Photography Class

Several of you have asked about how my first assignment for my photography class went. I got an A, but it is only an Intro to Photography class. :) And even though I went to all the trouble to hold a poll on this blog to get help picking my top three pictures, my professor ended up going through all our pictures in front of the whole class, so picking the top three didn't matter after all! Oh well!

Overall, he said my pictures had great texture, but that I needed more variety in my compositions. The pictures he made the most comments about were the rope, the window, the cement barrel, the baseball that was blurred in the background, and the picture below (Abby's hand) that I hadn't included in the blog vote (see previous blog post of the pictures to refresh your memory). He loved the textures in the rope, window and barrel pictures. He really liked how the point of view of the window picture was just barely off-centered, but thought I could have used Photoshop to lighten the shadows in the window to bring out a little more detail. He liked the foreshortened angle in the barrel picture and how the circles appeared as oblique shapes because of the angle. He thought the point of view of the baseball was unique (i.e.: is the viewer a dog, a mouse, etc?) and he liked how the picture of Abby's hand was an "action" shot (almost any pictures of a hand have a feel of "action" to them) and it had two things going on (the open hand and the patch on the pants). He said that he thinks the best pictures have three things for the viewer to "juggle" or contemplate. Oh, and the crawling picture which you all liked so much (me too!), he passed right over it after saying he didn't like the focal point and that the foot in the foreground should have been in focus. You win some, and you lose some. :)

My second assignment involved scanning and digitally retouching an old, damaged photograph. I used a 1929 picture of my maternal grandma's family (she is the little girl in the picture). The photograph had creases, many scratches, blurring, tattered edges, smudging, and was faded (especially the upper left-hand side).

Before:


After:

It is really tough to see all that I did on these pictures unless you can view the original in person and see the result in a large format, but I spent several hours taking out all the scratches and blemishes, reconstructing the sky and house on the left in the background, making a new border while preserving the hand-written title on the bottom, and adjusting the levels/contrasts and sharpening the image. It was a neat project that enabled me to use some of the new Photoshop skills I'm learning, but I don't see myself spending much time retouching old photographs in the future - it's just too time consuming for such little result.

And a few pictures to leave you with that I took over the last couple weeks, all unedited:

(notice the crow on the top of the building?)

Please let me know if you like any of them! Thanks! :)