The next assignment that I decided to do this week was your love for your pet! I have always had a huge love for animals so I was super excited when I saw that this was an assignment that I could do this week! When thinking of the pet that I was going to make a collage of, I eventually landed upon my brother and sister is law’s dog, Milo. Milo is a rescue dog that my brother and sister and law got last March. They think that he is part beagle and part yellow lab. He still has a lot of puppy energy and loves being the center of attention. His favorite activities are run in their backyard with other dogs and going to the dog park. He probably my favorite dog and I’m so glad that my brother and sister in law decided to rescue him!
For my second assignment of the week I chose Your Favorite Photo! I’m really excited to be able to share my favorite photo in this assignment and talk about why it is my favorite photo!
Above is my favorite picture I have ever taken. This is the view of Saranac Lake at Saranac Young Life Camp. This past summer I spend a month of my life working and living at this young life camp. This picture if of a view I saw pretty much 3 times a day, because it was right outside of the dining hall. This picture brings back a lot of amazing memories from the month that I spent at this camp. All the friends that I made and the laughs that I had. I miss this place daily and wish I could go back tomorrow! I think this picture capture exactly what this camp is all about: the lake and being in nature.
The first assignment that I chose to do this week was Places of Peace. I was really excited to be able to do this assignment and think of all the places that I love and feel at peace. I first started off by going through my photos and thinking of times that I was at peace. I collected 4 different photos that made me think of really good times, times of peace, etc. Then I put them in a collage and posted it to twitter!
The top photo, is from when I went on a hike with some of my friends last year. I love being outside and especially love hiking. It is something that brings me a ton of peace.
Then when working our way down on the left, we have the Outpost. This is the place I spent a month of my summer working. Now, sometimes this was stressful, but this place will alway bring me a sense of peace and home. This also reminds me of the experience of working at the camp in general and I love that place a lot!
To the right of that is Lake Anna. The picture is from a trip that I took with some of my friends this summer. I love any body of water (especially lakes). They always feel really peaceful and calm.
The last photo is from the Rappahannock River. Like I said before, any body of water really makes me feel calm. It is so amazing that we have our own body of water right down the street from the college. I spend a lot of my summer days here.
This assignment has been one of my favorite I have ever done!
This assignment, What’s in your bag?, asks you to take pictures of items in your bag that you use daily and explain their importance.
It caught me eye because there are a few things that I can’t leave the house without that are a little unique, so I thought I would share them with the world.
I’m not a huge fan of wearing purses, especially when I’m at school, so a lot of my items just go into my backpack. When I do go out on the weekends, I either have duplicates of what I carry around in my purse, or I switch things over from my backpack to my purse.
The first item is my gum. I always have to have this with me and it has to be this specific brand. I started chewing gum in the seventh grade and I actually think I’ve become addicted it. After I eat, I have to have my mint gum or my stomach starts to get upset. Mint naturally helps digestive problems so I believe that it is possible that my body uses it as a regular digestive aid now.
Another thing that I can’t go without is my chap stick. It doesn’t have to be this brand in particular, but I need to at least have some with me. When I was in high school, I was on the drug Accutane twice and one of the side effects was dry skin/lips. Ever since I started taking Accutane, I have had dry lips. It definitely isn’t as bad as when I was actually on the medicine, but I still feel the need to have chap stick on me at all times.
Next is some migraine medicine. This isn’t something I need every day, but when I can feel a migraine coming on, it usually never slows down so I have to make sure I have some medicine on me to attempt to get through the rest of the day. Sometimes, though, the medicine doesn’t help and I have to go home, but it can normally affect it a little bit.
I really need my keys. I commute to school so I couldn’t get home without them. I even take my keys with me if I am not driving. I think it is reassuring/comforting to have them on me just in case something happens to where I have to get into my house without my boyfriend.
My laptop/Surface is really important for school. It has all of my notes on it and I don’t usually carry notebooks or binders, so if I get to school and realize I don’t have it, I’ll have to turn around to go and get it. I only ever take it to school, however. This isn’t something that I will put in my purse. Maybe that’s obvious, but I wanted to clarify.
My final item is my earbuds and their case. I love listening to music, especially when I’m walking across campus or working on an assignment. The days that I have forgotten my headphones have been the longest days of my life.
All of these items are important to my daily life. Could I live without them? Sure. But they sure make life a lot easier.
When I was taking the pictures for this assignment, I wasn’t trying to make them too fancy, but I tried to follow some of the guideline that were introduced this week. I attempted to make the photo balanced/centered, use a plain background so the items can be in focus, and tried to get good lighting by blocking out the glare.
