Photostory Preview

For my photostory preview, I think I want to try to convey a story of bad and good in one's life. The classical "ups and downs", high points/ low points with a turning point. I use the lighting and the nature of the photo to begin the photostory at a very low point. The bud and half open poppy resemble the turning point and then the ending shows an open and mature flower and light. This is a rough "sketch" with my own photos but I think I have the story line down and can use my photo manipulation tools to better convey this story. 

Dodge/Burn and Filters

It was really cool this week to explore with the dodge and burn features. I used the photo I took of the lake and the background and I made the sky lighter and made the concrete and dock darker. I also used the dodge tool to create a thin layer of fog. Do you guys see a thin layer of fog in the distance? It took a while to try to get it just right because it had to be the perfect amount of light.

I explored the filters a lot last week and being able to add a bunch of filters was cool. The first one I added softglow, gaussian blur and messed around the with the hue brightness and saturation(Gimp). i really bundled a bunch of filters into this one and thought it was really cool looking. The second one I just added the old photo filter to make it look old, I thought that was pretty simple and cool.

(The first photo in each set is the original followed by the edited version of that same image)

Color/Lighting Adjustments

This week I really enjoyed playing around with Gimp's color and lighting tools. I can't believe how many different things you can do to your pictures. This first set I have the original picture first and in the edited photo I went under the color options and edited the green pull down shade. I changed the hue, saturation, and brightness of the pull down shade. I think it came out really well, it looks very cool. The second set I have the original and then I edited the lighting, brightness, and contrast of the image. I also added the sun with one of the filters which I thought was neat too.

Image Manipulation

It was really cool this week to mess around with the image manipulation software. I used Gimp because I couldn't find a free version of Photoshop. The first photo I messed around with creating layers and is fairly simple but shows some of the layer effects. The second picture is way more interesting where I used the moving and cropping tools. I also feathered the edges to blur some of where I cropped and moved the other photo in. I think the second one looks pretty cool. I look forward to playing around with this new software in the coming weeks!

Landscape Photography

It was nice for this weeks pictures to actually leave the house the get a few decent landscape shots. I drove all around St. Albans and took a bunch of landscape pictures, and then narrowed it down to these four. It takes a lot to try to get that "perfect landscape picture" because everything has to be pefect; especially the angle at which you're taking it. I took a few different pictures at different angles of the same area and you wouldn't believe how much better one shot looked than the other, just from a different position. I also think the overcast sky looked pretty cool too with some of these shots. The last one is neat because you have the landscape way in the background and I thought it was cool to look at.