NYC Night Shot

Hey, everyone ends up doing these at some point :)

Unfortunately my computer not longer detects my hard drive so I haven't been able to get any photo editing done (thank god for lab day tomorrow). Luckily all of the photos I've taken so far are backed up on both my pen drive and my external hard drive, so I just have to suffer the inconvenience of not having a usable computer.

These three, with the photos I posted earlier, make 10. Though I may switch some of them around, as I plan on taking more photos this weekend.

Working Photos (for the final)

I'm having a real hard time focusing on what I want my final to be. It's pretty difficult to decide between two things: antiques or technology. Plus there are a few other ideas I want to play around with...though they're more pet projects and probably won't make it to the final.

I think I may end up going with antiques, because I really like the more complex forms. Shapes in technology photos tend to be streamlined, which is kind of boring to me. I think I'll keep taking photos of both until I figure out what I'm going to do.

Antiques (most of these have had some editing done):

Porcelain doorknobs
I have a landscape of this shot, but it was REALLY bright (it was right in front of a window). While I kind of liked the brightness of the shot, it was a little bit too much for the eye.

I like this photo a lot but...it really doesn't have enough color for me, haha. It was this toy wooden piano that looked like it had seen hours of fun, it had so much personality!

I had to crop this one way more than I wanted to in order to get the "correct" dimensions. I saved a copy of the photo as I like it, with the hat and the end of the longest necklace still in the shot.

I would post more, but my computer is having serious problems detecting USB devices, and is so low on RAM it's having trouble running more than one program at once. Hopefully this will get fixed by Tuesday so I can continue. The "technology" photos are stuck on my camera, so I'll just post a few unedited "atnique" photos here:

Headshot

This took entirely more time than I thought it would; probably because I can't seem to figure out where the color replacement tools are in GIMP. I also had trouble with my photos coming out grainy or unfocused, even after manually setting the ISO to the lowest setting and changing the white balance. The focus problem comes from the fact that when using a self time, the camera focuses the lens before starting the timer.

It came out ok, I think. Except that my glasses were sliding off a bit, which ended up making me look a bit cross-eyed (and retouching that is beyond my skill level, haha).

Original photo:


Retouched photo:


Black and White:



It took a lot of willpower for me not to pump up the contrast, and have it just be a normal photo. I think it still looks a little bit desaturated, but that might just be me.

Also, since I got asked about the water photo in class, here is the original shot of the water fountain:


My personal camera happens to be the same as the school camera, so if you're interested in taking pictures of running water change the shutter speed to 1/2000 to 1/2500 (I think this one was taken with the latter).

Assignment #4 (Part 2)

Here are the other two photos that I took today that I really liked, and will be in my midterm group:


I think from all of the photos I've taken so far, that my final prints will be focused either on toys or the influence of technology. I have a few interesting ideas, so I might take photos related to both and see where each subject takes me.

Assignment #4 (Part 1)

So, here are a bunch of photos that will probably end up in my midterm print-outs:


I totally bough a bag of these candy fish after taking this photo. I loooove these things, I'll probably use them for a few more photos before I eat them :)

I figured out the shutter speed to take photos of moving water! I had entirely too much fun taking photos of this fountain.

I really had a challenge editing this one. You can't see it very well here, but the original photo (which included my entire face) had an air conditioner from about the center of the photo all the way to the left. All of the area behind the lefthand should was ugly air conditioner that I successfully managed to shop out (I hope anyway).

More photos later today as I finish my editing! Although judging from these photos, I really need to be careful how vibrant my photos are...

Assignment #3 Before and After

These are all done with a duplicate layer instead of a layer mask, because I'm using GIMP (the woes of Linux!) and I'm not actually sure how to do levels within the layer mask. So I just created a new layer from the original image and let it sit on top so I could see what the differences were between the new photo and the original.

Image #1: Before
Image #1: After
This is a personal preference; I like my photos with a higher contrast and more vibrant colors rather than realistic color. In case you're wondering, this is the inside of a slinky. :)

Image #2: Before
Image #2: After
Again, trading out the realism here. I think in general I tend to shy away from warm colors, and I think a lime green makes the shot much more interesting :)

Image #3: Before
Image #3: After
I popped up the highlights here so the blue velvet fabric had a better color and texture. I also pushed up the blues and reds so that the colors would be a little brighter.