Category: Composition

For this week’s using props theme, I found some difficulty in deciding what to photograph because of our current shelter in place situation. I found inspiration in the water droplets in the shower and decided to spray oil and water on the glass to create prominent water drops. I set up some lights, opened the window, and edited the photo in Photoshop.

During vacation, I took this picture which is partially underwater to play with depth of field. We were challenged this week to use depth of field to make the subject appear part of something larger. I like this photo because it makes those who see it feel as though they are in the pool. Additionally, since the lens is wide, the photo captures a lot more of the atmosphere.

This weekend, I helped some friends who are taking Film Analysis (an English alternative class offered at Los Altos High) with the film project that they are currently working on. Their film’s synopsis is an abandoned dog wanders through a town until he finds a new friend, and hopefully a new home. Since they wanted to get many different kinds of shots of the dog walking around, I decided that this would be a good opportunity to give a different kind of viewpoint. In this photo that I took with my drone (sorry it’s blurry; it is a screenshot from the drone video shot in 1080p!), I got the viewpoint of a neighbor watching the dog from the second story of their house. The neighbor sticks her head out the window and is surprised to see the dog wandering with no owner.

For this week’s photo blog, we were encouraged to explore color theory and the effect of color grading a photograph. I took this image from when we were on set filming our narrative film and then edited it in Photoshop. I color graded it by creating a selective color layer and I played around with lighting and with making the colors in the photo more soft and more as if the photo is a still from a real movie.

I utilized the rule of odds in a Nektar building. I noticed that they had hung up an odd number of pictures and had placed them in a way that was unaligned and visually appealing. In addition, the building had an odd number of windows.

This photo shows the feeling of behind left behind or left out. I positioned the rest of the group on the bottom left rule of thirds while the main girl is on the bottom right rule of thirds. She is also much closer to the camera but still looks the same height as those in the background, making her feel small and almost forgotten. I think I could’ve done better with the conveying of emotion in the photo.

As soon as we were given speed lights, I decided that Freestyle Homecoming would be a great place to practice using it since I was one of the photographers for the event. Since the dance is at night and outside, where there are not a lot of bright lights, the speed light came in handy and allowed me to capture the right moments with a quick burst of flash that actually made the photos show up instead of being entirely dark.

This week we took a portrait of someone and then used Adobe Photoshop to alter the subject’s face to be symmetrical to each side of the face. This week’s photo challenge was inspired by this symmetrical face portraits photography movement: https://mymodernmet.com/alex-john-beck-both-sides-of/