I was incredibly nervous before starting this assignment, mainly because of the time limit. 15 minutes to take all sorts of different pictures didn’t seem like enough time to get even a few done to my liking. But as I got started, I found the process to be pretty quick! During the time crunch I’d read the prompts and immediately get a couple ideas on what to do, and had to work quickly to see which idea was my favorite and set it up as best I can in order to get through all of them. I wasn’t able to get every picture, but I got a pretty decent amount of them all together. Some turned out much better than others, some needed to be retaken, and a few surprised me with how much I liked them.
I took all of these in the basement I live in on my phone as I have a lot of trinkets and items I felt would make for interesting pictures. I tried to make use of many tips from David duChemin’s “20 Ways to Make better Photographs”, and found that his tips on lighting, contrast, and depth were very helpful to me. For instance, the image that represents joy for me is a picture of a calendar with vibrant, colorful flowers on it. Yet getting the lighting to show off the contrast of the picture kept throwing me off. I thought about the advice I had just read, and started moving my lamp around under the calendar to see if I could get better results. Moving it closer on my desk wasn’t bright enough, moving it right under the calendar was far too bright, and eventually I settled on awkwardly holding the lamp with one hand and taking the picture with another. On the other hand, the bright light picture I took has so much good contrast in it that it’s easily a favorite out of all the ones I’ve taken. I originally wanted a picture of a bright scene, so I put my camera up to my lamp and as soon as it focused I was surprised by how clear and contrasted the image was. Another surprise was the end time picture. It was just to showcase the time, but after looking at it more closely I was really happy with the way the focus shows depth in the image. There’s a very clear foreground and background, and they both look so different even though they both fit perfectly together.
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