Today was the last day of class :'(
Well, at least it was the last day in class at youth in focus,
because there is no class next Tuesday and Thursday due to thanksgiving break.
The next class we have will be on November 30th and we will be meeting at the 619 western building, the place where the show is going to be held, and we will be hanging up our photos on this day.
All finals due today!!
You can only imagine how crazy it was. There was not a moment when the printer wasn't being used.
Everyone except for me and duy were not even half way through with their final pieces.
I was being nice pretty much the whole time and letting other people use the printer before me, sense I
already had my finals all ready to go. It did get irritating at times though because people would print without asking if someone was about to print so there was a long line for the printer all day, and also a lot of "mess-up photos" because if two people print at the same time it will confuse the printer and just print both of the images on the same piece of paper, on top of each other, some of them looked really cool though, haha.
About half way through the class I decided I didn't like one of the photos that I had framed,
It was the same photo I used for my postcard, the spider one,
I went back to editing it Lightroom, I messed around with it for a bit, re-cropped it so that the spider was in the middle and not the one side, and I also enhanced the colors of the spider, and I ended up liking this one way more the other one so I printed it out and replaced the two. Even C.B. agrees that it looks better.
I finally figured out how to make my self portrait look how I imagined it to look.
I took me a few prints to get to this one though, so I was happy when I was done with that and turned it in.
After finishing that I began to overview my artist statement and fix any in-corrections. This didn't take me very long, sense it was already written I just needed to edit it a bit.
I got those two done (self portrait & artist statement) so that was a good feeling.
C.B. had told us to print out 3 copies of each photo that is going into the show,
one for the show, one for the archives, and one for yourself (optional).
After printing those and getting all that done I started working on choosing a photo to print out for everyone.
I decided to use my photo of a 4-leaf clover, I thought of it has a form of "good luck" to give to everyone in my class. I wrote a little note to each of my classmates on the back of the photo and signed it with my name.
They all seemed to love what I gave them, a couple of them said they were going to hang it up on their wall, haha that's funny to me, but in a good way :)
David, one of my classmates, was super funny today, because he was one of the people that were behind, he was running around looking for things like mats, frames, towels, rulers, he needed everything basically, so I helped him a lot sense I was already done with everything. I actually helped a lot of people today, and let me tell you, they really needed it, haha.
C.B. and one of the mentors stayed after class because it was so crazy and a lot of people still had photos to print and frame. I stayed till 7:00pm to help a couple of them with framing and what not.
So I don't know what happened after I left but I'm assuming it must have been pretty crazy and a lot of them probably stayed a long time after class was over.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Tuesday, Nov. 16th: Matting & Framing.
With today being one of the last days to work on finals, it was a very busy day.
Everyone was in a hurry to get their mats and frames, which kind of gave me an advantage because
I already chose my mats and my frames last week in advanced.
I got to class about an hour early so I could be first in line to print, that was a big help because by the time
everyone started showing up I had half of my photos printed and ready to be framed.
I was surprised that another guy in my class, duy, was already there way longer before me.
Just goes to show how dedicated we are :) haha
It was hard picking out which pictures I wanted to put in the show, so I decided that day that I was going to set up my photos in a way so that there is two vertical nature photos on each side, two horizontal animal photos in the second placing, and a horizontal frame in the middle with two vertical photos of people.
The reason I did this was to have some kind of order with my photos, so they are not all jumbled up with no kind of meaning behind them.
Sometime during the middle of class it got really hectic because everyone was trying to use the printer, and there is only one printer by the way.
But I ended up getting all of my photos printed and framed by the end of the class, and I stayed through all of the "open darkroom" hours so 8:30pm was the end of class for me, it usually is.
All I have left to do now is make extra copies of them for the youth in focus's archives. Do some finishing touches on my self portrait and my artist statement. Clean all my frames' glass down with Windex. And print out 10 copies of a photo of my choice to give to everyone in the class. And I should be able to do all of that on Thursday, then I will be done with the whole thing.
