The first thought is fear, and brother, it emits a crippling bend

This picture is one that I took the night we went to DTGC. After almost two cold hours of picture taking downtown, I apparently still hadn't gotten enough because when I was walking back the fog struck me as photo-worthy so I snapped a few. As I was mid picture of a slow shuttered picture, the fog started to rise and really almost completely went away in a thirty second time period. It was pretty cool to see, and I think made a pretty good picture as well. Below is the original in color. I liked the green of the grass, but I don't miss the colors of the picture overall too badly.
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This is the original image that I took. It is of some roses that my boyfriend gave me for Valentine's Day courtesy of my sorority's annual rose fundraiser benefiting Relay for Life. I like this picure because of the way I successfully focused on the second rose and none of the others. My biggest criticism of the picture is the white ledge below the roses, although it adds to the line that your eyes follow with the roses, I think it is overall kind of distracting. I did take several others from a lower angle, but this is the one that I edited for our purposes. Below you will see the picture edited by adjusting curves in Photoshop. I messed around with the levels on my own for a while and then clicked the options button and this is what it gave me. I like how bright it made the second flower and how radiant the green of the stems are, but I do not like that the focus is now even more on the white ledge below the roses. If i use this picture for anything I will certainly crop it out. I do not think the rose the most in the foreground will be missed too much since it is not the one in focus anyway. Below the picture you can see the curves and the Options pane that opened up.

And this is sure to misspell disaster

I took two pictures like this. I really like this one to look at because of the way the light hits the different surfaces and makes everything look different, but my favorite thing is actually how it looks convincingly black and white, but it isn't. I used a big aperture to keep the focus on just the wall and ice and I wanted to see if it would throw part of the frame out of focus. It didn't really but I'm ok with that. Looking at the picture I think it appears black and white, but by looking at the histogram (which I learned about this week), I can see that there are some colors in the picture.








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This is a picture from Downtown Grove City. I took many pictures of the Guthrie theater from the street and wasn't very impressed with them. I also took a lot of pictures of the church next to the Guthrie, also unimpressive. Then I went to the alley where some of the most interesting backdrops are in DTGC. I liked this picture of the Guthrie from the alleyway for several reasons, mostly the lights. I liked how the lights shone off the wet bricks lining the alley as well as the ice lining the ground and even the pavement itself. The shutter speed was relatively long for the amount of light in the picture and it was because I used a small aperture to get the detail of the sign as well as the bricks lining the path. I would have preferred if the lights were less blurred, I'm not sure if I used the self timer on this picture, if I didn't I should have. Although, I kind of like that "Guthrie" is the only legible word in the frame. I also wish the people in the picture were not there.





Note: I do not recommend being in dark alleys late at night, even in dtgc it can be quite unnerving.

the rules that never ever multiply

This assignment was to take a picture with all of the white balance settings on our cameras. There were some pretty drastic differences between several of the pictures, but I had a hard time actually choosing which one I thought looked the best.

This picture was taken with the daylight setting.
It was at about 5pm so a pretty good time to take pictures.
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This picture is auto white balance. Its not really that pretty.
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This one was interesting because the sky pops since it is so bright blue,
but then you realize it's because the rest of the picture is also blue.

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This picture is the fluorescent white balance setting.

And I, I am a passenger tonight/I watch the world, from inside

This is a picture I took in Chinatown a couple of weeks ago. I would have liked to have had a tripod not only to make the lighting better, but to catch the lights of the cars going by.








The EXIF data shows that I took the picture without really knowing what I was doing. I should have used a higher number aperture and ideally if I had had a tripod I would have used a much longer shutter speed. I don't remember if it was in a mode.




The levels show that it was clipped on both ends. The sky was too dark and made it completely black, and the lightest parts of the highlights were completely lost. When editing this image, I boosted the highlights to 100% so that there was a little bit more detail in the overexposed sections. What I thought made the biggest difference was when I selected a neutral white/gray for the tint and it removed the very orange glow that the picture had. In conjunction with the tint, I also increased the color temperature.




This is the final image post-adjustments. A tripod still would have been preferable, but I do think these adjustments improve the quality of the picture. The white highlights are still distracting, but perhaps less so. The only thing I think got a little worse was the lights on the building at the top. Otherwise, I think it was a moderately successful edit.

Wincing the Night Away

While not overly impressive, this is my first ever picture of a series taken with a tripod; therefore, I am quite proud. I like Orion's belt in the top left. I like in this series of pictures the lights emanating from behind the trees to the left. I do not like the intensity of the light that I tried to cut out of the picture, I liked it even less when it was in the pictures. I also do not like banality of the image.










I was unable to get the shutter speed below 4.5 for some reason, but I was also told that it's better not to shoot at the maximum, so I suppose it is acceptable. My 25 second shutter speed was the longest I have dealt with, and I forgot to check the ISO when taking the pictures, but that is where I would have put it if I had remembered.