Week 6

This lesson I started the day by sorting out my sketchbook by annotating pictures and pages and making sure everything was in the right place and correctly labeled. I also carried on my research on my three topics that I  had chosen for my final pictures, By looking for more pictures online but this time I analyzed and annotated them for inspiration on my final photos.

But before moving onto my final photos I took two or three practice shots of things to do with media, however I only had time to edit one before starting my planning on my final photos. I took a picture of an advertisement called Krave, I wanted to show how advertisements help persuade you to pay for the things you crave, even though it's just a simple cereal advert the name of the advert represents what most adverts try to do; control your craving for things. The strong sunlight made it hard to prevent the poster from showing mine and other people's reflection, so i put it in black and white to try and blend people in with the poster, but eventually I realized that it looked a lot better with the reflection and also showed how the advertisement was aimed towards us, everyone who has a craving for Krave.

After brainstorming and looking at examples of photos, I tried sketching out some photo ideas in my sketchbook. I started off with just a few simple sketches to help me plan out my final photo ideas and then tried to improve on them or decide whether my ideas could or couldn't be possible depending on the equipment I can get or can't get.

week 5

This lesson I arrived late due to a dentist appointment, which gave me only enough time to work on my photos that focused on objects within school based on 'Control', because my old photos were accidentally deleted by another student, I borrowed a camera from CRAM and took some photos in my spare time at home and in school. Then during this lesson I started to edit them using Adobe photoshop.

I used a black and white effect on a picture of a path leading to one of the school's main entrance doors, and I tried to make the door and the pathway stand out in the picture by using a blur effect on everything but the path and door so that your eyes follow from the start of the path (at the bottom of the picture) to the door (at the top of the picture) which makes your eyes focus more on the door. I wanted to try out a 3-D effect on the path and door using red and blue colors to outline the picture, however I couldn't figure out how to perform these effects and the other students who had used such effects forgot how use them with photoshop.

Another picture I took of a pen but put the camera on the same table on the pen so that the angle was flat making the camera lens and the pen on the same height level, but I put the camera at one end of the pen so that the shadow of the pen could clearly be seen. I used a black and white effect on the picture because I thought that it made the pen look more plain and also to bring up the contrast of the shadow because it looks a lot better in a thick black then just a faded shadow. I made sure I used a flash when taking the picture because I wanted the pen to reflect a bit of light so that it's more eye catching instead of just a boring old pen with labels on it.

For my third photo I wanted to take a picture of a light but with a dark background, so I took one at night of a lamppost near school. Then when editing with photoshop I tried to darken the background by increasing the contrast and using a blur tool, I didn't aim to completely rid of the background just make it seem almost pitch black except for the parts that the lamppost helped to light up such as the bushes in the background. I made sure the only colors in the photo were black and orange by increasing the contrast of the lamppost's light and the darkness of the picture then increasing the orange color of the whole photo.

Once I was pleased with my pictures I moved on to thinking about my final pictures and what I should take pictures of, so i picked out three topics related to control and then looked at examples online and did research on fine art photography to do with 'Media', 'The human body' and 'Uncontrollable things' since those were my three chosen topics related to control for my final pictures.

Week 4

This lesson I started my editing on my milll road pictures that I took last week, I chose four of my best pictures to edit and stick into my book. I started off with this photo of a traffic light with a green man. I wanted to really highlight the green man and show how it controls when we walk across roads and when we don't for our own safety, and how we control technology for our own benefits. The sunlight made it hard to make the green man be fully focused on, so I made the photo black and white by putting a black and white effect on the photo layer but then I realized it makes the green man quite difficult to spot, so I used the Magnetic lasso tool to crop the green man out of the black and white effects so that it would stay green and then I increased the contrast to make it a brighter and more noticeable green so that your eyes are drawn to the green man straight away.

In this photo I had a problem with the lamp post in the bottom, once I started editing I realized that the lamp post ruined the picture slightly, but when I tried to crop it out i couldn't figure out what to replace it with, because when I tried to blend it in with the blue background it never looked right and always looked as if i had just put a random blue blob over it. The green tree leaves on the side of the photo weren't on purpose but I decided that they give the picture a bit more color other than blue so I would leave them in the photo, the reason the photo is so blue is because it was a very sunny day and there was nothing but blue skies in the sky, so I decided to amp up the blue by putting a blue photo layer on to the photo using photoshop. The aim of the photo was to show that even though we believe us as humans are fully in control of the world, there are some things beyond our control such as the sky, hence why I used the sky as a background with a sign that had controlled zone written on it, to show that there is a limit to what we can control no matter how much power we think we have.

For my third photo I took a picture of a cone on a street with a gratified wall for a background. The sunlight caused almost the whole photo to look really bright and funny colored, so I tried out multiple colored photo layers to put over the photo and give it a nicer orange, I decided to use an orange layer because it suited the cone and the sunlight, but it made the shadows seem really faded so I had to increase the contrast and lower the brightness quite a bit, then I used the burn tool to blur out the background a bit so that the photo was completely focused on the lone cone and it's shadow. The aim of the photo was to show how even though we try to control things by making rules and ways of life, there are always people who are willing to break those rules or disagree with them, the cone represents our rules and the graffiti represents people breaking rules. Even though the cone wouldn't prevent people from doing graffiti on walls, people decide to obey the rule of not parking their car where the cone is, but they instead choose to break another rule instead, which shows that usually when people follow one rule it's only so that they can break another one.

Week 3

This week we continued our work on the topic of 'control' as well as Fine Art Photography, this time we explored the open environments of mill road instead of taking pictures within school. Our objective was to again take pictures of things that we believed related to 'Control' whilst also trying to make the photo as artistic and creative as possible and make the object of control stand out in the picture by using good angles and distances.

Since I was in a more public and open place instead of school, there was a lot more choice of things to take pictures of that were related to control. I took pictures of things such as Traffic Lights, Road Signs, Police, shop signs, advertisements, cars, etc. I Tried all sorts of angles making sure the sunlight shined perfectly on the objects I was taking pictures of, so that they stood out from the background and fitted in well with the lighting.

Once i had my pictures I chose my best ones and saved them onto a computer so that I could start editing them for next lesson using adobe photoshop. I think that the hot weather was perfect for the shooting conditions and really helped to make my photos look a lot better and more life fine art photography by giving stronger shadows of objects and great contrast.

Week 2

This lesson I started off by going through last weeks work and seeing what needed completing e.g my photos needed to be edited and printed, I had unfinished research to complete, so I decided to complete my research first and stick all my notes on Fine Art Photography into my folder.

To help me edit my pictures perfectly I looked up some examples of great Fine Art Photography photos and printed them out to put it in my folder so that I could compare my photos to theirs and see how they were similar in good ways and what i could do to my photos to improve them and make them look more like Fine Art Photography.

Once I had a clear image of how to improve my photos, I uploaded them onto photoshop and attempted to edit them to give them more style and look more artistic instead of just plain photos of random objects. I used multiple effects on my photos such as black and white and I tried to make each object in the photo stand out from the background by increasing the tone of the object or erasing some of the background or increasing the size of the object so that the audiences eyes immediately focus on the objects related to control.