This is my final product. I cropped the book cover and put the title and author. The hardest part about this project was the Photoshop editing. The image was rather easy to take other than not lighting from above, but from the front. The frustrating part was lining up the subject and the Z to make the cut out exactly how I wanted to. I am very pleased with how this project ended up. I wish I would have known what the asexual fonts on the book cover were, but I made due. 

This is what I ended up with after I put my image in Photoshop. I had to work with layers and inverse them along with using the magnetic lasso tool in order to trace her facial feasters protruding from the "Z." I turned my image black and white. The hardest part about this project was that I was using a different subject and didn't know the exact font of the Z, so it was not proportional. I had to battle with the fonts and transforming it to get the image cut out how I wanted it to be. This is what I ended up with after a frustrating class period. 

ISO: 100 APERTURE: 9.0 SHUTTER SPEED: 1/250 This is what I ended up with. The problem I ran into was that my subject light over powered my shadow. Which was fine because I liked that the shadow wasn't very harsh. That's just a photographers personal taste I suppose. The sync on my subjects' flash had a short, so we had to keep taking the picture over and over until the flash decided to go off. Their flash was set extremely close to them, so I had to crop in close to them in order to get the umbrella out of the image. I should've angled it more in front of them and walked to my right so the shadow would've been fixed and the umbrella wouldn't have been in my image. 

ISO: 100 APERTURE: 9.0 SHUTTER SPEED: 1/250 This is the shadow that I made first before putting my subjects in with a separate strobe. I used a 600 flash at about 1/2 power. My shadow person held a fire hydrant because we were downtown and I didn't really have another weapon to pose with. This wasn't very hard to set. It was mid afternoon and the sun was setting, so I killed my ambient light with a low ISO. I knew that I needed to be at 1/250 so I was at the max sync speed. 

ISO: 160 APERTURE: 10.0 SHUTTER SPEED: 1/250 I took this photo on the gray background in the studio. I used the soft box on full power behind me so that my subject was on the verge of being blown out, this way when I converted it to black and white in Photoshop, there is a definite detail in the coloring and shading. I had to make sure this would line up perfectly behind the Z cut out on the cover. In Lightroom, I had to take this image and burn the background with an auto mask so that the background became all solid gray and darker than my subject. 

ISO: 1600 APERTURE: 2.8 SHUTTER SPEED: 1/250 I enjoyed shooting spring show because I like taking pictures of dance, especially in the theater. I thought this looked neat, but would have been far better if the girls were lined up perfectly, so that the subject looked like she had more arms and legs. She's out of focus, which is awful, but I thought it was a good image to blog about. ISO: 1600 APERTURE: 2.8 SHUTTER SPEED: 1/250 I like this image because of the pose the dancer was in. I figured the crop and the pose were pretty great together. Her outfit blended in with backdrop, so it was hard not to make the back look like crap while distinguishing the subject. ISO: 1600 APERTURE: 2.8 SHUTTER SPEED: 1/250 I fell in love with this photo as soon as I took it. It's such a feminine pose and the coloring is very neat. This depicts a lot of expression. The problem was that the lights were super dim instead of the normal stage lights, so I had to e

ISO: 400 APERTURE: 3.5 SHUTTER SPEED: 1/2000 My mother asked me to take pictures of my brother at a baseball game. This was from warming up before the game started. I used a 300mm lens. I tried to shoot at 400 to stop action with my shutter speed which is why I have the dirt flinging out of his glove. I was able to stand on the field since it was only a practice and it's my little brother's team. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gotten this angle which I love. His facial expression is pretty funny, but that may just be since he's my brother. I like that his hat is facing directly towards the camera and his face is clearly shown. This image wouldn't be able to be blown up because of the grain from cropping so tight though. This is one thing I need to work on: taking pride in my work and actually inspecting every detail about my images. 

ISO: 125 APERTURE: 4.0 SHUTTER SPEED: 1/800 I was asked to do drill team portraits for one of our high steppers, so of course, I said I would. She requested kicks, so I had her keep kicking at her own pace and held my shutter down. The background is a little strange, but she also wanted her pictures to end up looking like this, so I didn't want to argue with her. She originally had taken pictures on the ground and ripped her tights and started bleeding. I had to clone that out in Lightroom. I thought these looked nice. It probably would've been better if I had turned her and gotten a picture of her kicking the leg closest to me. I do like the colors and blurring background. I like that the action stopped her hair and fringe flinging up. 

For our book cover project, I decided to recreate this book cover. I was recently in Books-A-Million when I walked passed this. The cover caught my attention because it was the most unique and interesting around it. I decided this would teach me how to use better Photoshop skills, so that I would actually be learning something from this project versus picking something easy to recreate and just receiving a grade. The hard part is going to be making the overlay, or finding someone to cooperate. I think how I plan on shooting this, is dressing someone up, then taking a profile portrait of them. I'll turn it black and white, then ask Smith to teach me how to put a cut out of a "Z" in Photoshop and mess with the layering.