Summary:

1) Photographing movement/creating blur effectively:

I feel I managed to pick up the effective way to capture the movement/blur I wanted by practising with various shutter speeds in differently lit areas.
I will find this useful in my upcoming project to show mental illness by capturing movement and expression in a series of images as I now know the correct settings to use and I feel a lot ore confident and ready for my future shoots.

2) Using editing software I haven't used before.

- Google Nik Collection

- Adobe Bridge

- Lightroom

- Camera RAW

I think I mastered the basics of these different software by trying out different experiments and editing series of images to use on my social media sites. I really enjoyed using them and found a lot of editing techniques I will definitely use in future work. I especially loved lightroom and editing in raw as in lightroom there were so many beautiful filters to add to my images and using RAW made me take images in RAW more often and I was able to edit them a lot with hardly any loss of detail which I was really impressed by and I will continue to shoot in RAW.

3) Getting creative work noticed online.

Using:

- Instagram

- Behance
- My website

This challenge was certainly the one I thought was the hardest of them all, not because I couldn't operate the sites but because I didn't get noticed as much as I thought I would but I have learnt that in the future, in order to get my creative work noticed, it is going to take patience and consistency. I loved seeing the likes go up on my instagram pictures and I will continue to post regularly on instagram. I will also keep my website up to date and upload collections I am really happy with to my behance. 

Following a RAW tutorial

This is the tutorial I used - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDLand84RKw 

Original image

 I decreased the exposure, and then increased the contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, clarity and vibrance to give my image a touch up.

 I then used the gradient filter from the top toolbar and created my gradient going from the left of my image across to the right. I the went down to colour on the right hand side, I chose a purple colour at 40 saturation, not too intense. This created a light purple filter over the image, fading out to the right.

I looked at the colour wheel to see which colour was opposite purple to compliment it. It happened to be yellow.

 I added another gradient filter, this time going from the right of my image through to the left. I chose a yellow colour at 42 saturation, not too intense like the purple.

 in the 2nd gradient I also increased the clarity to make the right hand side facial expression stand out a little more.

I was pleased with the outcome as the colour filters were subtle and the light tones complimented eachother, they also worked well with the blu in the image, adding a warm tone.

Lightroom - creating my own preset

I made my own version of a preset following this tutorial -
https://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-create-your-own-lightroom-presets/

before:                                                                                    after:

I edited my image by increasing the contrast, clarity, vibrance and shadows and then reducing the highlights, whites and blacks slightly. When I was happy with how my image turned out, I clicked 'create new preset' on the left and named it 'contrast and clarity'. The new preset saved.

I opened a new image in Lightroom:

I found my saved preset and added it to the image:

It gave just the effect I needed so I continued to add the preset to a couple more images, this will save me time when I'm editing a shoot as I can make my own presets and apply them.

Opening JPEGs with Adobe Bridge

You can still edit JPEG images using the RAW editing tools by opening the image with Adobe Bridge. This is helpful if you want to edit your image but forgot to take it in the RAW format, giving you a similar edited look.

When you first open bridge, it opens like this with all your images and documents on show. You find the JPEG you want to edit, right click it and choose open in camera RAW.

When you do this, it opens like this:

Just like a normal RAW file so you can edit in the same way.

I edited the image as I would a RAW image:

I changed the temperature and hue to make the greens stand out more in the background and then lowered the exposure, increased the contrast and clarity to make the subject more sharp and brought out the darker tones.

Final image:

Zoomed in section:

As you can see, the edited JPEG doesn't hold the same quality as a RAW file, even when edited in RAW.

It still gives the appearance of a better quality image unless you are to zoom in so it would still look low quality if it was enlarged to be printed.

I will continue to shoot in both RAW and JPEG so that I can edit my RAW images and keep my JPEGS as a backup. RAW files hold so much more quality, I will definitely focus on RAW after finally getting round to using it during this assignment.

Lightroom/nik collection

I edited some of my 'capturing movement' imaged in lightroom and some using the nik collection in Photoshop.

I already know that my images for exhibiting for 605 will be in black and white and I love the blue filter so I edited a few with this filter.

These are my edits from lightroom:

I added the black and white high contrast blue filter and then increased exposure, decreased contrast, increased the highlights and decreased the shadows. I also increased the whites and decreased the blacks before slightly raising the clarity. I did this for each one.

Here are my results with before and after pictures.

I think making the images black and white already made them have more feeling as it gave a sad,  stressed atmosphere almost but when I added the blue filter, it changed dramatically, it made the images have a really creepy, eery feeling which gave them so much more meaning and made you think more about the facial expressions.



I then used the analog efex in nik collection on photoshop as this add on has camera types and film filters to give the effect it was taken on film.

I used the classic camera 4 and the 12th black and white neutral filter to give a more grainy, contrasted look.

I thought it was slightly overexposed so I brought down the contrast and brightness and slightly reduced the detail extraction.

These edits make the images appear as though they were taken on a film camera and along with the eeriness, the old film type filter gives it a creepy look like the lightroom edited images but slightly more as you relate film with old images which always seem to have an atmosphere about them.