Sunday 14 August 2011

Another Photo I'd Didn't Use In Assignment 5.


I nearly forgot to include this shot, this was Adding A Little Light from my notes on assignment 5 that my tutor recommended me not to include, i still like it but instead i add the image I've already talked about in my changes to assignment 5 section.

Friday 12 August 2011

Final Thoughts.

As i come to the end of another course i find myself asking what i have learned and what I'll take away from this. What i learned is simple Photoshop is a very powerful piece of software that is almost irreplaceable in the world of digital photography because of the creative powers it gives us. I seen alot of other peoples work over time and more often then not question how they produced that particular effect or how they'd made something look how they had but I'd never really before been able to gt my head around the processes involved or the time and effort that is needed to produce this work. From doing this course i now have the skill and confidence in using layers, blend modes, opacity control even using filter effects which before this point i had maybe played around with but never really understood the uses for them. On the whole i feel I've add a new side to my work that wasn't their before and found a new interest outside of wildlife and landscape photography, that's not saying i can't include what I've learn in this type of work its just now i can see other subjects as interesting because of the scope i have inside photoshop.
I was never a real fan of what i would call digital altered images but now i can see there merit and can understand why people are drawn to this way of working because more then once I've taken hours at a time just to get an image to look as i want it all because of the control that is available to me. I still think there are limits to how far you should alter photos but then maybe its down to the viewer to decide if I've gone to far, I'd like to think that i never have.

Tuesday 9 August 2011

Changes to My 5th Assignment.

After getting my Tutor Report back for Assignment 5 there was some alterations that my tutor thought could improve my work that I've had a go at.



One of the first thinks that i wanted to put in this section was the original image i used for my Me Or Is It? It'll probably help you to understand exactly what i did by being able to see the two shots together so that's what I've included above. I have to say that I'm still very happy with this shot not because I've radically altered my appearance but more because of the overall look of the final image.


One of the first alterations recommended to me to try was to make the cracks smaller in my Cracked image. To do this i used the clone stamp to remove alot of the bigger cracks but what i ended up do was removing a lot more of these plus some of the smaller one to see how it would appear with less cracks. It does i suppose look a lot less busy because of the reduction and you can maybe appreciate the shot its self more but I'm still leaning towards used my first attempt in my final selection because my gut tells me its the better one of the two.


The next image he thought could do with a slight change was Harvest Time, here it was more that he felt that the harvesters appeared to be all in a line moving over the same area (which doesn't appear really that realistic) so what he thought might improve it would be to move the rear most one over to the right a bit. This as you can see i did but whether its actually an improvement I'm not completely sold on, yes they do now appear more spread out across the field but to me the composition of the shot doesn't feel right. In retrospect it might have look better if I'd shot a number of frames over a much larger area of the field instead of in a straight line because then a more spread view would have been easier to produce.

Finally my tutor didn't rate very highly my Adding A Little More Light photo, here I'd basically just added a lens flare affect to make it appear as if the sun was really bright in a room so instead i produced a new image above. Here i duplicated the original layer and then converted it to black and white before using the eraser tool to bring through the colour of the boats below, its not one of the original images i chose to use but i think it still fits into the pattern of the other shots i have in this assignment.