30 final photos..part two

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

portrait 2-In color

This was taken in the afternoon, and the sun was coming from behind me, shining directly on her face. As you can see form the sky, there were very few clouds, so it was really bright out and the light was more direct instead dispersed for an overall brightness. The picture itself isn't that great of a portrait shot because of the background, so I added a vignet to it to try and bring the focus to her better. I like this picture though because if you know jill thats how she always is, so its more of a genuine photo and not so much a fake or posed shot. Again, the vignetting helps start the focus on her and not the background, and the background has a slight blur to it which helps as well. The sky is pretty prominent so your eye instantly wants to travel up from her face. Since the light is coming directly at her there's not really any shadows being cast other then from the hair in her face.

Portrait 1

I took this picture up at the equestrian center in the afternoon.  The sun was setting off to the west, and I liked the sunlight coming into the side of her face more so than directly on her face. I think this helps show off more of what type of light I was using for the photograph. Obviously, you can see the light lighting up the right side of her face and her hair on that side. But it was such a clear bright day that there was also sunlight reflecting off a cars and other objects. You can see this because the left side of her face isn't completely shadowed; there's light reaching it.  I tried to lighten up the eyes a bit, but she was squinting and she has dark eyes to begin with so it was pretty difficult. I also bumped up the contrast, clarity, and luminance of the noise reduction up a bit. I then used the spot removal tool to get rid of a few freckles that were standing out enough that they were bothering me. The last thing I did was cropped the bottom and the right side some to get rid of some unnecessary background, and make sure the attention is focused on the subject.

Portraits

This link is to BEL portraits. Their a photography business in the town where I'm from. Bernie is a super nice guy and I love his work, especially in the senior photos album. It's really interesting the different ideas in there. There's a pretty big variety in the photos and I like that a lot.

http://www.belportraits.com/Home.html

nature composition

http://photo.net/learn/nature/ghopkins/comp1/index

This article is about composition with nature photography. It talks about how the best way to improve composition skills is by learning how to see composition. Look for compositional elements in any photo. Ask yourself how they work together.  Has these "composition maps" that were created for visual teaching aids.

Action/Adventure

These are the photos I took for the action/adventure shoot. For the most part all the settings I changed were about the same for the photos. There were more but to many to choose from!

Composing with color

      In the first article its basically an introduction to color and the basic elements. For instance it talks about the three variables of color which are hue, saturation and lightness. From playing with my own photos i've seen what these are but it was kind of nice to have them defined. It also talked about how the attitude of a photographer working with color contrasts greatly with the attitude of one working with black and white. I thought it was interesting to read how a photographer who likes to photograph in black and white goes about looking for shots. They make a significant effort to see the black and white tones in what their looking at to see like what shade of gray is this color going to be? or  is this going to be black, is this going to be white? They have to try to search for those where as someone composing with color, though we do see in color there's a difference between what we see and what the camera sees, so they as well have to look at the scene and the elements that are in it.
      In part 2 of composing with color it goes over controlling color in photoshop, color balance, and color palette. In photoshop your able to play with the three variables of color individually.  In color balance you have to balance out the overall color. The goal of balancing is to get a neutral color truly neutral without a colorcast. The color palette is about selecting a range of colors that are going to be used in the photograph.
      Part three is about working with saturation. It talks about how saturation is important but at the sane time its over used. Over using any of the 3 variables is not really good for your photograph either. Mentions that saturation is more of a problem with raw files, because their naturally desaturated, so we tend  to oversaturate to get the color back in there. It explains global saturation Vs. local saturation. Global is saturation throughout the whole photo and local is saturation in a certain area of the photo.
      In part 4 it starts out with talking about memorizing colors in the field. Basically in this part it goes over the other parts again but with photographs showing you the different ways saturation works and global vs. local saturation.  A lot of repeat information.