FROM TODAY'S SERIES OF LITTLE "FIELD TRIPS"

want to see lots of new work from each of you. Here's alittle bit of what I was doing when we were out there.....



Now, show me yours.

FIELD TRIP

Amidst the unexpected, troublesome, yet beautiful winter weather, Two students still showed up for our field trip on Friday. It was quite cold and snowy, and we didn't stay out very long, but we still had some fun and got a few good pictures. Melissa and Cassie learned a little about compensating for bright snow, since all that white really throws off a light meter, and Cassie's sister posed a bit for us... until we couldn't feel our toes any more.

For Zack L.

I want to encourage you all to spend some time looking at what everyone else is doing. We have a lot of talent in our little school, and you can all learn a lot from each other. Take a look at what Zack L. is doing, he has a good eye, and a great knowledge of photoshop. I pick on him for little things (like the sensor dust that was in this shot), but I think he knows I like what he is doing. Keep the work coming everyone!
If I don't post anything in the next few days, have a great Thanksgiving, and a nince week off. I know a lot of you are planning photo shoots over the break. I can't wait to see what you do. If you can, post some of them!

FIELD TRIP

Ok, so those of you that are going on tomorrow's field trip need to meet me here, at the school at 10am. We will go to Ridley Creek State Park for about 2 hours to shoot many things! I want to leave my cell phone number for you, so you can call me if there are any problems. 267-446-9735.
Please leave me a note here if you are definitely going, so I know to wait for you before we leave.
i am looking forward to some photographic fun.
Also.... if the weather looks bad, give me a call and we can decide what we want to do.
MR. R

LANDSCAPES

From our little trash dump...

Also, please check out photo.net.There is a plethora of inspirational art work.

SOMEWHERE TO SHOOT

I was thinking about a field trip this Friday. It would not be an official school function, but that is the only way I can think to do a trip right now. I was thinking about meeting whoever is interested at Ridley Creek State Park for a couple hours of shooting and exploring. I have been there many times in their garden area. This would be a good place to do environmental portraits and landscapes. Ms. Knauer said that there is an old dilapidated house of some kind on the property, and a bunch of other possibilities.
If you have interest, let me know. Also, if you know of any other location that would be somewhat close, and interesting let me know.It would have to be a place that we could go to legally, so some of your thoughts need to end right now. I want to take some time with you all, just shooting, and at a better place than the little dump behind the school.
Post your thoughts!

REFERENCE....

I hope you have all come up with great ideas for your self portraits. In case you are having a case of creative block (or not) I'd love for you to spend some time looking at other artists self portraits. To name a few who you should search out, there's....
Frida Kahlo of course. I know many of you are familiar with Frida's work, but maybe some of you aren't, and you should be! She is widely known for her self portraits which expressed so much. Another artist you all probably know who did many, very expressive self portraits was VanGogh. Just look at his portraits throughout his life...they tell his story. Michelangelo hid self portraits throughout his work. You can find him as human skin held up in the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. Possibly due to the fact that it is quite difficult to photograph yourself, or possibly the fact that most photographers really hate to be on the other end of a camera, there are not a lot of photographers that are well known for self portraits, but there are some.... Cindy Sherman has transcended time and timeless issues photographing herself. Lucas Samaras has explored developing technology using himself as a subject. One of my favorite artist/photographers is David Hockney. In the 80's and 90's (possibly longer) Hockney did fun photo collages with a great cubist feel. many of his pieces were self portraits, or included evidence of Hockney's prescience... his feet (usually showing his signature stripped socks), or his shadow, or a bag. http://www.hockneypictures.com/photos/photos_collages.php
I would love to see some of you guys tackle a Hockneyesque, or a Kahloesque piece at some point. There is always a lot to learn by looking at others work. I will try to post some of my favorites for you to look at throughout the blog. I think we will have a little history section before I sign off as your teacher as well. You should all know where we have come from in the past 180 years or so.

SEASONS ROLL ON BY

I guess you could call it a landscape...why not. It is a good example of what you can do with a really wide open aperture.

