You might think photography is easy. You just choose a subject and snap a photo of it, right? A photo can express a certain emotion, mood or perspective. Some photos make us laugh, and I’ve come to realize that being a photographer is much harder than one would expect. Capturing the photo is just one element of the photo making process. It’s all the behind the scene elements that come afterwards that matter too. The editing of the photos is a major part of photography. It’s what can bring your photos to life; transforming your photo into what you had envisioned. In this post, I’ll be guiding you through my experiences, learnings and photos as I start to become my own photographer.
This unit was called constructing creative communication. The class was divided into two groups; one group did photography and the other did drawing, for about two weeks, and then the group that was doing drawing switched to photography and vice versa. In the first two weeks I did drawing, so now it was my turn to do photography.
Anyway, to start off our photography building skills unit, we talked about Fred Herzog, a photographer. Fred Herzog was born in Germany in 1930, and then I migrated to Vancouver in 1953. He took photos of street life and urban landscapes. We observed a few examples of his work. This is his self portrait:
When looking at this photo of his, you can notice some complex detail in the setting, lighting and the photos on the wall in the background.
The first skill we were going to build was: Composing Composition.
Our first activity was taking photos of an everyday object in fun and unique perspectives. I chose to take photos of my water bottle. We went outside to take photos of our everyday objects outside, keeping in mind the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is to positioning your main subject on the line where the lines of thirds intersect, to add balance to your photos. To get the grid lines on your camera, go to settings, tap “ Camera”, an then turn on “ Grid” feature. I love this addition when trying to take a photo and make it nice and even. Just to get an idea, I added a slideshow of some of the photos I took of my water bottle in interesting ways.
To show my understanding of composing composition, we had to pesonificate one of our photos of our everyday object. To do this, we were allowed to edit the chosen photo with the Camera editing tools. I had two really good ideas ; my first one was the hydro flask character lying down on a towel on the beech and my second idea was the hydro flask character playing Rapunzel in a tower. I continued with the second idea. I used the markup feature on Camera to add annotations to my photo using my Apple Pencil. I’m like this assignment because it allowed you to imagine and think of all the possibilities. I’m proud of my finished photo:
Skill 2: Adjusting Angles
In photography, you can be creative with your framing of the photo. You can play around with the angle of your photo to achieve a different or interesting perspective. The first step we took to explore angles was to take multiple self-portraits of ourselves. I learnt how to use the timer so I could have a couple seconds to get ready for my photo. We were allowed to use Photo Booth too add epic twists to our selfies.
Then, our next experiment was taking portraits of our partners. We got to go all around the school for this task, and it was totally up to the photographer to tell the other partner how to pose and where to pose. I took a lot of photos, but not all of them were as good as they could have been if I had tapped to focus my camera on the person, but hey, we had a time limit. With a different partner, we created silhouettes of each other. My partner was Sydney, and this was the the silhouette that I made of her. To make the silhouette, we adjusted the lighting and the contrast of the photo. Here is my silhouette of Sydney:
Our final task was to re-create a portrait from the past. I didn’t like this task because I spent so long scrolling through photos from years ago, only to realize that I can’t recreate them because they are in a different location or in a different season. I found one photo of me and my sister playing, so I decided to recreate it. See below for the before and after transition. It’s not perfect because I couldn’t find the ticket to ride board game and it it was way darker outside the window. Also, the leaves on the trees has all fallen.
Skill 3: Manufacturing mood
Photographers can express a mood or emotion through a photo. For example, a dark rainy day can make us feel sad, whereas a a sunny day with people smiling in it can express joy. To capture some fantastic panoramas and landscapes, we headed outside for a walk to the beach! Anyway, the idea was to learn to take several different types of shots of people, places and things. The assignment was to make a photo that conveyed a certain mood. We all got assigned a random mood; mine was surprise. Can you detect surprise in my photo?
The last two skills were creating collages and molding movement. We took Live Photos and tried doing a photo burst. My favourite part of this photography unit was creating our own GIF’s. You can see my collages and my GIF, on my about me page.
Now let me answer our driving question:
“How might I use technology to create and communicate?”
Over the past two weeks, I’ve demonstrated ways that I can communicate through the medium of photography. Photos can tell a story, can set a mood or can make the viewer see things in a new perspective. I’ve come to realize, that beeing a photographer and making beautiful photos requires a lot of thinking, creativity and effort. It’s not just taking a photo, but it’s determining what you want your photo to communicate. Then, editing the photo to meet your communication goals, which is surprisingly a lot harder than I thought it would have been. I’ve learnt a handful of new advanced tech skills to edit my photos using Snapseed, Camera and Pixelmator Photo on my iPad. My new skills will come in handy for projects, other blog posts and so that I can take authentic photos that tell a story.
Thanks for reading!