Painting with Light

Quint, Kristen, Alex and I did a baseball theme for our painting with light assignment.  Alex drew the bat, ball, and plate with a flashlight and Quint flashed me and the "Kristen's" with a flash.

Multiple Flash

This is one of the villains from the vampire movie my group has been shooting for our final project.  I used my flash to light his face and Ben was on the other side of him and filled the other side of his face, hands and body with the Norman set on 50 reflecting off of his own shirt.

Audio Slideshow Research

 Mr.Blues
http://mediastorm.com/training/mr-blues

I like the story behind this piece.  I think he's a very interesting character both by how he dresses and his attitude toward life.  The music is a great addition to the story since so much of his life and his bar have to do with music and it really helps the piece without being distracting. 

What I don't like about the piece is the length.  I think is a lot of stuff in here, like the conversations, that don't really seem relevant to what the story is.  After a while I just felt lost and I wasn't as excited or interested as I was at the beginning.  

Video Interview

Matt Busch discusses his love of photography

Fill/Balancing

I chose the fill shot as my select.  These kids were playing basketball on my street and I thought it would be a great opportunity to work on fill especially since the sun was bright, but not hitting them directly.  Obviously I didn't shoot in the bright mid-day sun.  It was about 5:30 in the evening but still very bright outside and the fill was necessary by that point to catch the detail on their faces.  I adjusted flash compensation up and down but found a happy medium around -2.2.

I chose this shot because the fill is hitting the girls pretty evenly and you can see the emotion in both of their faces.  Cosette, left, had to get seven stitches in her foot the day before and couldn't wait to show her friend Meira. It's something you can relate to because as a child we all loved showing our battle wounds and grossing our friends out.

Color Correction

 

I shot my select at the Boys and Girls Club.  There were several types of flourescent light, all in a nasty green/yellow combination.  I tried a bright yellow gel alone at first, and eventually ended up using a light yellow gel mixed with medium green.  

In this photo one of the club volunteers is helping one of the kids get dressed for the "fashion show" they put on.  The kids designed and created their own outfits and modeled them for other volunteers and kids.

Single Flash

This assignment was really tough.  I didn't end up with any takes I really liked.  I only had four real shots from my first take that would have been in any way acceptable, so I took my two selects both from my second take.  My subjects were students from a volunteer group called Stress Busters.  This group is put together by the student health center.  They provide free massages at events on campus.  In these shots they are practicing some of the new techniques they were recently taught by a professional massage therapist.  Some of my takes look kind of strange, like there is some funny business going on,  because there isn't  a lot of context in the photos. 

It was a very dimly lit room, which helped me eliminate what little additional light was avaliable.  Unfortunalty their bright white t-shirts mixed with dim flourescent lights seemed to eat all my flash light.  Their white shirts would relfect my light from the direction I was shooting from and I lost a lot of the details in their face.  I tried to move around to get a better flash posistion but it wasn't very successful.  When I look at these shots now I wish I would have gotten higher and tried to get a shot from above to change persepective and maybe that would have lit up the situation more. 

Metal/Glass Assignment

 

It took Robson and I about 3 hours to get this shot.  We had a really hard time eliminating all the glare.  We ended up using four lights, a black cloth, and a black card to finally get rid of all the reflection while also maintaining the shape of the glass.

http://blog.leniwiener.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/penn-woman-with-elephants.jpg

I have loved this Irving Penn photograph since David showed it to us in fundamentals.  It's composistion and overall feeling are just amazing.  Even though it's in black and white it really comes to life and feels like there are vivid colors popping off the page.

Even though it's a small lady in between two giant elephants, the way she stands makes it seem like shes in control of the situation.