Amazing! Awesome! Perfect! A Gold Standard! All these adjectives- yet words are not always able to measure up to my assessment of things. Even so, I must redundantly use them because it's the best I can do. So, on that thought-- here's a few things I am mulling around that fit some of those descriptors!
I am having a mental/emotional battle in classifying Photoshop Elements between the WANT vs NEED category. It seems that I am severely limited at this point in even the most basic editing ability. It is good to compose a photo correctly the first time, but sometimes you just can't! I was distracted in some of my portrait shots and the end result needed to be cropped. It took me almost an hour to fight through the sample programs to find a way to crop it and resize correctly to email. Surely, it was mostly my fault- operator error. But!! The want of Photoshop Elements began to cross over to NEED :) when I saw this cool technique of making circular, swirled images. It takes a nice photo and turns it into art. For me, the artistically-challenged, this is amazing! It comes from "Rick Sammon's Digital Photography Secrets".
Check it out http://www.worldisround.com/articles/300657/index.html
I want to make these!! My teacher's assistant for the photography class crops these to 4x4 first and then prints to make cards. Then, she puts them in a clear CD sleeve for an envelope! So cool and such a great gift!
I am still plugging away at my assignments for class. Some are so multi-faceted. Close-up, Still Life, Architecture, Moon Photography-- are all part of one lesson! The course barely touches on each but gives links for more info. I have been reading and practicing the close-up stuff. I don't really care about Moon Photography at this point. Still Life seems really fun, but it seems pointless to work too much on it without proper lighting. A studio light would be helpful because it doesn't cast unusual color. I have just begun some digging in with Architecture Photography. This seems challenging in some respects. So far, I have learned that it is very easy to create converging lines when photographing tall buildings. The temptation is to point the camera up from your vantage point to get the top of the building. However, that causes the lines to converge. The trick is to keep the camera parallel to the face of the building. Professional Architectural Photographers have special equipment to compensate for these tendencies. They use wide angle lenses and a view camera. A view camera (as best as I can understand it) takes in more area to view and allows the photographer to shift the view plane up in order to avoid tilting and resulting converging lines.
For those who aren't professional architecture photographers and who don't have special equipment, I learned a few tips. Use the lowest ISO setting (for greatest reduction of "noise"), use a small aperture for the greatest depth of field (allowing for all of the picture to have a sharp focus), use a tripod (obviously, the small aperture will need a slower shutter speed to allow enough light in), and use of a telephoto lens can compress the image in a helpful way. Additionally, more evidence for the NEED category :)-- you can correct perspective errors in Photoshop or a specific app -plug in like Image Align PRO(which is geared toward architectural photographers.) If the corrections are made before resizing the image, there shouldn't be too much loss of detail. Finally, in Photoshop there is a Trim Tool, and some teaching in the tutorial section about this issue that shows how to check the perspective box in the Options Bar. Use of a step ladder or a higher floor from another building can solve the problem, too.
This might be boring to you viewers, but I am using this blog as a learning log of sorts so I have to write this stuff in detail!:) A few last thoughts on the architectural photography-- one famous such photographer said to try to compose the photograph to display what the building hopes to be (or something like that!) Another point is that there is a lot of variation on the advise of architectural photographers. Some prefer the straight on view, others like shots of a point of intersection to show depth of a building, others prefer very close up shots to give a sense of design and detail.
A final topic that I cannot wait to explore is RAIN!! Perhaps August in California is making this subject even more enticing- but somehow, I don't think so. I love the smell of rain, the sound of rain, the feel of rain. How wonderful will it be to capture rain and its effects on my camera? My photography class instructor mentioned rain a while back. She said the play of light and color during and directly after rain is incredible! She once led a class regularly on some photo expedition outings. One day it was raining and the class was shocked that she didn't cancel the outing. They quickly learned why.
The visual elements of rain/after rain photos are an exciting prospect to me, but also the emotional elements. I'm not sure how yet, but I want to capture in my camera the way rain makes me feel. And really, not just how it makes me feel- but others, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3stFDtVQ_M&feature=player_detailpage
Sometimes, in the perfect rainy day setting, I feel like I am on our trip to Holland. Did you get that green, cozy, rainy day feel when you were there? A good photo to capture that would have to have lots of green- grass, bushes, maybe a small creek or a brick house - and definitely a glimpse of a grey sky. If you know that feeling of a rainy day in Holland, I challenge you to capture it (in the U.S. of course!)
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