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.

Jess Fred - C5 - Recipe

For Crit 5, I played around with the contrast in all of my photographs in order to see how dark I could make the shadows without losing the form. Using the Snapseed, an app for iPhone, I adjusted the levels and heightened the contrast to make the shadows on the right and the row of chairs much darker than the light wood flooring.

Jake - Recipe 5

For my picture for topic 5, I got to experiment with panoramas and slow shutter photography, which is something that I don't do normally. I usually just open up my iPhone camera and snap pictures, but for these, they took longer and a little more planning. And, the slow shutter required that I do it at night, which limited my time with it.

I have messed around with slow shutter photography before, but not on a phone. It took a little bit of research to find an app that did it, but eventually I found "Top Camera". It was very easy to work with, and did exactly what I needed. It cost $2.99 which isn't too bad, either.

After purchasing it, I went out with a couple of my friends and had them walk around and we messed with the slow shutter feature. The result of my pic of the week was done by my friend walking across the street when the light was green for him, causing the cars that faced him to light him with their headlights. That's why we get the result of his head in his walking pattern.

While messing around with panoramas, I turned my phone sideways for them to be a vertical picture rather than a landscape view, which I tried to avoid.

The pic of the week required to touch ups, I just posted it and it was one of my favorites, too.

Crit 5 Extended Seeing

The app I used was PhotoSynth. A panoramic application. I like it because ti doesn't limit you to just doingleft and right or else just up and down. You can do where ever and just click.

I was having trouble with it limiting you of where you can take a photo, if it couldn't catch a reference points it would not let you take a photo, but if you clicked fast enough it did it for you.

This photo was done looking down and taking photos in quick sequence. I would go back and forth overlaying photos even if I took a photo in that area. I did this because looking down it was just a mess of leaves in a chaotic form. And wanted to try to exaggerate that feeling in the photo.

Andrew Gatzemeyer C4

I revisit most memories while trying to sleep, either very late or early. This image reminds me of that early morning scenario when the light is coming through the window and keeping me from falling back asleep. The low angle provides that perspective as if my head were still on the sheets, lingering before leaving bed.

I reduced the contrast the ease some of the harder shadows and adjusted the highlight tones slightly to add a bit of red into the more exposed areas and adjusted the shadows for a touch of green. It is very subtle but provides a bit of vintage feel without distracting from the content. The shallow d.o.f. helps to accentuate that early morning grogginess (and waking up without my glasses on).

Andrew C3 recipe

This was my personal favorite of the group. I took a version of this with the lamp shade level with the table but then felt flat and uninteresting. But by tilting the shade slightly, it gained some mystery. There was also a perfectly soft light filling from a window on the right that gave a pretty uniform light on the wall.

To accentuate the hard lines of the light cast, I added a few layers of contrast and darkened the shadows. This brought out the grainy texture in the shade itself and made for an overall appealing image.

Bennett Moore - Brush Strokes Technique (Hopeful extra Credit!)

Using low shutter speeds I tried to recreate the look of brush strokes. I velcroed my phone to my tripod (a very useful thing to do regardless of the topic) and then went outside on a windy day. Depending on how strong the wind was blowing I would shoot anywhere from a 3 second (heavy wind, see 2nd picture) to a 20 second exposure (lighter wind, see 1st picture.) It took a lot of experimentation but I got something that I think looks absolutely beautiful, like an impressionist painting in our world.

Brittany Smith- Crit 4

 

 

Crit 4 was so far my favorite topic to shoot.  In my collection of photos, I really tried to capture items that we use to record memories, items that contain my own memories, or how memories seem to us in our heads.  Often times, memories are very vague and sometimes hazy when we try to think back on them, which is why some of my photos have less clarity.  Also, sometimes we only remember a certain part of a moment, like a few seconds of a laugh, a chair, a hand, etc.  That’s what I tried to capture. 

My POW for crit 4 is this picture of a bear laying out in the trash for trash pick-up.  I was walking down the street one night and found this.  I thought it was kind of comical, actually, but then also felt bad because I have also been through break-ups that made me want to just throw out everything that reminded me of that person.  This photo goes very well with the “memory” category for obvious reasons.  It vividly represents memories that we wish we didn’t have to carry with us.  Sometimes we wish we could just throw them out. Unfortunately that doesn’t always work. 

Brittany Smith- Crit 3

 

 

 

 

No one voted on the same photo for the passion critique.  So out of the ones that were voted on, I chose this photo.  It was my favorite out of the collection for a few reasons.  The angle that the photo is taken from is intriguing.  I woke up one morning and my feet were in this position and I liked the way the light was coming in from my window.  I feel like the picture is exposed very nicely and contains enough mystery.  I also feel like it is making a play on “passion”, because this person is obviously just laying in bed so its almost portraying them as lazy. 

Amanda- Crit 4 Recipe

These two photos were voted the best in my collection of photos. I think that the first one was the most successful so I will comment on that. I took this picture while at a stop light driving through Philadelphia. Taking pictures while driving is  bad idea but I found a lot of subject matter and outside lighting that was particularly interesting, not all of my photos came out focused though. Thinking of "vintage" and "memory" as our theme for this critique I was particularly interested in the wear on buildings and architecture in Philadelphia. The blue trailer and the blue trash bins stood out for their color and I played around with using filters on my phone. I downloaded several applications yet I couldn't find one that didn't require more photo storage on my phone. I decided to create a new account through Instagram and use the filters offered there which also required a square cropping. Cropping these photos actually helped me a lot in creating nice framing and composition and the filters offered gave me endless possibilities of tones and colors for the same image which was interesting. After exploring each filter, I ultimately chose the most enhancing of contrast for both of these photos which intensified their color and made the image more successful.

