Portrait Soup Essay

In some ways this was an easy assignment and in others it was difficult. I found it easy to photograph things in nature, but difficult to photograph people. Getting a self-portrait also was a small problem, though I was ultimately successful and have posted two.

Handling my camera has always been a small challenge in some ways for me. This project has encouraged me to push my camera further and to push my abilities in using it successfully. The self-portrait caused me to review using the timer function. The portrait of the dog required some work on position while using the camera. As usual, when I take my camera out, I take hundreds of pictures and find it to be a challenge to shrink the number down to fit an assignment. In this case I took over 400 pictures over the week and had to then shrink the number down to fit and then I found myself with about 30 pictures. I worked with these and still posted about 15 to 20 of them. To help me do this I used “Bridge” to help me with previewing all of the pictures. This helped me to shrink down the number of pictures though I still found myself wanting to post all that I could.

In Alphabet Soup, I used Photoshop on all but four of the pictures. In these pictures I typically used curves, hue and sat and the black and white layer tools. The picture that looks like a “N” makes the most extreme use of the curves tool. This one has small flowers at the points of the N which is a lowercase letter in cursive handwriting.

In Portraits, I used the curves tool on all posted pictures. On one I also used the crop tool, because I felt the photo worked better. I find that I do very well taking portraits of animals; however taking portraits of people is not so easy. I am not comfortable asking people if I can take pictures of them, even when I know them. When I do not know a person it is even harder for me to do. Critters do not get upset when you take pictures of them, nor do you need to ask permission to take their picture.

I do recognize that some of my pictures in Alphabet Soup could have been used in Portraits however I preferred them where I posted them. This was a very fun exercise and I really enjoyed taking the pictures for it. I even enjoyed the time consuming part of paring down the number of pictures to fit the assignment.