Everyone was in a hurry to get their mats and frames, which kind of gave me an advantage because
I already chose my mats and my frames last week in advanced.
I got to class about an hour early so I could be first in line to print, that was a big help because by the time
everyone started showing up I had half of my photos printed and ready to be framed.
I was surprised that another guy in my class, duy, was already there way longer before me.
Just goes to show how dedicated we are :) haha
It was hard picking out which pictures I wanted to put in the show, so I decided that day that I was going to set up my photos in a way so that there is two vertical nature photos on each side, two horizontal animal photos in the second placing, and a horizontal frame in the middle with two vertical photos of people.
The reason I did this was to have some kind of order with my photos, so they are not all jumbled up with no kind of meaning behind them.
Sometime during the middle of class it got really hectic because everyone was trying to use the printer, and there is only one printer by the way.
But I ended up getting all of my photos printed and framed by the end of the class, and I stayed through all of the "open darkroom" hours so 8:30pm was the end of class for me, it usually is.
All I have left to do now is make extra copies of them for the youth in focus's archives. Do some finishing touches on my self portrait and my artist statement. Clean all my frames' glass down with Windex. And print out 10 copies of a photo of my choice to give to everyone in the class. And I should be able to do all of that on Thursday, then I will be done with the whole thing.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Career Profession: Wedding Photography.
I just recently started thinking more and more about wedding photography, and so this is what I decided to do my research on.
It makes for a pretty good income and they usually take place during weekends, so that makes it a lot easier to cover. Plus its all on location so there is no need for a studio setting, and the selling will be done in the home so that makes no need for an office.
Wedding photographs can be taken with almost any equipment you own, so that's cool. Although most photographers use a standardize camera with a 21/4 35mm, and one thing to remember is that the smaller equipment is easy to hold, and is easily maneuvered.
Another important key to wedding photography (and most other photography professions) is to always bring spares, you must have two camera bodies, two strobe units, and three or more synch cords. The reasoning for this is kinda obvious; if your camera stops working midway through an assignment their not just gonna stop the wedding and re-plan it, the wedding will go on with or without you, so it's always good to have spares just in case a catastrophe like that happens.
When it comes to flash equipment , it isn't actually necessary to have identical units. The price of a good unit would cost me about $60 or more, but the good ones come with a high-powered battery pack so that is a plus. A wedding photographer is usually hired to shoot the wedding, the reception, and the time whenthe bride is home when she's getting ready for the ceremony.
The price rises according to the time spent and the degree of coverage.
All weddings are usually photographed in negative color film.
Most professional photographers offer 4 x 4 or 4 x 5 proofs, and a suggestive thing to do is mount together the proofs in an album before you show them to the bride and groom. Because a album of the proofs looks more professional then just loose prints. Never show your client all the pictures you took, you don't really want to have discards anyways but if you have some photos where it's to dark or to light or the groom is opening his mouth, you want to get rid of those and you want your client to think that every picture you took was pure perfection. This is very helpful information for future business cost.
You should charge about a minimum of $25 an hour, figure an hour for the wedding, an hour before the ceremony in the brides home, and maybe two hours for the reception.
Some must have photos you will have to take; the bride coming down the aisle on her fathers arm, the bridesmaids and best man, the wedding ceremony, the throwing of the rice, the bridal bouquet, and the couple dancing and with their parents.
As far as advertising goes, you can use many methods, such as "the student market" most high schools have a newspaper and/or yearbooks that are avidly read by the student body. Most colleges and junior colleges have newspapers too, and these are an even better placement for your advertisement.
For your advertisement to be effective it must be fairly large and have a photograph that spells out romance.
It makes for a pretty good income and they usually take place during weekends, so that makes it a lot easier to cover. Plus its all on location so there is no need for a studio setting, and the selling will be done in the home so that makes no need for an office.
Wedding photographs can be taken with almost any equipment you own, so that's cool. Although most photographers use a standardize camera with a 21/4 35mm, and one thing to remember is that the smaller equipment is easy to hold, and is easily maneuvered.
