Final

5 - 10 sentence written reflection on your blog: What were your favorite projects during this course? Least favorite? Why? What did you learn? How can you apply this knowledge after high school?

By far my favorite project in  this class was the light exposure project. It was intriguing to see to see how much shutter speed can affect the outcome of a picture. My least favorite was the color wheel because it was so annoying to find the right colors within the school. Its easy to find basic red, blue yellow, but hard to find light blue or deep red. The best thing that this class taught me was the versatility of a camera. Its ridiculous how  much the cameras are programmed to be able to and I feel like I've only touched the surface of  things that can be accomplished by using the cameras. The main takeaway from this class has to be the photo-retouching skills that I learned. My parents have already had me re-touch several old pictures and I'm glad that I am able to do that

Recontextualization

Smokey the bear is a simple for the prevention of forest fires. He almost serves as a symbol for the protector of the forest who would stop at nothing to make keep the forest safe from fires. This retextualization shows Smokey, the hero of the forest, as an arson looking like he is itching to burn down every thing in sight. This shows how people can be corrupted and can stray away from the goo path they are on. "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain."

 

Uncle Sam, aside from the American flag, is probably the most patriotic symbol in our country, brought out in the midst of war to inspire people to be passionate about joining and fighting in the war. The second version shows Sam looking pretty beat up and I would say regretting the decision to fight. This powerful image helps to demonstrate how war is brutal and can change people when they realize that brutality and harshness. The gaze position is initially for people on edge or simply people fighting in the war showing that America is strong when we fight together. Then it changes to people who perhaps haven't fought or don't understand war or are anti war as the second image clearly shows the negatives that arise from war.







 

 

Adolf Hitler was one of the most feared and terrible people to ever exist. He ruled with an iron fist and was the reason for millions of people to be murdered. But that was over 70 years ago, now even the "all powerful" Hitler is mocked because people have the attention span the size of a pea. The first picture shows the might and authority of Hitler, he strands proud and powerful with a crowd of hundreds at his back. The second image is a meme that ultimately mocks the German leader. This recontextualization shows how anyway, over time, loses power and can eventually mean nothing to common people. There are far to many people that don't understand, or care to understand the how truly evil and the significance that Hitler had in today's society. The gaze position is for young people, or people who just don't care about history

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Still Life

    

Alternate angle

 Alt. Angle w/ low aperture

Frontal in the dark with lamp light only

Frontal with low shutter speed in the dark

Regular Frontal

Taking the pictures in different lighting and adjusting the shutter speed  and aperture have a big effect on how the picture turns out. With shutter speed and aperture it is easy to manipulate how much or how little light will be shown. However sometimes it is necessary to use an actual light source as overusing the speed and aperture can make the picture look unrealistically lighted. The most challenging part of this project was trying to adjust the shutter speed, taking a picture, and then having to adjust the aperture as changes in one affect the other. Despite that the shutter speed and aperture were by far the most useful tools as they helped to manipulate the lighting in the pictures. Next time I would change the ISO and see how that independently changes the pictures and how that affects the shutter speed and aperture.
The books represents my scholarly nature and desire to learn.
The basketball jersey represents my true passion which is basketball along with the mask and knee pads and finally the socks are my snowboarding socks because that recently become a loved hobby of mine and I really want to do it more often.

The Photoshop Effect

3. Answer in paragraph form: Should images of models that have been Photoshopped be labelled? Why or why not?

Pictures that are photo shopped should absolutely be labeled as such simply because of the way models are perceived. For most people models are the ideal way to look and many people strive to look like those models usually holding themselves to unrealistic expectations. Also many people don't know that the pictures of models are photoshopped or to what extent. For those reasons I think its necessary to label phtoshopped images. People will attempt to be like the models that they see but those models aren't what they appear to be.


 4. Answer in paragraph form: If steroids are illegal for athletes, should Photoshop be illegal for models?

I think that the two situations are completely unrelated. Typically models are used for advertisements of specific product whether that be new make up or swim wear and so they are intended to look essentially perfect with no flaws as a company wouldn't want those flaws to reflect their products. Probably all pictures minus one are photo shopped so I think Photoshop is necessary when advertising which is usually what models use it for.

Original

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spot the Difference

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Changes

 

What worked well for this project were the main tools that I used, the clone stamp tool and the quick selection tool. Both tools essentially served the same purpose to take pictures and extract only the part of the picture that I wanted. Some objects were definitely easier than others, for example the orange that replaced the basketball has a white rim around some of it while the new Charlotte Bobcats logo was extracted nearly perfectly. This helped me learn the importance of selecting good pictures when trying to photo shop a picture and that's the only thing I would do differently.  

Color Wheel

This project was pretty simple all it required was to take pictures with specific colors, resize them and then place them in the correct area according to the color wheel. The most challenging part of this project was finding the specific colors to take pictures of. For example it was easy to find a red  locker but much more difficult to find the red orange scorpion. The main thing that I would do differently would be to not take pictures of writing because its difficult to see what the picture is actually of and try and find pictures with a greater difference in the colors. The color wheel is a very useful tool when finding what colors blend well together for example the wheel shows the complimentary colors, divides the warm and cool colors and puts the colors most like each other together.

