Crit 3, 4, and 5

I've been very behind on my recipe's so I decided to bang them all out with this post, I hope that is ok :)

I decided to choose all the ones that had the most votes from Crit's 3, 4 and 5

This image is actually just a landscape just outside my family's home. They live in Bensalem so the area is very remote and the property is somewhat old so there are plenty of these types of trees there that I always found interesting. When I take shots like this I like to play around to see what the most interesting crop I can get is, and I also use the Black and White function in Photoshop to bump up the contrast. I used the same process for my Crit #4 photo which seemed to be the most popular. 

This image was taken along route to my apartment. Since taking this class - I made more of an effort to take long walks around the neighborhood to see if I could find any interesting shots. I was always drawn to this home and the pile of wood by the doorway -- I always thought there was something eerie and a bit old fashioned about the house. I wanted this to come across in the image so I attempted to capture it during the afternoon when I knew the shadows around it would be the strongest.

A lot of my images taken in Crit #5 were while visiting friends down in Eerie, PA. This image is of the Lake, and I was initially attracted to the color around this time of year. It was very stark and calm, and I sort of tried to give the bottom half an interesting texture by cropping a lot of the ground out and just focusing in on the ice forming around the lake. 

Taylor Donges - Crit 5 Recipe

For this photo, I used the panorama function on my camera. I wanted to capture as much of the tunnel as possible with an ultra-wide panoramic experience. I stood at one end of the tunnel. I started the photo aiming the camera at the left wall of the tunnel. I rotated, capturing the opposite end of the tunnel, and ending the photo with the trashcan near the end I was standing at. I believe the application stitched together five photographs to make the finished product.

I thought that photographing the tunnel with the panorama application would provide a really surreal experience. I was hoping to capture the setting with one smooth motion. I thought the tunnel would look really incredible in such a wide frame. I wanted it to seem like the the walls were warping outward.

Daniel Peterson - Crit 5 Recipe

I obviously used the panoramic view for this picture, but there is actually a lot more to it. First off, my phone didn’t come with a capability of taking panoramic pictures in the camera app that came with the phone. I downloaded the “Pano” app for Android as Professor Berkowitz suggested. At first, I thought that this app didn’t work, but it was actually the photographer (me) who wasn’t using the app correctly.

Once I found out how to use the app, I knew how to find what I was looking for in a panoramic picture. I was driving by this corner store and for some reason the content in this setting made me want to pull over and observe what I might be able to create out of the scene. I came up with what you see with the assistance of Snapseed’s drama filter. 

Brittany Smith- Crit 5 Recipe

 

 

Critique 5 was a little more difficult in my opinion.  I never really liked the panorama setting on my phone in the first place because of how exact you have to be.  I did see that some students played around with how “steady” you have to be while taking the panoramas and they worked very well, so I wish I did more with that.  I definitely enjoyed doing the long exposure photos a lot more.  I downloaded a long exposure app and I had a fun time playing around with it. 

This was my POW and I don’t necessarily think that it was one of my strongest photos.  Other students just said that they really liked the composition of the photo and the way that the cones lead your eyes up the photo.  That is definitely what was intended, especially with the theme of extended seeing.  I’m glad that I was able to successfully pull that off for this photo. 

Bill Wilson - Crit 5 - Recipe

I was really not a big fan of the slow shutter photography.  I downloaded multiple apps but I couldn't get the desired result from most.  This one was taken using an app called "SlowShutter."

I literally took hundreds of these slow shutter pictures, and only a handful came out as usable, and this was probably the best of those.  I used the 4x shutter speed, and the bus passing by became translucent, as you can see the street behind through the moving windows.

From an editing standpoint, I spent a lot of time trying to find the right filters and light levels with this one.  In it's unedited state, the photo was pretty good, but I thought it could get better and I wasn't exactly sure how.  I settled on a 25% light fill, about 50% highlights, and boosted the color strength by about 25% (all using Picasa).

Bill Wilson - Crit 4 - Recipe

The wine glasses photo was voted as the picture of the week.  Several people mentioned this photo having the deepest memory, with feelings of awkwardness and mystery associated with a “first date” (interestingly it wasn’t taken on a date, but at a business meeting).

I tried to capture the split between the red wine and white wine, and if you split the photo diagonally from top left to bottom right, there is a clear division between the darker red and lighter white/yellow colors (not just the wine, but the color and tone of the surrounding atmosphere).  I basically just got lucky that I noticed this, and I didn't stage it that way.

I took 3 or 4 similar photos and this ended up being the best one, most of them captured too much of the room and it lost the meaning.  From an editing standpoint, I used a color boost filter to make the colors more pronounced, but only subtly so.  There is the tiniest bit of blurring in the photo.

Kat Fleck Crit 5 Recipe

I started off crit 5 by shooting the view of the city lights from my apartment window at night. Ultimately, this led to my focus on light as a subject for my photographs during this session. For this photo, I just used the panorama feature on my phone. To me, there wasn't anything visually stimulating about the park (seen at the left of the photo), so I wanted to make sure to capture as much of the cityscape as I could in one photo. I was incredibly lucky that the sun was where it was over the buildings to the far right, and that I caught the "line" of sunshine extending across the photo.