Another important key to wedding photography (and most other photography professions) is to always bring spares, you must have two camera bodies, two strobe units, and three or more synch cords. The reasoning for this is kinda obvious; if your camera stops working midway through an assignment their not just gonna stop the wedding and re-plan it, the wedding will go on with or without you, so it's always good to have spares just in case a catastrophe like that happens.
When it comes to flash equipment , it isn't actually necessary to have identical units. The price of a good unit would cost me about $60 or more, but the good ones come with a high-powered battery pack so that is a plus. A wedding photographer is usually hired to shoot the wedding, the reception, and the time whenthe bride is home when she's getting ready for the ceremony.
The price rises according to the time spent and the degree of coverage.
All weddings are usually photographed in negative color film.
Most professional photographers offer 4 x 4 or 4 x 5 proofs, and a suggestive thing to do is mount together the proofs in an album before you show them to the bride and groom. Because a album of the proofs looks more professional then just loose prints. Never show your client all the pictures you took, you don't really want to have discards anyways but if you have some photos where it's to dark or to light or the groom is opening his mouth, you want to get rid of those and you want your client to think that every picture you took was pure perfection. This is very helpful information for future business cost.
You should charge about a minimum of $25 an hour, figure an hour for the wedding, an hour before the ceremony in the brides home, and maybe two hours for the reception.
Some must have photos you will have to take; the bride coming down the aisle on her fathers arm, the bridesmaids and best man, the wedding ceremony, the throwing of the rice, the bridal bouquet, and the couple dancing and with their parents.
As far as advertising goes, you can use many methods, such as "the student market" most high schools have a newspaper and/or yearbooks that are avidly read by the student body. Most colleges and junior colleges have newspapers too, and these are an even better placement for your advertisement.
For your advertisement to be effective it must be fairly large and have a photograph that spells out romance.
Refelction
I really enjoyed taking this class, pretty much everything about it.
The friends I made are probably going to be around in my life for awhile, some really interesting cool people.
The mentors were very helpful and there when we needed them. And C.B. is such a great teacher I can hardly even began to explain it. I'm going to be sad when time comes around and it' over.
In the beginning of the class I thought I wasn't going to learn that much because I had already worked with photoshop and lightroom years before, and it seemed like that's all they were going to teach. But I was surprised by how much C.B. knew and had to offer. He taught us some things that I will probably never forget, Ex: I learned what angling means, how it is really important when taking portraits of people because you only want to show some detail on the face. I also learned a lot about lighting and the big difference between sun light and indoor light, there is so many other lighting's you could use though. We went outside one day in class, well actually we did this a couple of days, but it was a sunny day so the lighting was really good at some angels, we all took pictures of each other and and looked at them after we were done. I thought it was pretty fun getting to do learn that hands-on.
One thing my mentor told me awhile ago, something that would have been so helpful to me all these years, Is that a large aperture and a very slow shutter speed will capture things with low-lighting, like the nighttime, and the moon and stars. I wish I would have known that before, I feel so stupid because it makes perfect sense now, haha.
I got more practice in cloning pictures, that means to select an area on the photo your working on or a completely different photo if you choose and you "clone" out that selected part then paste it onto the photo where you please. It is actually a really complicated tool in photoshop, until you get the hang of it that is.
This tool is fun though because you can go into photos with like a mom and her baby/kid and just switch their heads so that the picture stays completely the same but the faces are switched with each other so it looks really awkward and just like "whaaat?" hahaha.
Honestly, I wish this class was longer, it feels like I just started it and now it's already over. And I'm going to miss my camera so much it makes me want to cry :'(
I'm thinking about taking film classes after this, I don't know yet though, it will be a completely different world, and I can't began to imagine what it will be like only having a certain amount of pictures to took each week. Scary thought in my world, haha, I love being able to take like 30 pictures of the same thing and then just go back and find the one(s) I like the most.
The friends I made are probably going to be around in my life for awhile, some really interesting cool people.
