Blog Post #5

Progress Report:

During the last two weeks, I was able to work on my photo editing skills. In the first meeting, my mentor and I went over some of the pictures I had taken earlier. During the prior week, he had given me a special 85mm portrait lens to work on the focus, rather than having to control the zoom and focus. This is what I used to photograph my dog. As I mentioned above we went over the pictures I had taken and then we picked out our favourites. Here are a few of my favourites below:

After looking at the photos Mr. Ross introduced me to photoshop and showed me the basics of most tools. Knowing that I didn’t have photoshop installed at the moment he let me edit the photos on Lightroom. Here are the same photos but edited:

As you can see I was able to light up my dog’s face in all of the photos. In the one photo on the bottom in particular I would have liked to keep the very dark background the same as it was before editing the shot. The first one, where my dog was laying on the red seat, I found that I had edited it pretty well and it doesn’t need any improvements same with the middle one.

By editing my photos and getting a second opinion it has helped me grow my editing techniques. It lets me see my photos from another perspective.

How to Have a Beautiful Mind:

Definitions of the different hats:

White hat: White means information. ex. Hard facts and personal facts/rumours.

Red hat: The Red hat includes intuition and emotion.

Black hat: This includes critical thinking and judging information.

Yellow hat: This hat looks for values, benefits and why something should work.

Green hat: This hat is productive because it “asks for ideas, alternatives, possibilities and designs”. The creative part of the conversation.

Blue hat: This hat helps organize other hats. It defines the focus and purpose of a conversation. It also sets up a sequence of hats for the conversation.

Sample conversations (I highlighted the hat examples in the original copy, but it didn’t copy over on my blog, so I changed the colour of the text instead):

Week one (going through pictures of my dog and one picture of my friend):

R: I believe this one is a picture of your sister.

N: No, actually this is a picture of one of my friends in school. Right after you gave me the assignment to take portraits with the 85mm lens, I decided to just take a few pictures of her.

R: This one actually turned out quite nice.  Like her expression, and all that, might not be perfect, and I saw you only had two pictures. So next time maybe continue on, like you know 10 minutes of chatting there and keep taking pictures. You probably would get some really great shots. This one is really good though just some minor changes.

Week two (Looking through the edited photos of my dog):

N: So here are the photos I edited of my dog. I basically did what you assigned, which is that I just played around with the different settings. I believe I took ten photos. I Like quite a few of the photos. As you can see here already, in this photo I edited of my dog I lightened it up and made the eyes a bit lighter.

R: I think this one here is really good. That’s exactly what you want to see. I remember there being a competing focus part earlier, but it looks like you cut that part out, which makes the face the part you focus on. Did you change anything else like the editing of her face at all or did you mostly just change exposure and that kind of thing?

N: If you look closely there’s this little ring around the eye that I made a bit lighter using a brush tool because it was quite dark so you couldn’t see anything.

R: I really liked that addition. What about the next photo?

N: the next photo is very similar, but I edited it in a different way.

R: I personally like the other one better. The contrast was better in the last one.

A link my mentor shared with me:

https://www.liveabout.com/elements-of-composition-in-art-2577514

During these two weeks, I was able to improve my skills in photo editing and download new software to tryout. I am hoping that over the course of the remaining time, I get to grow even more. Come back in two weeks to see me grow and continue on my journey! Bye!! 😊