Portugal

   

     Over spring break, my family and I took and brief trip to Lisbon, Portugal. I knew as soon as I heard the plans for this trip that I wanted to take plenty of photos on this trip. This is why as soon as we left and I forgot our camera at home, we turned the taxi around on the way to the airport. Once we reached Portugal after a long and tiring trip I immediately started planning what I would  photograph. For the next week, I spent my days relieving stress from school by taking hundreds of photos.

     During this trip I wanted to utilize all of the tricks and new techniques that I had learned over the past months. The two things that I paid most attention to which I did not in the past were lighting and over all composition. In the end I think I came away with some of the best photos I've taken. Here are a few of my personal favorites and more will be on my Flickr page soon.

Experimental Lighting

 
    This week I began to try out some different lighting strategies. I've never really used a serious light set up but have seen how many photographers have utilized lighting to create some pretty incredible images. Because I dont own any lights besides my flash I decided to play around with a smaller subject and smaller lights. For this I used an elefant model and chess pieces along with some tiny finger lights that I hope to use for more light painting in the future. This allowed me to create a scaled down version of what a photographer's studio might look like. I spent quite a while trying out different lighting angles and avoided using my flash so that I could focus on the placement of the smaller lights.

    I wasn't able to take any truly great shots simply because I was experimenting and don't quite have the equipment needed for taking studio lit quality photos. I also focused less on the subject and more on how different lighting angles affected the image. Overall I thought this experiment was successful, even If I did only got a couple decent shots. Once I have a few real lights and a backdrop I'm sure that this experiment will help me. This also forced me to be a little more creative and gave me a bit of a challenge which makes things more fun.

   Also, I'm not sure how many people consistently check my blog but If anyone who reads this has a suggestion for any photos to take or something interesting to film or even simply to experiment with something related to cameras, just comment and I will try it out and post it one week.

Documentary Reflection

                  For this documentary project, my group members and I created a short film about The Shoe Game. This is a community of people who buy and sell the latest, most rare shoes, most of which are Jordans and Nikes. This was always an interesting thing to me as I’ve seen kids at school who wear a different pair of shoes every day and have collections worth thousands of dollars. I still find it very interesting although the amount of drama within our school shoe game was less than I first expected. This however, did not affect the quality of our film. I don’t think we could go too much further with our topic but I don’t regret choosing it. I thought having the freedom to choose our own topic was vital, otherwise I don't think we would have been as interested and this would have made the final result not as strong.

                  Throughout the process of making this film, I discovered that documentary filmmaking is much different than other forms of film. I found it to be much more difficult than creating a film where there are actors or just something experimental. In other types of films, lines can be changed and you are delivering something from your own imagination and can be creative, while with documentaries you must stick to the truth and not stretch facts to make the film more interesting. I also learned about editing a documentary and all the possible ways to format it. This allowed me to get more creative with how to edit it.

One of the most challenging aspects of the process was planning how the final result would look. Once you have all of your footage, information and even script for a voice over, it can be very difficult to see what the final product will look like. You may have a plan but it will always change until there is a stable rough cut on the computer. One of the ways I overcame this was to edit our interviews and parts that I knew would fit, and then recorded voice-overs. As soon as the voice-overs are added in, it becomes much easier to put in other b-roll. I under estimated how challenging this process would be but I found it very rewarding in the end.

                  If I were to do this again, I would probably focus less on what the final product would look like and plan out what information would go into the film first. I also would not write a script until all of our interviews were done because I found that what the kids had to say compared to what they did say had a huge affect on how the film turned out. Besides these few things I think we made a pretty strong documentary for our first attempt.

                  I think that it went generally smoothly for this first year. I thought that it was good to show us examples of other short documentaries but maybe you could also give more general ideas of how to structure the film. Also I think there could have been a bit more individual guidance throughout the process. Instead of going over some things with the whole class you could have weekly meetings with each group to go through what they need to work on and what’s going well. Overall what we needed was simply work time, which you did give us and truly helped. At first I was slightly stressed and felt rushed but once you gave us a bunch of full classes to work I was able to overcome some challenges and that’s what allowed us to finish.

                  Overall I think this project went smoothly and we were able to come out with a fairly solid documentary that I think captures The Shoe Game quite well. The deadline extensions helped a lot and without them we would have rushed and that would have affected the final product. I think showing some of our films to next year’s class would help them greatly. At least from our group’s point of view I thought this documentary project was a success. 