Since I usually kind of manipulate what the assignment is asking for I decided to make this not a portrait, but rather full body shots of a friend of mine dancing. Originally I was going to have each image on top of each other and create a circle effect, but it looks better aligned like this. I used my camera’s quick shutter style to capture every angle of this move and then selected each image individually. Once I aligned them evenly I just faded each layer until it was the full opacity on the right. If I had taken more time on this assignment I would’ve touched up some spots like in between her fingers, and her hair. (those spots are so difficult with the quick select tool). The elongation of her leg counteracted by the way her arm is going creates really great lines that make your eye move in a million different directions. This was overall really fun, and I am super excited that this week is the photoshop week because that is what I have the most experience with and what I like to do the most.
This assignment is my first for the week and is worth 3 stars.
As I scrolled through my camera roll for this visual assignment (2 stars), I found this picture from my landing flight into Akita, Japan after my 3-day weekend trip to Tokyo in late November. It’s a pretty bad picture, but I thought it caught Akita’s rural beauty just right.
I did the best I could on the Photoshop Express app on my phone to make the picture have a vintage effect, but as for what to write in Helvetica, I wanted to do a quote from a famous movie in the 80s. I decided on “Wax on, wax off,” from The Karate Kid (1984).
Why would I choose something that’s so seemingly random and mundane? It’s because of its mundaneness (and the movie’s connection to Japanese culture) that I thought that it would be perfect for this picture.
The quote itself emphasizes the importance of the everyday things we do in our lives that become almost second nature. For Daniel, the mundane task of washing Mr. Miyagi’s car made his learning of karate easier because of the way his muscles had been trained while car washing. Now, I may be stretching this a bit much, but I think this can be somewhat applied to life (or maybe my life) in Akita. Here me out.
Akita is a rural prefecture, and although there is public transportation, the buses and trains–though efficient and punctual–don’t come in 5 minute intervals like people expect from Tokyo. Over time you’ll find that there isn’t much to do, and life in Akita can get pretty routine. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved it there, but there does come a time when Akita loses its novelty. To be very honest, I still found something to do in Akita (mostly because I was so caught up doing my everyday tasks I never had the chance to explore more).
One look at this picture and you can already get an impression that this place lacks excitement, but with those preconceptions, you’d be missing out on Akita’s vibrant culture and warm, affectionate people despite the bitter cold. While my day to day, week to week life in Akita had been fairly the same, my time there changed me. My life in Japan, in Akita, made living a healthier lifestyle, doing mundane chores and shopping, cooking, and walking around everywhere so much easier. It made it easier to do this scary thing called “adulting.” I still have a ways to go, but the mundane shaped me to be a more capable individual.
Maybe I am stretching this analogy a bit much. Oh well, please enjoy picture I edited!
I love using photoshop, and especially when it involves photoshopping myself into photos so I was excited for this assignment. When I was looking for a picuture to photoshop myslef I found two I really liked so I decided to use both.
The first one was a picture of President Kennedy with his wife. I chose this one because it was an older photo and I wanted to challenge myself to be able to edit my picture to match the old photo. To achieve this I put a black and white filter on the photo and then increased the “grain” of the photo to give it an older effect. I circled myself in the background because I ended up being a little smaller than I though I’d be.
My second photo I decided to go with a more recent photo of some other Presidents, Obama, both of the Bush’s, and Clinton. I’m not gonna lie, I chose this photo just because I wanted to be in a photo with Obama. I was able to make myself a bit bigger and easier to see in this one.
I really enjoyed this assignment. I was able to utilize and continue to improve on my photoshop skills. I’m hoping I’ll be able to use more photoshop in other assignments this week.
PS: This was a 3.5 star assignment…8.5 left for the week!
For this week’s first assignment, I decided to do something that I thought seemed like fun. Maybe it’s too easy or too hard, but I thought it would be worth a shot.
This assignment is called “That’s Not What I Expected,” where the purpose is to take a picture of something zoomed in and try to get people to guess what it is.
I wanted to try this one out because it would allow me to use a bit of the photography info that we have been studying this week.
For my picture, I decided to zoom in on this household item. When taking the picture, I thought about the perspective (what may make it look not like itself?), lighting, balance (the kind-of symmetry), and contrast.
I took some other pictures that I was interested in posting instead, but I really liked the last one I took, which is the one embedded in this blog. I think the color is beautiful and it contrasts well with the black. It was a spontaneous photo, which I think fits this assignment and theme this week best.
This assignment took me longer because I am still getting the hang of photoshopping pictures. This one is really random but I picked a girl playing volleyball but decided to replace the ball with a picture of it raining cats and dogs. Again, not sure what made me pick these pictures but it was fun making it!
