Reflectors

Reflectors are large cloth disks which can be folded to take less space, they come with reflective covers, like gold and silver. Without the reflective cover it has a thin semi-transparent white cloth which can be used to soften light.

Without a reflector

 With a golden reflector, note the face is lit up with a soft warm light. almost like he is looking at a sunset.

Reflectors in silver and gold.

Portrait

Portrait comes from the old french word Portrair, which means to portray. And is defined as: A likeness to  a person, especially one showing the face, that is created by a painter or photographer.

This is a portrait taken in the photo studio at my school, it encompasses Silje from head to toe, the light is soft and shows all the details without gleam. The point of a portrait is to capture the essence of a person, it is supposed to give you an impression of the person without knowing him/her.

Making .Gif animations in Photoshop

The above Gif is made by me, using photoshop. It's essentially stop motion (several pictures taken with the object moved) and then combined using the animation tool in Photoshop. A gif can easily be made from movies by screen capping several images and combining them. This .Gif is made with 13 photos with a .1 second gap between the images.

This video shows how you can make a .Gif in Photoshop

Photo Studio

Monday, we got to start using our schools photo studio. the first two pictures demonstrate how important the flash/iso/shutter speed/aperture settings in a photo studio is.

 This picture, the aperture and iso were very high, that is why my arms blend with the background and i look very pale.

 Here, we tweaked the camera settings, so the picture is much clearer and you can see the colors properly.

This shot was taken with a delay of 10 seconds, another way to use the photo studio if you are short on hands.

Magazine Page Layout

We had the assignment in indesign to copy a page layout, fill the text with Lorem Ipsum (placeholder text) and use the portrait to see the difference. The page was between two articles and showed clearly that one article had ended and gave the reader "Breathing room". The original picture was from Broken Hill australia, and was used for a commercial, the text describing the location and purpose of the picture.

Retouching Portraits

As we started taking photos of people, we also learned how to fix natural "flaws" using different tools in photoshop; Dodge, Burn and Spot Healing Brush.
   1. Spot Healing Brush, the tool works by dragging colors and pixels into the highlighted circle, use it on spots on the skin, such as a mole.
   2. Burn, burn is used to darken areas in the highlighted circle. this ads shade or darker color, I used this tool on the hat and around to create the shadow.
   3. Dodge, the dodge is the exact opposite of the burn, it makes areas lighter, i used the dodge tool on the eyes.

Could you tell if the first one was photoshopped without seeing the original?

Into the fog

Today, there was dense fog outside, so in the hour before lunch we all went out and took pictures, experimenting with the lighting caused by the fog. the sun is shining but the fog is dense, causing a soft white light to cover everything.
In this picture one can see the outline of the sun and the soft halo of light surrounding it.

Bubbles

Today we took photos with a macro lens, a macro lens catches the tiniest details. It's used when you want up close and personal photos. My ring is no bigger than an inch but the macro lens catches every detail. The bubbles caused are because the ring is submerged in carbonated water. and the bubbles stick to scratches and dimples.

The Clarinet

Last monday my photo group were taking pictures of clarinets for an assignment in which the entire class were involved in, we were making commercial posters for the Sandnes klarnettkor in Indesign.
It was somewhat hard and tedious because we were not permitted to touch any of the clarinets, because they are expensive. Not being able to manipulate the clarinet opened up a new way to take photos and explore our creativity, with angles and camera settings. we had one person who brought the clarinets move them and hold them for us, which is where my picture comes in, the yellow part is all photoshopped, and part of my poster. Working with both indesign and photoshop was interesting and I'm looking forward to working more with it.