The mentors were very helpful and there when we needed them. And C.B. is such a great teacher I can hardly even began to explain it. I'm going to be sad when time comes around and it' over.
In the beginning of the class I thought I wasn't going to learn that much because I had already worked with photoshop and lightroom years before, and it seemed like that's all they were going to teach. But I was surprised by how much C.B. knew and had to offer. He taught us some things that I will probably never forget, Ex: I learned what angling means, how it is really important when taking portraits of people because you only want to show some detail on the face. I also learned a lot about lighting and the big difference between sun light and indoor light, there is so many other lighting's you could use though. We went outside one day in class, well actually we did this a couple of days, but it was a sunny day so the lighting was really good at some angels, we all took pictures of each other and and looked at them after we were done. I thought it was pretty fun getting to do learn that hands-on.
One thing my mentor told me awhile ago, something that would have been so helpful to me all these years, Is that a large aperture and a very slow shutter speed will capture things with low-lighting, like the nighttime, and the moon and stars. I wish I would have known that before, I feel so stupid because it makes perfect sense now, haha.
I got more practice in cloning pictures, that means to select an area on the photo your working on or a completely different photo if you choose and you "clone" out that selected part then paste it onto the photo where you please. It is actually a really complicated tool in photoshop, until you get the hang of it that is.
This tool is fun though because you can go into photos with like a mom and her baby/kid and just switch their heads so that the picture stays completely the same but the faces are switched with each other so it looks really awkward and just like "whaaat?" hahaha.
Honestly, I wish this class was longer, it feels like I just started it and now it's already over. And I'm going to miss my camera so much it makes me want to cry :'(
I'm thinking about taking film classes after this, I don't know yet though, it will be a completely different world, and I can't began to imagine what it will be like only having a certain amount of pictures to took each week. Scary thought in my world, haha, I love being able to take like 30 pictures of the same thing and then just go back and find the one(s) I like the most.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Thursday, Nov 11th: Field Trip/Class Critique.
Unfortunately....youth in focus doesn't really celebrate veterans day, so we had to go to class today.
But instead of just going to class at the tree-house building at 3:30, my class and I planned a field trip for this day a while back, so we all had to meet up with C.B. and each other at his studio over in Fremont at 12:30pm.
It was kind of depressing having to wake up early though, because it was all foggy and gloomy outside, oh and on top of that I had to sit on a bus for almost two hours =/
I got a little lost when I got to Fremont, I kept taking different turns and twists before I finally just called C.B. After talking to him for a little bit we ended up realizing that I was just across the street from his studio, haha.
When I went inside the first thing I did was look at this photo albums, he is a big wedding photographer I guess, but I really like his work. After everyone in our class showed up, we all walked down to the troll, which happened to be just right down the street. He had us take a couple of class photos while we were there and then we went back to the studio. When we got there he ordered us like four pizzas from this Italian restaurant down the street, it was pretty good, and it was super nice of him to do that.
All the students that had school today had a "Class Critique" at 4:30, so we started heading to youth in focus at around 3:30pm to get there in time. Our bus was late and it was pouring down rain, but we had fun and ended up learning lot about each other on the bus rides there, and I forgot to mention, C.B., paul and kenna all have cars so they just drove to Y.I.F and left us to take the bus, hahaha meanies.
For some reason everyone thought we weren't gonna show up and assumed that we had decided to just take the day off or something. There was only about six students from one of the film back and white classes, so the youth in focus staff went out and bought several different kinds of ice cream pints for them, just for the hell of it. But then we showed up, so they felt bad and bought more so we could have some :]
After me and one of my class mates hung up our classes photos on the white bored, we all got ice cream and started the class critique. I thought a lot of the black and white classes photos were really good, and I had a lot to say about them. Once again, our class was the only ones talking for most the time.
We did class critique until the end of class,talking about each photo for 5 minutes, what we liked and didn't liked in detail. I stayed until 7:00pm to work on one of my photos that needed editing.
So, I guess you could call this just one of those "All Photography Days".