ONWARD

I hope everyone finished up the first marking period in one piece. I am excited to move on, now that the basics have been laid out. I really want to see how creative you guys can be, and I think we can do some cool things in the next few weeks.
I am so happy to see more of you posting regularly. I love that you are posting all sorts of images, and poetry, and thoughts. I am having fun with this.
I am eager to see what you have been doing with your self portrait project. I'll be looking for some of that tomorrow. Since it has been over a week since I assigned that project, I am going to introduce a new project. I am going to keep it simple. I would just like you to do a landscape. You can take it literally, or figuratively.... just start thinking about a landscape.
Here's my input.....
...I'll post more soon. I have had a thing for clouds and water recently.
Bonus points for those of you that read to the end. Check out this blog. I am amazed and inspired by these images...anyone up for a field trip out west? www.mitchdobrowner.com

SELF PORTRAIT

Ok, the basics are out there, and I am sure most of you are still scratching your heads about the whole manual camera thing. That's ok. keep what you have learned in your head, and keep referring back to it as you continue to shoot. It will all click at some point. Like I have said, I had embarked on a professional career in photography, and was still teaching myself exactly what difference an aperture made in my life. But I expect more for each of you!
What I am noticing many of you forgetting, which is very important, is to make sure you have a proper exposure. You need to pay attention to your light meters. If you forget how to read your specific meter, let me know. It is getting colder out, and you will probably be shooting inside more....and that means more difficult lower light. Please don't be afraid to ask questions. What I would like you to work on is a self portrait. Now, I am NOT talking about a Myspace, hold the camera at arm's length over your head and shoot type self portrait. I am not interested in seeing how sexy, or handsome you can look after practicing in the mirror for a while. I am not even interested in necessarily even seeing your faces. I want to see a representation of you. It can be a picture of you, but I want it to tell me something about you. please be creative and, as always, keep your elements of composition in mind. I would like to see these in at least a rough form next week. PLEASE!

INSPIRATION

The sky has been a constant source of inspiration lately... have you noticed the amazing clouds in just the past few days?This first image is an example of aperture and shutter speed working together. I wanted the whole scene to be in focus, so that means a small aperture was in order. It was starting to get dark, so if I wanted to shoot at f/16 to get a wide depth of field, my shutter speed had to be about 1/2 second. I knew I could not hold steady for this long without some shake, so I supported the camera on the dock, and exposed for 1/2 second. This worked well because it created a smoothing blur of the water, which makes the picture a little softer, and less busy. This allows your eye to travel through the picture with more ease... in my opinion, of course.

SHUTTER SPEED

Ok, now that all of you fully understand everything about aperture, we will move on to focus on shutter speed. Shutter speed is the easier of the two camera settings to understand. The shutter speed controls how long the shutter stays open. It is measured in seconds, or technically, fractions of a second. Most cameras have the ability to keep the shutter open for as fast as 1/2000th of a second, and as long as you want (some digital cameras limit you to only 30 seconds). Please do a google search of shutter speed, and see what you can find. I found a site.. www.diyphotography.net/shutter-speed that was fairly informative, and easy to understand(although more geared towards digital cameras). Please write something in your blog that will prove to me that you understand the concept of shutter speed.
Also... on your next roll of film,or group of images, please use at least half of it showing your mastery of this element of photography. Try to purposefully use long and short shutter speeds to add interest to your image. If you simply don't get it... PLEASE TALK TO ME. I am always happy to explain or demonstrate. I will want you to eventually post your images to the blog.
**note** Please do this now. If you have not done the aperture project yet, do that first, then do this. I am hoping to have everyone past this point by the end of next week so we can start doing more interesting projects!!!

APERTURE IN ACTION

Here are some samples of shots taken on Tuesday while discussing aperture settings and their effect on the depth of field. It is easy to see how much difference there is here. Please pay attention to how the shutter speed is effected by the different aperture settings.

The first shot was shot at f/22 @ 1/5th of a second.... I was lucky here that neither Cameron or Liz were moving, and I have a steady hand. Usually if the shutter speed is 1/5th of a second, there will be blur from movement. Notice, that at a small aperture opening like this, pretty much everything is in focus.
The second shot was shot at f6.3 @ 1/60th of a second. Notice that we are starting to loose Liz (oh the irony).But there is still some detail.
Finally, this shot was taken at f/1.4 @ 1250th of a second. Liz has now lost all focus.
I hope you guys don't mind my picking on you. Thanks for being my test subjects.

RECENT WORK OF MINE....

I was told in class the other day that I need to post more of my work. Ok, fair enough. If I show you what I am doing, do you promise to show me more of what you are doing?
This is an image from a wedding I shot this past Saturday. I have been playing around a lot lately with layering texture on my images. When I see interesting textures, I photograph them, and save them to use as texture layers. This texture was a rusty sheet of metal.