Water Drops

    Today I tried something a little bit different and a little abstract. I took pictures of water. At first you may think that pictures of water aren't very interesting but I discovered some pretty cool things to do with it. First I set up my camera on a tripod with weight attached so that my heavy and expensive dslr wouldn't tip over. I also attached and external flash. Then I set a dish of water with paper around it to prevent shadows under the lens. I first started by practicing my timing and played around with plain water but found it difficult to make look very interesting so I wanted to addd some other color. For this I turned to food coloring. 

     As I added drops of food coloring to the dish of water, mini splashes would occur and I tried to freeze these moments. It is very difficult to time but eventually I got it down and took some good shots. What I find awesome about these pictures is that they are of something as simple as water but remain abstract and interesting with the use of colors. Some of the pictures even appear more like solid figures than liquid. 

    I wasn't quite sure what I was going for when I first started but ideas began developing and I think I got some very nice photos out of the water drops. If I were to do this again, I would probably use additional lights to create a more stable, shadow free pool of water. Also I would use a cleaner white dish because I noticed that even the smallest amount of dust will appear with the use of the flash. I hope you enjoy the pictures. I originally took about fifty but these are the ones I think came out best.

(Click to enlarge) 

Baseball Begins

      This is not a typical post from me but I felt the need to share my other passion of playing baseball. Other than photography and video, baseball is the thing I'm most dedicated to. I feel that writing about this on my blog truly completes who I am and represents me well. I also included photos of me playing baseball which I did not take for obvious reasons, but did edit them. Also a couple I did take.
      Tryouts begin this friday and I've been shaking off the rust at weekly pitching and hitting clinics on the weekends for the past month. Although I made the team last year it can always be a bit stressful to participate in a tryout. I can't say I've been the greatest hitter over the years but what does set me apart is the fact that I'm a left-handed pitcher. This gives me an advantage against batters, making it more likely for me to get on a team as well.  I've been playing baseball for as long as I can remember and began pitching not long after. Pitching is what I truly love and what I devote most of my efforts towards. I don't see myself playing on any high level college teams but I would like to continue to play and don't see myself quitting any time soon.
     These are two pictures that I took on my birthday last year and I feel really sum me up well because they were taken with my first camera and truly combined my new and old hobbies. Also for being taken from deep left field without a tripod or fancy dslr camera I think these photos came out quite well.

Here are a couple photos of me playing:

Kicks In the Cold

    Just a few weeks ago some of my friends went to play some soccer at the Blair turf. It was in the low 40s but that did not stop them from playing and that did not stop me from bringing my camera and working on my sports photography. I had taken pictures of basketball and a little baseball but never soccer so this was an exciting new opportunity. There is a chance that I will take photos for Silver Chips so every bit of experience helps.  

    While they played I attempted to capture some interesting angles and use the harsh sunlight to my advantage. The one thing that I had to be sure to do was use a high shutter speed because soccer can be very fast paced and you want to capture the moment without any blur. Here are some of the photos I took. Hopefully by next week we will have finished our one minute films and I will post that.

Art Photography

  For the past year or so I have been taking pictures of my brother's art. He got into ar several years ago and started taking pictures of the pieces and posting the them online. Because of my interest in photography I volunteered to take on the job for him. This allows him to exhibit his work online so his friends and the public can see his art.
    At first I thought taking pictures of art was simple and all you had to do was snap the photo and upload it. I quickly realized that there is much more to it. First you must frame the shot so that either the the painting is framed perfectly which is more challenging or frame the picture so that when it is cropped none of the painting is cut. This can be tricky and often takes several pictures to get one that does not clip the painting too much. The second thing you must consider when taking photos of art is that it is correctly focussed. Often times I would take an image and only realize how blurry the image is once I had put it onto the computer. To combat this you need to use a high f-stop so the depth of field is greater.  Finally you must make sure that the colors on the image match those of the painting. Depending on the cameras settings and white balance, it can change the color of the painting slightly. To preserve the artist's work you must be careful not to change it at all.
   This weekly assistance I give to my brother is very rewarding because it helps both him and me. He is able to put is art online quickly and I am able to refine my photography skills and learn how to work around new challenges. To see some more of my brother's art click here. His drawings are especially interesting.