InsideOut

So I decided to send this one in for the Inside Out project. It's a picture of my niece on Thanksgiving day. A little story behind the photo: She loves to eat, just like her aunt, and was trying to sneak in snacks throughout the day, that's where the cookie comes in. We were both on the floor, trying to get my dog (a 100 lb. Bernese Mountain Dog, who's deathly afraid of little children...) out from under the table. I had my camera and said Riley's name so she would look at me and caught this cute "I didn't do it" face. To me it looks like she's trying to hide the fact that she stole a second cookie, but is willing to let her cool aunt in on her act of mischieviousness.

22 Things I Can Do Today...

After reading this list I made it one of my goals to eventually make it through the whole list. There were some things on the list I've done before, but I think it would be beneficial to go over them again. For example, tonight I will sit down with my camera again and go through everything like I did when I first got it.

The one thing I am taking away from this list for this post is #1o. Awhile back I created a Flickr account, but have not put any pictures up yet. Today I will make myself post at least ten of my best shots and make it my goal to continue posting at least every other day. Here's a link to my page...

Something else I want to do to improve my photography is to make myself go out and shoot everyday. A couple years ago a peer attempted to do the 365 challenge, which required him to take and post a picture everyday for a year.

Bridge Confusion

For the most part I understand most of the tools in the raw editing of Adobe Bridge. In class I was most confused about clipping. I understand the definition but I'm a little unsure how I can tell where it is on the histogram. I think when I start processing more pictures this will be helpful to fully understand.

Also, when I posted my before and after photos last week it seemed that the edits I did in Bridge looked nice while they were in the program, but when I posted it online it looked different and I didn't like it as much. I will go back and try editing it differently, but I'm wondering why this would happen. Or maybe I'm just seeing things...

Second Assignment - Editing in Adobe Bridge

"Editing in Bridge"

For the first assignment I chose to photograph a trophy because it provided a lot

of different, interesting angles I could play with. I chose this image to edit becaus

e I thought it was my best one, but also one that with a little brightening and added contrast could look even better. The lighting at the time

of the shot was very dull and I wanted to see what I could do in Bridge to make the photo seem more vibrant, without over doing it.

The first edit I made was with the white balance. My white balance was set to Auto while I was shooting, but when I clicked the auto white balance in the camera raw edits through Bridge it lessened the warm tones in my photo and brought out cooler, blue tones, which in my opinion looks nicer. I then brightened the picture slightly by adjusting the exposure by +0.50. I also wanted to provide some contrast and I first

started this edit by bringing out the black in the creases of the angel's wings. I adjusted "blacks" by +10. This also made her wings look more golden. I then moved the contrast bar from +8 to +16 to add a tiny bit more "pop". I cropped the image slightly. I wanted to keep a little bit of the sparkly post on the left in the image to frame her, but I didn't want the brightness of the sparkles to overshadow the subject.

1st Assignment.

Why am I taking this course?

I signed up for ARTST 119 for two reasons. The first reason is I need it for my Integrated Media major and my Photography minor. The second reason being I don't know very much about Photoshop/Bridge, but I am aware that both programs provide a wide range of editing options that I am interested in learning about and becoming competent in. I hope this class helps me better understand how I can use Photoshop to excel my photography without feeling like I'm "cheating" or "over-editing" or in other words how to use the program for good, not evil.

It's hard for me to decide on just one "photographic hero" as I am constantly amazed by others work and find inspiration in multiple photographers. I really like adventure photography and nice black and white portraits. For this class I've decided on Joey Lawrence to be my photographic hero. I chose him because I find a lot of his portraits to be stunning and I can tell he is a very talented photographer and does a very good job at showing the emotion in his subjects through his photographs. He obviously is a talented photographer and knows how to use photoshop to produce inspirational images. I think his work will help me reach my goals of using photoshop to make really nice, clean images rather than overprocessing them.