In photography this year I believe that I have learned a lot. I went from not knowing anything about cameras, and ignorantly believing cameras all came with one lens, to learning ridiculous things such as off camera lighting or studio set ups.  The biggest proponent to my learning this year was flash. I learned how to bounce and beam my flash depending on situations and also during head shots. I differentiated what a fill and main light are. I learned how to use off camera flash along with lighting portraits or different studio lighting. A 3:1 ratio lighting setup was probably the only formal lesson I had with strobes.  Things that I wish I could've had more experience with were building portfolios such as for different image contests or even my own printed portfolio for on hand reference. I would also like more preparation with using off camera lighting for a single headshot. I would feel more comfortable having more background knowledge in applications such as Lightroom...

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...