Well, this is it. The last truly official post I do for DS106. Yeah, we’ve had some times. I can’t say that all have been pleasant, but we’ve certainly… ah… had some times. This coming week is finals week, then dead week, then the official end of my undergraduate career. That said, I have not finished the photos I wanted to take for my scavenger hunt. I’ll probably finish them over the summer, when I’ll probably have more time between working at a part time job and looking for a full-time job.
Out of 25 terms required to “complete” the assignment, I did 18. A couple of them have more than one photo, and I have several more pictures in the works, taken but not edited. If I were less of a perfectionist I might have posted them already. But here’s the deal: either I post something I don’t think is ready now and remove it later, or I spend more time on the piece and leave it in Flickr. Over the past couple months, I’ve taken photos out of Flickr because they were clearly not good. I want to showcase only the photos I consider ready.
You can see all of the photos in the “Scavenger Hunt” tab on my site. I’ll only post the ones I’m particularly happy with here.
I didn’t do much but arrange this one. I love the angles and the colors and the detail. It might not be the most exciting photo I took over the course of this assignment, but it was delicious to clean up afterwards. The milk was entirely necessary because I accidentally added too much pepper. I did plan this shot out, but it wasn’t the most extravagant photo I took.
I like this photo not only because the subject is cute, but because I think the composition is interesting. I wound up centering Birby, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing because the real framing device (the newspaper) forces him to appear somewhat off-center. Also, it’s difficult to work with animal subjects and this was made even harder since this was in low-light and he kept moving around.
This was an easy shot to take. I knew I wanted to do flowers, and my camera has a monochrome setting on it. All I had to do was choose the flowers I wanted to take pictures of. I took pictures of both yellow and blue pansies and was convinced by Mauve and Twitterless Boy that the blue looked better. Now that I’ve looked back on them again, I am inclined to agree. The blue is very soft looking.
This was the first picture I took. I love how it turned out and I’m pretty sure that’s because I planned most of the details out. I told Chibi to wear blue so that the yellow would stand out more, I decided against photographing her face since I don’t think that it would add to the photo- we too often associate joy with facial expressions like smiling. To me, joy could be something as simple as yellow flowers. We wanted to do sorrow as sort of the end to that expression, with dead flowers cupped in somebody’s palms, but the yellow flowers were all gone and the other plants we had access to at the time were virtually unrecognizable when wilted.
This is a good example of model/director cooperation. I wanted to put him in the same photo, fighting himself (after working through several other ideas), and he pretty much decided the rest. He even sat behind me when I was photoshopping it to make suggestions. My models were pretty awesome.
They were so patient with me and allowed me to move them all over. They even contributed to the expressions and the eventual shot that wound up as Envy. THANKYOUSOMUCH, CHIBI, TITUS, MAUVE, AND TWITTERLESS BOY!
This was the shot that took the most work. I found a tutorial that walked me through it. It was actually a lot of fun and I plan on looking into more tutorials when I have less studying to do.
In the end, I affirmed my love of planned photography and came out of it with a few tips. If you ever plan on doing this:
1.) Plan out your shots well in advance and take them as soon as the opportunity presents itself. I forgive my own procrastination since I was occupied in doing other homework, but there will be days when you can’t take the photos and days when you can.
2.) Be prepared to take several photos for each subject, especially if you plan on photoshopping things. For the shopping to look right, the photos need to be clean. Also, if you think the bones of your composition aren’t good, the end result will not wind up looking that great either.
3.) Be flexible. You might not be able to do that spectacular thing you wanted to do, but you can easily adapt the idea and come up with something else. Don’t stress about it too much because that stress can easily come back to make you resent ever taking the challenge.
4.) Be patient, both with your models and with yourself. Try to make the entire experience as positive as possible and even if the photos don’t turn out all right, you’ll still have the memories of a fun time.
