My Mentor

The person who will be mentoring me is Elizabeth Gray. She’s a professional photographer and focuses mainly on street photography and is very experienced with Lightroom and Photoshop. Elizabeth has been teaching photography for over 25 years. Her website: https://photographybyelizabethgray.com/ introduces her background, her works, and her photography instruction classes. I will be meeting online with Elizabeth next week and will be writing more about this mentorship in my next post.

Progress Report

Since last week, I’ve been learning more about image editing in general, started working with Photoshop, and started following an online guide on YouTube.

I’ve done some research into editing workflow. I found it useful to watch videos of professionals creating projects from start to finish. This channel was one of my favourites: https://www.youtube.com/c/BennyProductions/videos. Following videos also gave me an idea of what common tools I would be using in Photoshop, and introduce me to some core features of the program. This was very helpful when starting the tutorial. I was quicker to grasp how parts of the program worked.

Before starting the tutorial, I tried out Photoshop on my own first. I used dummy images and tried to figure out how I could do some simple tasks. I thought that my learning would benefit a lot more by fiddling with the program myself beforehand. The tutorial I’m following is linked here: https://youtu.be/IyR_uYsRdPs. So far, I’ve learned how to combine multiple images, and to use the transform tool to resize, rotate, crop, and distort an image. I’ve learned a distinctive piece of Photoshop, called layers. Layers allow you to stack different images on top of one another, and hide certain images within your project. Layers are very important when working with all kinds of Photoshop projects. Following the guide, I’ve also learned how to adjust a photo’s tones, colors, and hues.

I’m happy with my progress so far. I’m hoping to learn some valuable tips from my mentor next week, and I will continue following the online tutorial. For my first meeting with my mentor, I’ve prepared some general and specific questions that I’m curious about.