This is just a personal piece that I shot the other day. I called it PERSEPHONE. I like to play with titles to tip the viewer to what I am thinking while creating an image. This was also a shot that relied heavily on using the widest aperture available on my lens. In this case, I used a lens with an aperture of f1.4, which is wider than most lenses. If you take time to look at this larger, you will see that the sprouts growing out of the top of these mounds are the only thing in focus. I use a narrow depth of field like this to create selective focus, so you are drawn to a specific part of the picture. A wide aperture opening is also helpful here because my light source was just a fairly low watt lightbulb. The wide aperture allowed me to still shoot at around 1/60th of a second (that's my shutter speed) which allows me to hand hold the camera, and not get blur from movement.

DNG Converter

I have taken some time today to address the problem that those of you shooting RAW digital files have been having. I have installed a DNG converter to the mac lab computers. I will save this tool to the dock on each computer so it is easy to find. It is very easy to use, and once you open it, you should have no problem converting your different RAW files to a generic "DNG" or digital negative file, which photoshop will recognize. You will then be able to open your files in Bridge (Photoshop's RAW workstation) and experience the benefits of working with RAW images as opposed to JPG files that are pre adjusted by your camera.
To test this out I stole one of Erik S's files and did some work on it....I hope you don't mind Erik.
This is the file as it was shot....

and after some tweaking....

WORKING HARD.....

APERTURE

Now that we are all set up with our blogs, for the most part, I want to start posting assignments here. As I have said in class, I want you guys to understand how a camera works. I know you all have great artistic talent, and I want you to be able to express yourselves in photography, and know how to get what you want from the camera.
We are going to start with APERTURE.
To start, I want you to go to...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture
Read through this, especially the part pertaining to photography. Make a post telling 3 things that you have learned about apertures.
I want you to shoot something...an object , or a person... whatever, and shoot at different apertures. Please write down the aperture setting (f stop) you use for each shot. Try to be creative with this as well. Creativity is always good. Please use at least half a roll (15-20 shots) working on this, and use the rest to shoot whatever you want, but always be thinking about what you are shooting....the content, the composition, etc.
Once you have shot and processed the pictures, I want you to post a few of them to the blog (For non digital classes, we will scan the images so you can post them). These shots should show the effects of using different aperture settings.
For those of you with point and shoot cameras, that do not have manual settings, please come and talk to me. I will take one more look at the camera settings, and give you a school camera if needed.

MATCHBOX PINHOLE CAMERA

For any of you who have a little time to kill, or just really love photography (specifically pinhole photography), you might want to try out this....
www.matchboxpinhole.com
At least take a look. You will realize how simple a camera really is, and that you can make a camera out of many different things.

SET UP LINK LIST

Ok, now that you have found me, I want you to set up a "link list" to your other class mates. At this point, some of them don't work because....possibly some people didn't completely follow the instructions I gave out. Possibly I made a mistake while entering them, but probably not. Here are some quick instructions on creating the "link list"....

Click on the customize button at the top right of your page. You should see the page to the right (sort of at least). Now click on "add a gadget".

The page to the left should now come up. Click on "link list". This will add the link list to your edit layout page (and your main page). Call the list whatever you want.... Classmates, friends, the competition, critics..... whatever. Then you want to click the "edit" button in the link list box. This will bring up the next page, where you will add the url, and name of the other people in the class. You can just add your class. If you want to add anyone from another class, just add a separate link list for others that you will be sharing with.


Once you have added everyone, make sure you check that they work, and save. If you have problems, you can email me, or comment to my blog. If I can help you over the weekend, I will, if not, I'll help you on Tuesday.
On a different note.... some of the supplies came in! Yes, just some of them. We have some chemicals, and some film, and some paper. Hopefully, by Tuesday we will have everything.
Have a good weekend.

WELCOME!

I plan to use these blogs as a means to communicate, and show and critique your work. I also think it will be a good place for you to do research projects complete with links and pictures,etc. Using the internet to it's full extent. I hope you like your pictures I have posted here. If you don't like them, please make some images you would like to share! Thursday I plan on connecting all of our blogs through a list on my site. I want all of you to add everyone elsein the class so it is easy to click from person to person. Please start sharing whenever you can. If you need help with anything please leave me a message here or by email.