Week Four Summary

This week was all about photography and photo editing. We had readings about modern photography, famous photographers, photo manipulation, and photography tips. We were also supposed to connect with others in the class on discord and twitter. I didn’t do this very well, because it’s a little uncomfortable to comment on strangers post, especially if I don’t have anything meaningful to say. No one has really been posting about their blogs or any work we’ve done in the class besides the daily creates. Unless I’m just not looking hard enough. Even a month in, I still haven’t really gotten used to discord either. Part of it is probably because I don’t have twitter or discord downloaded onto my phone. I’m sure this would make communicating easier, but I really don’t want to download it if I know it’s specifically for school. I like to keep my entertainment separate from my academics. As far as the rest of the assignments, they went pretty well.

Daily Create – Week Four

Three daily creates for this week again. I did “dot day”, “please_____________thank you” an d added a scene to an album cover. For dot day, I found a picture of a simple connect the dots on Google and drew it in my notes app on my iPhone. I screen recorded myself connecting the dots and posted it. For please, thank you, I used Google Draw and filled the blank in with “send me money”. Lastly, I edited Usher’s Here I Stand. I added an explosion to his album cover. And of course I posted them all using the correct hashtags for that specific daily create.

Assignment Bank – Visual

 For this week’s assignment bank, we had to do eight stars worth of visual assignments. Like last week I picked two assignments rated at about four stars. They didn’t take long and I actually finished both in one night. I prefer the visual assignments over the writings we did last week so these were actually kind of fun for me to do. 

Photo Manipulation

Photo manipulation has come a long way over the years and is now accessible to everyone. Photoshop is the main app used for photo manipulation, but many alternatives are available as well. With all of these tools available, we are able to change our photos by adding filters, fix blemishes, alter colors and shapes, and much more. Photo manipulation seems to be most noticeable with the editing of celebrity photos. Because we see celebrities and influencers in their perfect photos so often, a natural picture of them goes viral and we are shocked. Editing has given us a false sense of reality. Especially with the use of social media, beauty standards warp society’s view on what we should look like. Seeing celebrities and influencers look a certain way makes us want to look just as perfect, despite it not being real. We now expect everything to look high quality with no imperfections.

Jim Richardson

Jim Richardson is a photographer and his photos appear frequently in National Geographic Magazine. His work has taken him all over the world. His photos primarily focus on nature and traditions from different cultures around the world. I chose some of my favorites from his Small World Gallery. In all of his photos, Richardson has a good balance of color, lines and movement.

Photography Is (not) Dead

Photography plays a very big role in our lives, even if we’re not a photographer. I don’t know about you, but no matter how much storage I have on my phone, my camera roll seems to take up the most storage. We take pictures all of the time – screenshots of a cool recipe, photos from a vacation, pictures of your friends and family and of course much more. We have so many, that we may not even remember what it was originally from. This begins the discussion on whether we should be busy taking photos or videos during an event or just live in the moment.