Drowning

Or so it felt like it. This project was due on Thursday at 2pm. I didn't know how to make the sound trip work (so that when the ice hit the water the flash would go off) and I spent the whole night Wednesday trying to figure it out. Apparently I was missing one part of the system. Anyway, it wasn't working, and at 8am Thursday morning I had nothing to show for class... and in a class designed to develop time management where deadlines are EVERYTHING... that's not good. So Thursday morning I was at the cage, checking out a studio to attempt to do this by hand. Thank god we have ice in building 7...

So somehow I managed to shoot this project. And turn it in at 2pm on that day. It was brilliant. And my class loved the results. Hopefully you do too.

3-D Madness

Sorry for not writing in a while. School was insane for the last couple of weeks while i finished my projects. Anyway one of my facorite projects (and one that I want to continue working with) thus far has been the stereo project. I used the QTVR tripod head which has two rails, and took two photographs of the same scene separated laterally by about one inch. I then deleted the red channel out of the first image and copied and pasted the red channel from the second image into the first (wordy enough for you?). This slightly offset red channel is what gives the illusion of a 3-D space when you put on red/cyan 3-D glasses. I hope you have some sitting around so you can see the stereo.

Video Editing

For the last two weeks my group and I have been slaving over this assignment. 5 minutes of video takes something like 3 hours of footage... it's really complicated. I tip my hat to those in the video industry. We had a lot of fun with this project because we were documenting something we were interested in... and the people we talked to were full of stories! It was seriously a great time, and I'm proud of this video.

These were for my architecture assignment. MY class was really excited that I chose to photograph at night for this. Honestly, I think all architecture should be photographed at night. The lighting is so much better - usually buildings are lit from the outside to accentuate their architectural style, and I wanted to highlight that. I ended up compositing a few images together in order to get a single properly exposed photograph.

Don't Prick Yourself

I love happy accidents. Although, I've been shooting this project for the last week and a half, and wasn't getting anything worth while. (The shot glasses below were the only thing for this project, prior to the safety pins that turned out well). I used a 105mm macro lens - and it was amazing. I LOVE the selective focus!

The point of the assignment is to use color to create an image of something "ordinary." My teacher wanted it to be similar to something you might see in an airline magazine. He suggested that we use colored gels and hot lamps, but I chose a different route. I used an off camera flash reflected off a sheet of white paper (draped around the pins so that it was reflected from all directions) and a colored card (courtesy of my color aid pack that I NEVER used from last year). I hope you enjoy the effect - I was pretty happy with the results!

Legalities

I'm officially 21...

Which means I'm old enough to consume alcoholic beverages in the United States. Sweet.

In the meantime, I have some shots of Sake that I was up all night working on. Really it's just a black line/white line. But I thought it was pretty - so even though I'm not turning this in, I thought someone might want to look at it. Or at least know that I'm capable of photographing glass with a black background.

Elbow Grease

I wish I knew what this sample was. It wasn't labeled, so I have no idea what it is. In the slide, it looked as though it might be snake skin. It was photographed at a higher magnification (20x), so there wasn't a large depth of field. I managed to take somewhere between 7 and 10 photos, each at a different focal plane. Then I took them into photoshop and merged them together so that I have one image with a much larger depth of field. Most people use something like Z-Stack to merge their stacks together... but I'm proud to say that I did this by hand. :)

Bad to the Bone

This is a human bone sample. Aren't the textures awesome!? This is a map, meaning there are several images here strung together to make the final composition. This sample is magnified to 10x. I don't know how I feel about the color... I think it's supposed to be more of a desaturated, grayish neutral. I balanced the darker areas to be neutral gray, but the lighter sections are still yellow or magenta. I'm working on it.

Editing...

This is a Hydra! Isn't he cute?! He was squirming all over the place as I was trying to photograph him. His movement made it difficult to find an interesting composition, as well as keep the image sharp. He was also squirming all over the place (and suctioning to the bottom of the container!) while I tried to extract him from his container to put him in the slide. It took a while, but eventually, I managed to get him into the slide, and take a decent photograph.

It didn't help that the lighting for the image wasn't even. As a part of my post processing, I had to paint in the background to make it one solid color, rather than an uneven vignette. It took a lot of time, but I think it's well worth the extra effort.

Geeking Out!!!

For one of the assignments in Photo in the Mic we got to use a fluorescent system. This is a cross section of a tilia stem photographed at low magnification with a 4x objective. I ended up stitching 3 images together to get this final "panorama." The red is where the sample fluoresced under the blue excitation filter (basically the entire thing). I thought it looked pretty cool.

The next few weeks are going to be a little wild at school. It's the middle of week 9, so there's a lot of work to be done, and I'm actually really excited to get started on a lot of it! More later!