But instead of just going to class at the tree-house building at 3:30, my class and I planned a field trip for this day a while back, so we all had to meet up with C.B. and each other at his studio over in Fremont at 12:30pm.
It was kind of depressing having to wake up early though, because it was all foggy and gloomy outside, oh and on top of that I had to sit on a bus for almost two hours =/
I got a little lost when I got to Fremont, I kept taking different turns and twists before I finally just called C.B. After talking to him for a little bit we ended up realizing that I was just across the street from his studio, haha.
When I went inside the first thing I did was look at this photo albums, he is a big wedding photographer I guess, but I really like his work. After everyone in our class showed up, we all walked down to the troll, which happened to be just right down the street. He had us take a couple of class photos while we were there and then we went back to the studio. When we got there he ordered us like four pizzas from this Italian restaurant down the street, it was pretty good, and it was super nice of him to do that.
All the students that had school today had a "Class Critique" at 4:30, so we started heading to youth in focus at around 3:30pm to get there in time. Our bus was late and it was pouring down rain, but we had fun and ended up learning lot about each other on the bus rides there, and I forgot to mention, C.B., paul and kenna all have cars so they just drove to Y.I.F and left us to take the bus, hahaha meanies.
For some reason everyone thought we weren't gonna show up and assumed that we had decided to just take the day off or something. There was only about six students from one of the film back and white classes, so the youth in focus staff went out and bought several different kinds of ice cream pints for them, just for the hell of it. But then we showed up, so they felt bad and bought more so we could have some :]
After me and one of my class mates hung up our classes photos on the white bored, we all got ice cream and started the class critique. I thought a lot of the black and white classes photos were really good, and I had a lot to say about them. Once again, our class was the only ones talking for most the time.
We did class critique until the end of class,talking about each photo for 5 minutes, what we liked and didn't liked in detail. I stayed until 7:00pm to work on one of my photos that needed editing.
So, I guess you could call this just one of those "All Photography Days".
Tuesday, Nov. 9th: Planing & Matting.
Today we were each supposed to meet with C.B. to discuss our plans for the final portfolio and it's hanging order, orientation, titles, etc, etc...
I was surprised and I actually think my confidence got a little higher when I saw that I was the only one ready to choose my mats and frames.
Even though I only have two images that are for sure going into the show, I picked out all five mats and five frames just to make it easier on me and have them ready, so I don't have to go back and try to find one while everyone else in the world is trying to find one too.
And plus since I did that, now I know what pictures to look for in my albums because each matt has a different frame on the inside of it, so it's going to be less difficult choosing my final photos when I already know what to look for.
After going through boxes upon boxes and choosing my final mats and frames, I decided to go back on my computer and work on some more images and maybe my artist statement some more.
I'm very happy that I might have possibly found a number three contestant to hang up for my show. It is a picture that I took of my cat the other day, it was kind of a random shot and I didn't think I was going to use it at all, but when I started to edit it and changed it to black and white, I really liked it. The only problem is that when I edited and printed this photo, no one else was there (because I was in open darkroom) for me to get their opinions on it, so I'm just hoping other people will like it too.
I was surprised and I actually think my confidence got a little higher when I saw that I was the only one ready to choose my mats and frames.
Even though I only have two images that are for sure going into the show, I picked out all five mats and five frames just to make it easier on me and have them ready, so I don't have to go back and try to find one while everyone else in the world is trying to find one too.
And plus since I did that, now I know what pictures to look for in my albums because each matt has a different frame on the inside of it, so it's going to be less difficult choosing my final photos when I already know what to look for.
After going through boxes upon boxes and choosing my final mats and frames, I decided to go back on my computer and work on some more images and maybe my artist statement some more.
I'm very happy that I might have possibly found a number three contestant to hang up for my show. It is a picture that I took of my cat the other day, it was kind of a random shot and I didn't think I was going to use it at all, but when I started to edit it and changed it to black and white, I really liked it. The only problem is that when I edited and printed this photo, no one else was there (because I was in open darkroom) for me to get their opinions on it, so I'm just hoping other people will like it too.
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