CAGD 112 Digital Photography

Hyper-Realism Project

For our final assignment, we were assigned to shoot and composite a minimum of two photos together. The objective was to make a combination of two objects realistic, yet surreal to the naked eye. Approaching the Hyper-Realism project, I initially wanted to combine a picture of me sitting with some kind of plant of some sort for my first concept. I checked the internet (Google Images) for inspiration and I found this cool looking mushroom. I would use this for an example to photo shoot later. But after looking through my photo gallery another time, I found more interesting photos that opened to more ideas. It was a last minute thought in mind that I could combine a picture of me standing trapped inside something. I quickly looked around my surroundings in my room and the first thing I saw beside me was a water bottle. At that moment, another idea clicked, and I quickly double checked my fridge if there was any other drink that was interesting. Then I saw the Jack Daniel’s bottle stored in the back.

Final

As I got to work in Photoshop, I uploaded the pictures of me in a suit along side the Jack Daniel’s bottle. I used the quick selection tool and layer mask to isolate the picture of me in a suit and positioned myself in the bottle. The scene now was that my suit picture was in front of the Jack Daniel’s bottle, and my objective was to find the necessary tools to make it seem like I’m blended in the bottle. To do so, I looked for some resources to help guide me (Blackboard tutorials and Youtube videos). After some time researching through Black Board and Youtube I learned how to make my cut out self a smoother a cleaner look within the layer mask thumbnail. I was able to erase unneeded marks that stood out of place, and guide the seaming lines of the bottle to blend with the picture of me. To do this I had to make another layer style outside of the layer mask. From doing this, I noticed my opacity was too high, so I lower it to the appropriate blend. Then to guide the seaming lines to myself, I used a very low opacity brush, flow, and hardness and followed the bottle’s crease with white. This gave the Jack Daniel’s bottle a little shine to it. I also used the low opacity eraser tool to lower the darkness of my suit. The picture of me in a suit now looked like it blended in the bottle. My last edits were mostly just messing around the adjustment layers to give the bottle a little more pop to it. In this case, I used Exposure, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, Curves, and Photo Filter to make the bottle stand out a little more from the background.

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Portrait

In this assignment, students were to capture a formal like photos 

Final

Original

HDRI

In this assignment, we were assigned to use the bracketing feature in our cameras to take photos of three different exposures. Then we utilize the tools in Lightroom and merge these photos into one, creating a high definition photo, allowing greater range in tonal value. 

Unfortunately for this assignment, I might've forgotten to save the several photos I took with the rental camera and I am unable to find the photos through BlackBoard or Google Drive.  

Panorama

     For this assignment, we were to hand stitch a Panorama. We were assigned to take multiple photos with the same exposure, overlap them with enough space side by side, and stitch them together without showing obvious seam lines. All panoramic photos had to be taken outside, so I decided to check out Lower Bidwell park. I was walking along an outskirt trail beside the main walking trail until I stumbled upon a open creek with a gorgeous scenery that caught my attention. This scenery was taken around half an hour before evening while mostly cloudy during the day, showing a nice reflection of the trees with decent lighting. 

Final

I had a difficult time maintaining consistent lighting taking photos left to right. While I took some time adjusting the camera settings, a man walking his dog went off trail then went to the water. A funny moment when I was trying to shoot panorama photos the second time, the man that went off trail saw that I was taking photos, so he climbed a stable branch to shake some leaves for my shot. 

     The composition used for my image is trees surrounding a body of water. The strongest compositional elements I was able to achieve was capturing the nice reflection of the tree reflected on the water before sunset. The intended focal point is the tree to the right, though it can be difficult for the viewer to understand since it blends in with the background.
     Main issues I found while working on this project was the stitching process, especially working around with the lighting. I used six photos in total to create this panorama ad half the photos to the right had brighter lighting compared to the left. It was very difficult balancing the two, ultimately creating an obvious seaming line through the middle. I spent the most time deciding if I should transition the darker light source with the brighter one and vice versa.

original

original

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Things

     For our next assignment, the focus was to get very close to a single object while blurring the background, known as "Bokeh". Bokeh is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced from the out of focused parts of an image produced by a lens. The purpose of this project was to mess around the the Bokeh effect in the background while keeping a clear and crisp focal point of the targeted subject. I was able to achieve this shot by getting low on the floor, while adjusting the shutter speed, aperture and focus of the cap.

     I chose this cap as my subject at the time because it was a simple look with plain colors and a neat logo on the center to work with. Since the theme of the subject was a bucket of bucket, I thought it was more fitting to take a shot indoors in my apartment than outdoors. I saturated the cap a little to make a glow feel, providing more focus towards the main subject. For the blurriness, I used a cool blue contrast to hide the bright light in the background.

     Issues I experienced while working on this project was getting the right lighting to shoot and working around the enhancement tools to create a blur in the background. For the background, I dimmed the lighting from the window to the right, but still I didn't get the cool blue enhancement as I would liked since there was a weird effect from the small poster that was difficult to adjust. 

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On the Edge

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For the "On the Edge" assignment we were required to take a picture of a subject and have it placed near or at the borders of the camera frame. The premise of this assignment was to edit around and make it be in black and white. The second objective was to explore different image compositions, while using guide lines to provide emphasis on the subject and apply other image enhancement techniques.
This photo was taken at Boiler Chiller Plant, near the outskirts of lower campus. I just thought it would be interesting messing around with the textures of the brick wall. For the editing process I used Photoshop to gray scale the image.