Assignment 5:

-Retouched self-portrait

Think about how you want to represent yourself and start with a new self-portrait. Retouch the image using Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush, the techniques we discussed in class, the techniques in the reading, and ideas from your own imagination. Create a version of yourself that is altered to meet your fantasy or your vision.

Photography:

-Reading Quiz

1. How do you apply masks in LR and how can you use those masks to adjust your image?

2. Describe the difference between the adjustment brush and the gradient filter and how you might use each one.

3. What is Pascal Dangin’s job? In what ways is it creative?

4. What is his attitude about the ethics of the job he does?

Answers:

1.  Using the Adjustment Brush tool and the Graduated Filter tool. The Adjustment Brush tool lets you selectively apply Exposure, Clarity, Brightness, and other adjustments to photos by “painting” them onto the photo. The Graduated Filter tool lets you apply Exposure, Clarity, and other tonal adjustments gradually across a region of a photo. You can make the region as wide or as narrow as you like.

2. The gradient filter lets you adjust exposure, contrast, saturation, clarity, sharpness and color to an image and the adjustment brush allows adjustments to exposure, clarity, brightness, act. Depending on the effect you are looking for, either of those filter will work successfully.

3. Pascal Dangin's job in photo re-touching. It is creative because it basically is making the camera lie.

4. He thinks of it as Taboo.

Assignment 4:

-Use the Develop Module in LR to edit one of the images you photographed for the Campus shooting assignment. Post both the before and after versions of the image to your blog.

Remember to make one or more virtual copies of your image before you start adjusting it. Adjust the white balance, the exposure, the clarity, vibrance, and the contrast (with the tone curve) as we discussed in class. When you are finished adjusting the image export it as a jpg using LR’s preset: For Email.

-Reading Quiz

1. What does the phrase “The man who said ‘I saw it! I saw it!’ and passed it by” mean in terms of photography?

2. Drawing on the Daido Moriyama essay and our class discussions explain in your own words how photographs can “contain the living pulse of the human being behind the camera”.

Answers:

1. The phrase "The man said 'I saw it! I saw it!' and passed it by" means in terms of photography that a photographer sees all. He is both a viewer and a "dweller." In terms of photography in order to get an amazing photograph and capture an amazing image, the person behind the lens has to really look and really see his or her subject not just view and observe.

2. Photographs can "contain the living pulse of the human being behind the camera" because it has a special connection to him or her. The the photographer chooses a specific subject to photograph because they see and feel something special about it. A certain connection is made and suddenly for that moment, it is a living and moving experience, one with a special pulse, that the photographer encounters.

Assignment 3:

-Looking at Photographs

Download the PDF containing 5 spreads from Looking at Photographs from Blackboard (in READING section on left)

For each spread read the text and consider the image carefully. Select the image that most engages your attention and write a paragraph explaining why you have selected the image. Please keep in mind the photographic elements described in last week's reading (detail, frame, time, vantage point) when you are considering and evaluating the photographs. Post your paragraph to your blog.

(note: this is not the assignment I mentioned in class, you do NOT need to email me your campus contact sheets)

Answer: "Broken Window" by Brett Weston was one photograph from Looking at Photographs that most engaged my attention. The single black area of the photograph gives a sense of wonder and curiousness to its views. At first, I did not recognize it as a broken window, in fact, I didn't know what i thought it was. After reading the short article about it, I found it fascinating that the back area was not a void or negative space but the actual presence of the broken glass. The lack of detail and high contrast lighting really gives me no choice but to "see nothing as something." 

-Reading Quiz

1. Describe IN YOUR OWN WORDS what is meant by the idea that “the link (with the human eye and its usual optical radius) is not really needed” in terms of photography and film. (Ossip Brik reading)

2. What is a DNG file? Why would you convert your files to DNG when you are importing them to LR?

3. How do you enter Lights Out mode in LR? How can you use this mode?

Answers:

1.  By saying "The link (with the human eye and its usual optical radius) is not really needed," we basically are stating that even without our eyes looking though the lens, a camera and take of the cinema is so advanced and unexpected that a photograph can be taken and a scene or subject can be shown in a way that the human eye isn't used to seeing.

2. A DNG File is an Adobe Digital Negative Raw Image file.DNG files store all of your metadata and raw settings within the file itself.

3.  Press the "Shift-Tab" keys to hide side panels and then "L" twice to enter lights out mode. You can do this for presentations and to view what your image looks like blown up and as a final product.

Assignment 2:

-Review your camera's manual and answer the following questions about your camera.
Post the answers to your blog.

1. What is the maximum image size your camera is capable of shooting in terms of pixel width and height?
2. What options do you have for controlling exposure with your camera?
3. Describe some hypothetical situations in which you would want to use different exposure modes/settings.
4. What ASA/ISO range is your camera capable of? Why would you choose one over the other?
5. What is white balance and what options do you have for adjusting it on your camera?
6. What is the histogram and how do you use it?

Answers:

1. 4,608 x 3,072
2. Metering, Autoexposure lock, Exposure Compensation, and Flash Compensation. ISO, Shutter Speed, and Aperture.
3. If I were to shoot a fast moving object, and shooing on a manual setting, I would choose a high shutter speed and medium exposure to capture of an exact moment in time.
4. The ISO range is 100-3200. I would use a lower ISO if I was shooting a scene that is bright.  I would choose a higher ISO if the scene I was shooting is dark.
5. My camera has white balance settings such as Automatic, Incandescent, Fluorescent, Direct Sunlight, Flash, Shade, Cloudy and it can be set manually.
6. The histogram help guide you to achieving a proper exposure.

-Reading Quiz
1. On pages 1-3 Szarkowski describes many ways that photography offered a new kind of picture making process with a very different group of practitioners. Describe one of the ways that photography was a very different art form.
2. What does John Szarkowski mean by the characteristic “The Thing Itself”?
3. Szarkowski writes that the time that photographs describe is always the present. What does he mean?

Answers:
1. Photography was a different art form because its product was never "made" it was always "taken." You make art, not take it, or so the people thought back when photography was first introduced. Now, it's so much more.
2. "The Thing Itself" was the image giving more credence than the actual human eye. "For the image would survive the subject, and become the remembered reality." This technically means that one simple image can make an object or memory last a lifetime.
3. He means that they will always represent the duration of time it took to produce the image. The photograph will always and forever show the time it was taken, never before or after. It is stuck in the present of where it once was.