Photo2Q2.8: End Q2 Best Photo

This quarter felt more like going through motions, to be honest. There were some interesting projects, but still, the images I feel that are my best are far different from the topics that we explored this quarter, or they don't necessarily relate to it. I would argue that I'm going through a "sophomore slump", or perhaps it's just senioritis, but that would be too generous, as quality production of my photos this quarter reached an all-time low. I am still passionate about photography, but it's just been difficult to find the drive to take photos after my brain gets drilled from everything that's been going on this senior year relating to college and life in general. Next semester, I look forward to changing this. I used to be incredibly productive back in Photo 1, and I hope to continue that for the second semester. No partially completed assignments (hopefully). In fact, I purchased this app called Tick Tick, to help organize literally all of my tasks in life and education, so perhaps my production in this class will increase as a result.

But I digress; these are all personal difficulties. In photography, I look forward to the studio lighting and Pow Wow. These two seem very intriguing, and I want to take advantage of my last year in this class. Instead of succumbing to senioritis, I want this semester to be all about putting the "cherry on top"; finishing strong.



Okay, not gonna lie, this best image was taken in priority over my slow shutter project. I was doing one concept for that project and I was like "man, I really want to recreate the Frank Ocean "Blonde" album cover. A mini ITSO that I never got to do. I photoshopped an overlay of the actual cover onto my replication of it (you can see the green hair merging in the middle). I like this the best amongst all the other images I've taken thus far because it has a lot of personal meaning. That album came at a time where I was quite broken, and at a time that I considered split my life from adolescence and maturity; a coming of age. I still listen to it today because of the vast array of emotions and messages it carries.



This free choice photo is of Britney Cabuhat, a close friend of mine. We were doing this spur-of-the-moment photoshoot at school while we were waiting for the Winter Concert from SO. I based this off of an image I found online a while back and asked her to do the same pose.



This second free choice image was one of my fast shutter concepts. I just found the food coloring to be incredibly neat, and it's something I've never seen in person. I still have the food coloring today and I'm quite honestly thinking of doing another photoshoot with that same food coloring just to try and see the different color combos I can get.

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Photo2Q2.7: Multiple Pinholes

No prism for the two

(From left to right, top to bottom)

1: Portrait against wall. Single pinhole. Light was undesirable and conflicted. Some clear light leaks on the side as shown, likely due to poor camera tape applications, but was fixed later.

2: Portrait against staircase-side of F building, top floor. Single pinhole. Light was undesirable and conflicted. Same problems.

1, 2, 3: No prism. 4, 5,6: Prism

Working with camera obscura and the pinhole camera was somewhat difficult. I am conditioned to using Lightroom to manipulate my raw images, which has led me to care less about whether I get my exposures correctly when I shoot. I always think "just so long as it's somewhat accurate it'll be fine". The same cannot be said about pinhole cameras, or film cameras in general. This challenge was a tough one to face because of how adapted I was to DSLR's and the small range of knowledge I possessed for pinhole photography.

(From left to right, top to bottom)

1: Rylen as subject posing against wall. Multiple pinholes (6). Light was bountiful; I attribute the overexposure largely to having too long of a shutter time.

2: Self portrait against rail. Multiple pinholes (6). Plenty of light; long exposure time was a clear problem, so I reduced in small increments (which is why they appear to get better as it progresses).

3. Unknown, likely a wall portrait. Multiple pinholes (6). Overexposed.

4. Unknown, also likely a wall portrait. Multiple pinholes (6). Very overexposed and likely out of position because I can barely make out a shadow of a person against a surface.

5. Reynaldo's shoes as he walks down the stairs. Multiple pinholes (6). Lighting was plentiful, but exposing in a dark area seemed to counteract that effectively. I enjoy the better exposure here, but the position is somewhat awkward and has a slight dutch angle to it that doesn't really add to the photo.

6. Self portrait sitting on the wall outside the classroom. Multiple pinholes (6). Somewhat clouded, but overall bright day. This is probably the best exposed image of the bunch. Yes, there is a slight dutch angle to it, but the fact that it was exposed so much better than the rest made it desirable.

Pinhole photography has a lot of opportunities for combinations of exposures. The prism effect can be desirable, yes, but I feel that what's more desirable is combining multiple different images onto the same canvas instead of the same repeating image.

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Photo2Q2.6: Slow Shutter

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As a primarily people-photographer, I had pretty little experience in slow shutter photography. It's simply not my cup of tea. I like having freedom when I shoot. By that, I mean freedom of movement; I dislike having to be attached to a tripod, which is what, a majority of the succeeding photos in this post consist of. I tried to do what I could based on what I knew. Researching for this was a little bit more difficult since I interpreted a lot of what I saw on Pinterest and Google images as being too difficult to replicate because of how precisely I needed to have the conditions meet. That may be a lack of effort, or just being afraid of trying something new, but I digress.

Brainstorm slide

Brainstorming in class was helpful in bouncing ideas off of each other. I realized that one of my concepts was basically like leaving everything up to chance and having little personal artistic effort (10-30sec concept).

Concept 1 (1/60-.5sec):  1/2, f/10, and ISO 100

Concept 1 (1/60-.5sec) 1/40, f/10 and ISO 100

For this first concept, I just wanted to capture nature; nothing super thematic. I was hiking and unfortunately had no tripod to mount my camera on. Still, I attempted to shoot the stream as described in my brainstorm slide. There was no waterfall anywhere really, so I settled for these small drop-offs in the stream. The biggest difficulty here was just the sheer amount of camera shake. I was really trying not to drop my camera into the water, so I held onto it tight (which unfortunately caused the extra camera shake as shown). In the future, I'd bring something like a mini tripod or a gorilla pod.

Concept 2 (1-5sec) 3s, f/8, and ISO 100

Concept 2 (1-5sec) 2s, f/7.1, and ISO 400

For the second concept, I wanted to recreate Frank Ocean's Blonde album cover with a little twist of slow shutter to it. In retrospect, perhaps using a variety of angles and having actual sub-concept variations would've made this better. The difficult part of this was getting in and out of the shower and having to deal with freezing every time I splashed water on myself.  In addition, the bar itself in the shower was kinda frustrating to deal with, but I tried recreating the cover with my 50mm without slow shutter and it turned out fine. Perhaps asking someone to shoot for this one or trying another concept in general would've been preferable.

Concept 3 (10-30sec) 15sec, f/4, and ISO 100

Concept 3 (10-30sec) 15sec, f/4, and ISO

Perhaps my weakest concept because I deviated so much from my original brainstorm plans, I was at a party at the time and thought that the place they used was interesting, because they had a church with this unique upper part to it. Some editing got the yellowish hue it originally had due to surrounding lighting, but it persists. Having the moving clouds is indeed interesting, but if I were to reshoot this, I'd definitely use a variety of buildings instead of just one.

Below are some additional photos I gained from the shoot. Some are relevant to the project, some aren't.

In all honesty, none of the concepts were my favorite and I thought that I failed expectations for this project, but if I were to rate them on success level, concept 2, 1, 3. On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of how confident I am in slow shutter, I think I'm a 4-5. Last time, in the light painting post, I mentioned how I thought that slow shutter was interesting, but as a project I'd do personally, it isn't. In that post I also mentioned that my confidence going in was a 6-7. My reduction in score was due to the apparent lacking in effort and quality in this project, and I realize that. Here's to next quarter/year; doing better in planning and becoming a more responsible student is a primary goal of mine.

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