Precious Portraits

The next week Ms. Taylor sent our class to go and take advantage of all of the information that we know about PhotoShop and editing techniques, along with "setting up the scene" and other aspects of photography that we learned and assigned us to go into classrooms and ask to take pictures of students. Our mission was to snap shots of the students in a natural pose, either staring at the camera or not. If we were going to take pictures of the students, we also had to find one teacher that we could also take photographs of.

After we were told to come back into the photography studio we downloaded all of the photographs onto Adobe Bridge, which is the program that we were trained to use when editing professional photographs, and edit the pictures to either make them into Grayscale or turn them into "grainy" pictures. Our other interesting options was to drain out specific colors in particular photographs in order to make certain colors "pop". This effect was really useful in allowing me to play around with the colors in a picture, and to control the exact outcome of the photograph.

The Peculiar Moth

The next class in photography our teacher did something quite surprising. She handed out Canon Rebel cameras to everybody in the beginning of class, then instructed us that we would have exactly 8 minutes to take a creative photo shoot around school and download/edit the photographs on our computer. She exclaimed, "Go!", and the whole class burst out of the photography studio in a frantic style. Our teacher later explained that this was a simple yet challenging exercise to test our photographic skills by putting us in a timely situation and seeing if we can still apply all that we have learned to create beautiful photographs.

After I ran out of the classroom, I wanted to present something creative and extraordinary; I just didn't know how. Then it came to me-- It literally appeared before my eyes. This injured moth was stuck on a tree bark, and I was taken back by its intricate beauty. I instantly started snapping away pictures from my camera, and I had no clue that the results would be so fascinating.

Water Bottle Phenomenon

Our next huge project in photography was to choose an object--any object at all--- and take a photo shoot of it. This project was created in order to help us better understand how to take still pictures and use the correct amount of light and the right background at the same time while taking the picture. I was really excited to do this project- but I really had no clue what my object would be. I thought about this over and over in my head that day- but I couldn't think of the right object.

Then, it finally came to me- water bottles. Since another art class was doing a recycling project using water bottles by creating all of these abstract structures using water bottles and caps, I decided I could borrow their idea and utilize it in my project. I took four simple miniature water bottles and took them everywhere on the campus and snapped shots of them from all different types of angles. The results came out very nice and unique.