So, uhh, it's been a while since I updated this.
In that time, quite a lot has changed. One minor change is that I drove from this place:
To this place:
So yeah, I moved to Beloit College. That's fun.
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Yesterday, one of my classes was given the assignment to walk around the town, observe things, and take pictures. Most of the groups took around five or six photos. I took seventy-eight.
Below are the best eleven.
This one is easily my favorite, with the diagonal lines leading the eye from highlights to shadows.
It has become the goal of the Beloit Class of 2020 to hide googly eyes all over campus throughout the course of the semester.
So that was yesterday.
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Today, I was asked by a player on the basketball team to take pictures of him. Apparently he broke a ton of high school basketball records and his school wanted to make posters of him.
This is probably my favorite, and it's the one that ended up being the final choice for the poster.
Editing the pictures today really taught me a lot. I figured out that I could make the muscles in Tim's arms and his facial features stand out a lot with some dodging/burning, which will probably be a strategy I'll start doing for most of my shots.
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I do want to say one thing, though. I've heard from some people that they feel I shouldn't edit my photos so much, as it detracts from the pictures or because my site then ends up being more about editing than photography.
What I want to say is this: my photography and the subsequent editing are practically inseparable. I may over-edit photos on occasion, but my main goal is to use editing to improve the original shots. I don't have professional equipment and the light sometimes isn't as good as I'd like it to be, so I use editing to fix problems and accentuate the things I want to draw attention to.
To show what I do and how much it can affect pictures, here are the before/after for a couple of the shots of Tim.
In those shots I brightened everything, fixed white balance, worked a lot on highlights and shadows, and did extensive work dodging and burning to sharpen muscles and facial features.
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So it may be that I edit my pictures too much, but I think the edits I do are primarily for the sake of improvement and I know I will not stop editing, though I know I will keep getting better and learning new techniques.
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I know this has been a long post and I'm sorry for that and for the slight rant about editing there.
I'll do my best to get back into a bit of a routine for the site and for my photography as I start to get more settled in here at Beloit.
That's all for today,
Alec
Alec