Recently got my Canon t3i Rebel — and what a difference it makes.
The quality of the image is clearly much, much better [the pictures below required little to no photoshopping], and I’ve just begun to use it. I’ll let you decide if the composition is any better.
The pictures this week mark the end of the photos that will be taken with my older camera. My Canon S1 IS has been around for a while — I got it when I was much younger, played with it for a while, but I could never quite get my photographs to come out right. After a few months of point-and-clicking, I gave up and it sat in my room collecting dust — I only picked it up when some important occasion needed a photo or two. And now, it’s still a good camera — just not one that I think I will be able to grow as a photographer with. Next week, I’ll be shooting with my new camera. Hopefully I’ll be able to find some interesting new subjects!
For this week, here are some shots I took at the graduation yesterday, and some that I took while I was studying for my algebra qual.
The first two were taken with another camera. Notice the sharpness. And these were even cropped!
Here’s some from ‘round town.
And here’s two from the band playing at the graduation party thing. I wanted to take more photos, but my camera was running out of batteries. Sad.
I took some photos of two bands who played on consecutive Fridays by the student center here. I’m not sure what the bands were called, but if you do let me know!
I’ll admit, these are not the best quality. I feel a bit embarrassed going up to people using my little camera [though, it shouldn’t bother me!] since I feel more like a tourist than a photographer. This is not a technical issue, it is a user issue!
Some park stuff going on here, and I’m clearing out my old pictures touched up. I’m almost done with school, so next week I might try to bike somewhere interesting and take some shots.
I didn’t catch the name of the band in the first picture, but they were pretty good. The lobster-things are crawfish — here, they are super-popular. That was during something called the GSSA Crawfest. Pretty red. Also, there’s a squirrel eating an apple.
Week two of photoshop help. For these (with the exception of two), I’ve only used the Saturation and Levels tools in photoshop. The Levels too is pretty nice because it gives a bit of light-and-dark to an otherwise kind of grey-ish image. I didn’t notice how “flat” my photos seemed until I before-and-after’d a few of them. Saturation is a tool that, I’ve been told, should be used lightly — in the same way contrast should be used lightly. I’d rather not use the saturation or contrast things as “easy fixes” for otherwise boring pictures BUT I do find that increasing saturation does help some of the green pictures look a bit greener and decreasing saturation helps to give a photo that “old” feeling.
This last one was an accidental shot. I call it The Best Sandwich Ever.
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
This is a quote by Ansel Adams which I’ve seen over and over since I started taking pictures. I’ve seen it in the introductions to photo books, I’ve seen it on photo blogs, and I’ve seen it being recalled on photo forums. Of course, everyone has a different idea as to what he meant: composition, light settings, etc.
When I started taking photographs (and, indeed, I’m still at the very beginning —) I did not want to use photoshop at all. I thought post-production was cheating: it was just a way to get around not lighting your picture correctly in the first place.
Of course, this is not always the case. Sometimes my photos don’t pop. Sometimes I was expecting them to be moodier. And sometimes I don’t have time to set up the light settings before I shoot something. If I go back to what I thought to begin with — that photography, in the literal sense, is “writing with light” — then what happens after I hit the shutter-button is still part of this writing process.
To sum up, this week I’ve started to use photoshop a bit. I’m not usually going to be doing anything intense, just adjusting a few levels. If I do more, I’ll make a note of it.
The first two are older images that I tried to fix up; they were pretty bad to begin with. The first image is of this sign, but it’s 10pm and each of the letters lights up individually, one at a time. I kept the shutter open for a while, and I got this shot. It’s really backlit, but I did my best with it. The second is a weird story: I took a picture of this dog, but the photo sort of was terrible so I was getting ready to trash it when I noticed that a pretty big spider was hangin’ around on the side of the house (not by the dog!). The spider was hard to see in the original picture, and I wanted to see how well I could do in bringing out its details.
I’m a little more than halfway through half of the photo project. I told myself that if I made it through half [26 weeks] of this photo project and still loved going around taking pictures then I would buy myself a better camera. This week I want to link back to where I was at the beginning of the year to contrast where I am now. I’ve still got a long way to go, but I feel more comfortable with my camera. I like being able to think, “Yes, it looks okay on the LCD screen, but when I upload this it will be too _____.” and try to correct from there.
It’s also sort of comforting to have my camera. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m an anxious kid. Having a camera around in stressful situations helps take my mind off of things. It sounds pretty 90’s after-school-special, but it’s legit.
Here’s an older photo that I just found but didn’t upload until now. I like it because it’s basically me taking a picture of a bee’s butt. Here’s my newer stuff.
This is one of my favorite pictures, I think. It’s not positioned too well, and it’s not great color-wise or anything, but it’s the first photograph I’ve taken where I’m “tricking the viewer.” See if you can see what I mean.
This is from outside a Chinese restaurant in the back. After I took this, some guy came out and started yelling towards me in Chinese.
These are a few from last week, but I really like how the second one came out. The first required a bit of photoshopping since the sky always seems to come out so grey. The colors are more or less what I see when I look at the sunset, so this is as true-to-live as I can do!
The following ones are new: it was warm out, so I went around shooting a bit of the greenery — most of it didn’t come out, but I did like the two that did.
I got a snack, and then I went into the building next to the math building. There are a number of beautiful stained glass windows in there, but there’s also a lot of dull hallways.
These aren’t part of the photo project, they’re just the “best I can do” right now — unfortunately, NOLA is super bright all of the time, so it’s hard to find anywhere really dark. These are untouched [except the first, which was darkened slightly so that the noise wouldn’t show as much]. The ISO was 100, since my camera is SUPER noise otherwise. Also, interesting fact: there are not only lights below where I’m taking this picture, but they’re STADIUM LIGHTS. Really, really bright and really, really hard not to catch the strands of.
