter.
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 travel a bit further than usual for these images.
Subject placement: The areas of the images that are important to me are contextual in a holistic and 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. The helicopter is pretty far away though. My close ups tend to disregard the background and focus on the foreground image. I like to use the rule of thirds for my subject placement.
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 might not be. 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 can throw it off a bit for bracketing focus. So there's an aesthetic reason, to keep the focus on the subject. I know how to overcome the technical challenge of getting the background in focus using HDR 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, such as when I'm bracketing. I do force the flash off, oftentimes. But when I'm in a dark spot, maybe a shadow, it will surprise me now and then. But when I'm shooting for HDR that's not necessarily a bad thing to have plenty of light on one image and have another be dark. You get excellent highlights and shadows that way.
Improvement: I completed everything but I might go back and add some more HDR hyper-realistic images at some point. I feel like I held back and did not go as crazy with the color on those as I could have. I shot about 200 photos this week, probably more counting all the set-ups, situations and locations for this assignment. I wanted to make sure I would get enough variety of color, shape and texture 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 most important factor for a photographer. That being said, I'm also learning a lot of techniques for processing and editing images. It's a lifelong learning experience and it also happens to be a lot of fun for me.
Subject placement: The areas of the images that are important to me are contextual in a holistic and 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. The helicopter is pretty far away though. My close ups tend to disregard the background and focus on the foreground image. I like to use the rule of thirds for my subject placement.
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 might not be. 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 can throw it off a bit for bracketing focus. So there's an aesthetic reason, to keep the focus on the subject. I know how to overcome the technical challenge of getting the background in focus using HDR 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, such as when I'm bracketing. I do force the flash off, oftentimes. But when I'm in a dark spot, maybe a shadow, it will surprise me now and then. But when I'm shooting for HDR that's not necessarily a bad thing to have plenty of light on one image and have another be dark. You get excellent highlights and shadows that way.
Improvement: I completed everything but I might go back and add some more HDR hyper-realistic images at some point. I feel like I held back and did not go as crazy with the color on those as I could have. I shot about 200 photos this week, probably more counting all the set-ups, situations and locations for this assignment. I wanted to make sure I would get enough variety of color, shape and texture 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 most important factor for a photographer. That being said, I'm also learning a lot of techniques for processing and editing images. It's a lifelong learning experience and it also happens to be a lot of fun for me.