Shutter Speed and Exposure

Writing

Picture

Multi-Exposure

 

 

.Changing the shutter speed affects how long light is able to be captured by the camera. Exposure determines how light or dark a photo will turn out. The longer the shutter speed the more light is captured and so images will be lighter a shorter shutter speed will produce darker pictures. It is easier to capture photos like the car when the shutter speed is longer because there is more time to make the drawing. Because my light was very bright a the ISO had to be brought down so the light wouldn't be so bright and would be much easier to see what I was drawing. Some of the shutter speeds are shown as 5" or can be shown as just 5. The difference between the two displays is that the tick marks mean 1 over the number in this case 5, so 5" means that the shutter speed is 1/5 second. When the number is by itself that just means seconds so the reading of 5 means the shutter speed is 5 seconds long. 

 



Photo Montage

The most difficult part of this project was trying to take pictures that had just the right amount of overlap so that the photomontage looked like a montage and not just a jumbled collaboration of pictures. I'm not sure why it was so challenging for me to take the pictures correctly but I re-shot 3 different times and got the same result each time. Most of my pictures had a huge overlap and that makes this picture look pretty messy. On this project I didn't use many tools aside from the move tool and the crop tool. The move tool was used to move each image into the correct place to get an entire scene from each individual image. The main way that this project is applicable to my future is that I can use the technique of taking images of part of an area, for a large area, to get  a panoramic view.



First Roll shoot

  angle up

 

 angle down

 

 perspective

frame in a frame

 reflection

texture

 Rule of Thirds

 Shadow

 

 

 

 Pattern
 
 
 
 

                                                                                                                Side Lighting
 



 

 

Using my phone for this project worked very well because, since its a newer phone, it has a setting where I can setup pictures with a rule of thirds grid so taking pictures that way wasn't very difficult. The most difficult part of this project was trying to get a good back lighting picture at the school which was pretty much impossible because of how everywhere was lit. no other picture was that hard to take. Next time I would try to take pictures in a location that isn't the school because then I should have much more control over the lighting and so I could probably get a back lighting picture much easier. The primary tool for this project was the paint brush which I used to touch up some areas. For example on the pattern picture the border was orange which was not consistent with the pattern present so I used the paint brush to edit the right pattern and colors. Learning the rule of thirds was definitely the most useful part of this project. Usually everyone things that the people or focus of the picture should be directly centered in the middle of the photo but using rule of thirds makes the picture much more interesting so I will definitely continue to take pictures using the rule of thirds.

 

 



 



Picture Resoration

 

 

 

The main and most useful tool that I used for this was the spot healing brush that, like magic, easily gets rid of certain damage to photos like discoloring, watermarks, scratches and bends. This tool can be used in a very precise area like parts of the jacket or over large areas in the background. Another tool used was the paint brush that had the ability to mimic the color of an area and allow you to color another part that color. This tool is extremely useful when trying to restore finer details like the eyes or the eye brows because the healing brush would simply blend the colors together and make such areas look distorted and messy. Next time I might try to see the difference in trying to use the spot healing brush to restore an area like a crease vs. using the paint brush. The most challenging part of the project was trying to use the spot healing brush on the borders of the picture. For some reason the border would turn a darkish brown color when I used that tool so along the border I had to color that myself with the paint brush. This has definitely been the most useful Photoshop that I've done because my mom is already asking me to restore several old pictures so that she can send them to people restored and now I have the ability to do so. 

 

 

 

 



Old Picture Resortation

 



 

Pop Art



The main thing that went well in this project was the versatility of the gradient map. It can be used to color the entire image itself or very specific layers or parts with very specific or custom color combinations. The most challenging aspect of this project was to make my layering consistent meaning that I didn't want one layer on top of the other in one place and in other the previous top layer being on the bottom. More specifically in this project I had 3 major layers  with each layer inside the other. Next time I will definitely make sure to duplicate my background so that if I make any major mistakes, which I did, it wont be a very big hassle to fix the mistake. Also I need to be more away of merging layers when I want to have certain areas of the picture being a different color. with the entire image all being one layer the gradient map colors everything and not a single layer. The main tools used were the gradient map to color the image and the quick selection tool to edit the three original images and only get the individual not the background which is a very quick and easy tool to use even though at times some areas needed to be refined. I definitely need to make sure I save my work in separate parts so that if I make a mistake it isn't hard to correct myself.

Face Swap

The stamp tool that we used for the face swap works well, the only problem with that tool is that it can become fairly difficult to accurately get the face without having all of the extra parts like the neck and necks that we don't need. That being said the stamp tool makes swapping faces much more simple than I expected it to be. The tool works very well because though there are some features that I'd rather not have the erase tool effective gets rid of those additions. Next time I would choose a better picture to swap faces with. I thought that President Obama's face swap looked pretty good but with Michelle part of her hair was on her face which doesn't look well mixing with Obama's short hair and definitive hairline which makes that face swap a lot less natural looking. The primary tools used were the stamp tool to get each face and the erase tool to subtract unnecessary additions added on by the useful though partially inaccurate stamp tool. In the future I know the versatility of using the erase tool to get rid of things that I don't want and to make Photoshop's look much more natural. Also with the stamp tool if I want a certain area to be repeated or placed into a different place I can use that tool to do so.