Archive for the ‘tdc149’ Category

 

A Daily Dose of Creative Photography

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I tried a different approach this week for blogging my Daily Creates. Instead of blogging them one at a time, as I completed them, I am showcasing the whole collection here this week. I have been twittering the Flickr links each day but I will probably return to blogging each one separately in the future (in addition to twittering, of course!).

After camp announcements were posted on Monday, I did a little research and just kept clicking links, following a crazy curve path through the Web, absorbing as many tricks, tips, and hints as I could. The photography resources the Directors provided were great! I’m really learning to work my new digital camera as well as my iPhone camera! I learned some pretty cool ways to add interest and intrigue through photography. For instance, some of my favorite, most helpful lessons  were:

  • Take photos of anything, ugly things, everyday things (anyone looking at my memory card might think a two-year-old was playing with it! LoL)
  • Change positions with your body to change perspective (I have stopped trying to center subject from straight on)
  • Keep all photos, even bad ones (I keep thinking these might be useful later)
  • Shoot like you don’t have Photoshop (I don’t so that’s easy, but my goal when photographing is to not think about editing the shots. I’m trying to get the shot I want with JUST the camera)
  • Always carry a camera with you and use multiple cameras (I’m now carrying two with my everywhere—my iPhone and my Canon PowerShot 260SX. I find myself stopping to take pics that I wouldn’t have bothered with before)
  • Last but not least…use the “grid” and “rule of thirds”. (this is helping me get more interesting and creative shots J)

And now for the instant replay:

tdc148—Create a photograph today where some/all of your subject isn’t in focus.

Cloudy Canine

You’ve met Duke in previous photo assignments. Here’s Gracie, my other Golden. Cloudy and out of focus. Had to play with the camera a bit, using the fish-eye lens, I had to be quick to beat the auto focus feature. Took me a while to get it but I had fun trying!

tdc149—ds106 day in your life – Take a photo at 6 minutes past the hour for an entire day.

Pix @ Six

I had a few ideas about how to do this one, so all day I took a few shots at 6 minutes past every hour. This way good or bad photos, I would be able to figure out what to do with them at the end of the day. Ultimately, I had to nix my original idea, which was to replay the numbers on a clock face with an image that I took at the corresponding hour. It was getting late and I was having trouble getting GIMP to cooperate with me to create the final image I wanted, so I changed in up a bit. In this collage, I show an image of a timekeeping device near me, displaying the time at xx:06 every hour for 12 hours.

tdc150—Make a monochrome photo (monochrome doesn’t have to mean black and white)

Mayan Calendar

In making a monochrome photo, I decided to attempt to actually take a monochrome photo, instead of using filters, B&W, sepia, or photo editing software. After wandering around my house and yard, taking a dozen or so options, I think this is it. A zoomed in pic of the Mayan calendar wall sculpture I bought in Mexico a few years ago. This is where some of the photography tips kicked in! Instead of showing the whole sculpture, I zoomed in on an interesting portion of it and used the Rule of Thirds to make it interesting and unusual.

tdc151—Take a photo of something that you are envious of (physical or metaphorical).

Beautiful Drive

The topic for this one gave me a lot of trouble. I was at a loss for ideas; so much so that I almost skipped it. But on my way home for work that day, I passed the entrance to Curtis Park in Stafford, Va. I have always loved the look and feel of a long, mature, tree-lined drive. Inspiration struck! I pulled over and started shooting (photos!). I played with angles and lighting, taking many pics so I would have at least a few good ones to work with. I chose this one because it captures the calm, serene feeling that I so envy and desire in the grand entrance to my home, my haven.

tdc153—Take a photo of the oldest building near you; use add filters to make your photo look even older.

The Lewis Store (est 1749)

This was Saturday’s Daily Create. I was just getting ready to leave for my historic downtown Fredericksburg Photoshop, when I saw it pop up on Twitter. I stop to do a little internet investigation. Knowing there are so many old, historic buildings there, I was curious to know…exacting which one IS the oldest. The answer is The Lewis Store, built in 1749. It is not only the oldest building in Fredericksburg, Virginia, but one of the oldest retail buildings in the United States. It sits at the corner of Caroline Street and Lewis Street. Again, I follow some of the photography guidelines I learned this week and took many photos, at  different angles and depths, with different lighting. I was tempted to edit out the street signs, to give it a “less modern-day” look, but decided to keep the integrity of the image intact, just playing with the sepia filter to give it an antique feel.                 

 

Posted in bunk2, ds106, magicmacguffin, tdc148, tdc149, tdc150, tdc151, tdc153, umwsum12 | Comments Off on A Daily Dose of Creative Photography

Visual Assignment–Time of Day and TDC 149

Friday, June 8th, 2012

My second attempt at one of the Visual Assignments from the DS106 repository is Time of Day, which appealed to me because of the image appearance and because I wanted to try some more work with layers and combining photographs.

Take a picture of the same spot outside several times in a day, then merge them all together in a way that shows the differences in appearance over the day.

When the Daily Create for that day turned out to be take a picture multiple times over the course of a day and represent it as one picture, it seemed an obvious choice.   So I set up a small camera on a tripod and took a picture every hour at 6 after for 12 or so hours.

This was my finished product with the earliest photo in the strip on the left and the latest in the strip on the right, but it didn’t come easy for me.

Time of Day

The editing of these images (I ultimately used 8 of the 12) was particularly difficult one for me, mostly because of my unfamiliarity with Photoshop.

Scott Plunkett‘s tutorial for the assignment gave me a good approach for what I needed to try to do (specifically to just cut off increasing slices and layer them on top of the base image), but he used MS Paint and I wanted to try to figure it out in Photoshop.

I tried multiple wrong ways to edit them down and managed to crash Photoshop three times and my computer twice  in the process.  I walked away and came back the next day.  This is the process I finally figured out:

  • I opened up all of the images I was going to use in Photoshop
  • My base image here was the last image taken (on the finished photo, you can see the strip on the right side).
  • Then I took the next-to-last image and selected the section I wanted to keep – I calculated that each section would need to be 1/8 of the photo (in this case, I was using inches, ~2.75 per slice).  That meant that each section would be 2.75 inches smaller than the previous one.
  • For each photo, after selection the section that I wanted to keep, I right clicked on the photo, chose Layer via Cut, which creates a separate layer with just the selected material.  Then I right clicked on that layer (Layer control is usual in the right lower corner of the PS screen) and chose Duplicate Layer.  For output, I used the pull down menu to choose the base layer photo.  That places the cropped layer onto the original photo.
  • Then I just repeated the process, in reverse chronological order, cutting more and more off of the succeeding photos until the last one was just a single 2.75″ wide strip from the far left size and layering them onto the base image with all the other images.  The result, an image with 8 layers, saves as the image you see above.

Once I figured out the process, it was fairly easy, but it was a bit frustrating as I flailed around a bit.  Still, I’m pretty satisfied with the result.

 

Posted in Assignments, bunk3, Daily Create assignments, magicmacguffin, Narrating the process, openonline, tdc149, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments431 | Comments Off on Visual Assignment–Time of Day and TDC 149