My Photography Experience
My photographic experience in this quarter has been very eye-opening. I used to do photography just for the fun of it. While I still think that is important, doing photography with purpose is a lot more fulfilling. I have come across strengths and weaknesses, I did not know I had. It has been fun to overcome some of those weaknesses and find new strengths. The projects have been fun and some have been challenging. Photographing words for the image jam assignments was one of my favorite. It is fun to take a word and try to interpret it in your own way. I picture could mean a million words and a word can produce a million more photos. I also never realized how much I was into photographing the color green. I never thought I would have come to such a liking for it. For my focus project every time I see something that encapsulates green I just have to take a picture of it. Seeing all the photos together is pleasing and for many other classes, I do not get that feeling.
When it comes to my experience and exploration with composition, color, tone, and light, I definitely made some personal discoveries. When it comes to composition and taking a picture of something at an angle, I felt like I always had that down. When it came to color, tone, and light, I never realized the huge impact it had when it was done right. In my previous experience with photography, I never knew how to manipulate light. I always just took a photo for the sake of taking a photo. I never changed the settings and adjusted them correctly. Once you get that down the entire photography game changes. It doesn’t matter the time of day anymore and whether the lighting is good. You can make it good. Same difference with my photo editing skills. I never realized how different editing is rather than before. I used to oversaturate photos until they looked crazy. In this class, I learned less is more. Not everything has to look fake and euphoric. Things are pretty just the way they are sometimes. It helped me take a step back and reevaluate what I was doing. Now I can take my time and do things the right way. Example of oversaturation below:
In this class, I also learned that light is the single most important thing when it comes to photography. It can either make or break a photo. Brightness, color, and contrast all play very important rules. I never realized how brightness can easily be too much or too little. For one assignment I was out in the snow taking pictures and the exposure was so high due to the whiteness of the snow. It was intense. I could hardly see through my lens. It could probably be fixed a lot in editing. I now have a lot of respect for those who do winter photography all the time and get it to look good. The contrast was my best friend in editing because so easily photos can be too highly exposed and using contrast saved most of my images. The color of the light was something I hardly took into consideration. In my apartment, my lamps are a warmer light and the main lights are fluorescent so it gave an interesting variety when taking photos. As well as the windows. I have so many windows so most of the time for the pictures I took inside I used the natural light and quickly found out that produced the best colors and results. Overall, learning to incorporate these things and really take them into consideration will make me a better photographer.