Dann - Crit 4 - Recipe

 

First off, I want to say texting while driving is bad as well as taking pictures while driving. To completely contradict myself, I’ll have to admit I took this while I was driving my car. Actually, I was at a stop sign and no one was laying on their car horn behind me, so I had a chance to roll down the window, stop, and take about three or four shots. There was only one shot where the little boy on the bike completely made it into the frame of the picture. Just thought I should mention the production in the field since it had kind of an interesting story. However, I realize I should be talking more about post-production, so here it goes…

Even though this photo was dramatic when I took it, I decided to make it a little more dramatic by using the drama filter effect with Snapseed. I didn’t have the filter effect maxed out, but I would say it was at a higher level which helped with the desaturation which everyone loves in this photo. The scene itself had a pretty good contrast, but I did actually go into the tuning options in Snapseed and slightly increased the saturation for contrast since the drama filter made all the colors look so flat. It’s pretty hard to believe I increased the saturation when everyone talked about how much they liked the lack of saturation. I would highly recommend the drama filter in Snapseed as a method for lowering photo saturation.  

Lauren W. Crit 4 Recipe

This image was taken while I was at work of a co-worker (who has no idea I took his photo, by the way).  I increased the contrast and brightness super high, increased the white balance slightly to create a subtle sepia look.  I would consider my approach to this photo as a shooting from the hip style, mainly because I did not want the guy to realize I was taking a picture so just held my phone low and tapped away at the screen.  I am happy with the results and am glad mostly everyone voted unanimously.  The space flows throughout the image really well and creates tones of shapes which adds to the composition.

Kat C4 Recipe

I actually had some trouble getting started on this critique. I downloaded several vintage filters and apps to my phone, but they each required an external memory drive, which I don't have. Eventually I just decided to use the features that my phone already has: a "Kelvin" feature, which seems to emphasize reds and yellows, and a "Toaster"feature, which is a graduated highlighting feature. These filters helped, but I would have preferred a wider selection.

The memory subject was also a challenge. My fa
mily and I just moved to Hoboken, so there's not much in the terms of "memories" yet. I decided to focus on the Fall, and some of the more noticeable vintage locations in Hoboken, which is why I decided to photograph the Clam House sign in image 4.

Jess Fred - C4 - Recipe

I also tried new processes of toning to get all of my photos to look exactly the same tone. with the most. I took the photo and used the vintage filter on the iPhone app, Snapseed. Then, I took the saturation down and added a slight blue tone top. I really like the final tone; it looks vintage, but the cooler colors on top give it more mysterious, memory look. The comments on my blog post also agreed; they thought that the tonality was cohesive throughout my shots and gave each piece both a vintage and mysterious feel. One comment even talked about the tonality making my shots look like dramatic events.

Taylor Donges - Crit 4 - Recipe

Double Exposure/Instant Camera Effect 

For this photo, I used a combination of a customized version of the instant camera effect and the double exposure feature on the Vignette application. I took the first image of my friend Rory, taking a picture of me with his DSLR. The second image is a close up shot of a sign that reads “DO NOT PARK ON GRASS”.

I tweaked the preset “instant camera” effect by scaling back the intensity of the initial effect and turning up the vignette feature. I thought that the text would look interesting superimposed over the image of Rory in the woods. I added the "Print" frame, putting a white border around the image to give the illusion of an actual photographic print.

Bennett Moore - Recipe Crit 4

For this photo, I had already decided I wanted to feature the toy dinosaur I found and was outside in my back yard when I decided to stick the cigarette butt in his mouth. It was difficult to hold the camera steady with one hand while reaching around with the other to spark the lighter, but I eventually got one that wasn't blurry. I used the app Snapseed on this and my other photos this week to give it the vintage feel. The filter isn't as heavily plastered on as some of my other photos but it is definitely noticeable. I don't remember exactly which settings I tweaked, as I usually just mess around in Snapseed until I get something that looks good. If I could do it again, I'd frame it with a slightly different background because the fence is at a bit of an off-putting angle. The leaf in the foreground bottom right is also starting to bother me...grrr.

Jake - Recipe 4

For my picture this week, I got inspired while walking around downtown. I was looking for similar shapes, and it sparked an idea. First, I took a picture of a bike, chained up somewhere. It had to be against a background that was not only interesting, but not confusing (for example, it couldn't be chained up with a lot of other bikes, for it would be too dark and wouldn't stand out). It took me a bit but I found a bike off of South Street. Then, I took the picture of me on the sewer grate.

Next, I used an app called "Image Blender". I did exactly the effect you see in the photograph within the app. I had a soft edge on the way I cut it, and moved /scaled it to the right size in order to match the circles.

Finally, I touched it up a little in the Camera+ app to give a little color saturation and pop to the overall picture. The sidewalk lines and brick background added to the photograph and I think it all worked out well!

Jess D - Crit 4 - Recipe

My photo of the week was a point-blank shot of an old heater in my bathroom. I used the editing program, iPiccy, to crop it and run it through a filter. The filter gave the center of the photo a brightened, yellowed effect while adding a subtle darkened vignette. I think this filter made the photo more effective by adding more color and complexity to an otherwise obvious shot. I also think that the composition of the photo worked well to convey a "vintage" feel, and the subject added mystery to the photo since not many people have seen heaters like this one.