Midterm 2

Season and Color

I spent days going through all my photos for the color combinations for Summer. I started with shots from Hawaii, shots of the kids/pets, anything Summer and put them in one folder then investigated the different possibilities for color schemes. I wanted a different view, because it seems we always think of one way to do colors. When I came across the firework pictures I took on the 4th of July, it opened the door for exactly what I was looking for.
I decided to use Orange as the main color since it was present in every photo I chose. I will post both results to show how different just the background and text made the same layout of photos look different. The different backgrounds brought out different colors and gave each layout a completely different feel to them.
I wanted to bring in photos of the night since a lot of activity goes on at night in the Summer. However, I wanted to keep the feel of the fun daytime activity as well. So I started my photos with a bang of excitement of daytime water activity. The boat was orange and a part of it shows centered on the bottom. The person on that inflatable being towed by my husband, in his boat, is my Mother!! They actually enjoyed themselves and all I could do was laugh nervously while taking pictures from the front of the boat. The next photo is our 8-year-old son, Jackson showing one of his salmon trophes while he worked on a gill-netter (he wore my skiing goggles because he got red jellyfish in his eyes before). Next we have our 12-year-old girl, Alec winding down the excitement flowing the activity into a relaxed sunset (I loved how she had a mask and snorkel on and that is was blue, too). I kept the photo of her cropped to include her reflection, because there was still apparent orange in the rippled water. Steven on the bottom left, has the sunset rays on his face and his boating activity is coming to a close as opposed to the first photo of him heartily enjoying whipping my mom around the water (FYI, they really like each other). The photo on top on the lower right corner is our oldest, Megan lighting off two roman candles. If you look closely, there are at least two angles of her face- one looking at the candles shooting off and one turning to the camera. The sky in this shot had an amazing blue color. Then lastly, we have our youngest (just barely turned 3), Jace Z "Cabee" winding down the explosion of fireworks to a sparkler going out and bringing in the black night. I noticed that firework photos show people's faces looking up. All photo activity working from day to night (light to dark) and excitement to relaxation (bright to subtle).
I chose to accent the photo arrangement with a sunflower. I had taken a picture up close of a sunflower in a gorgeous flower arrangement my husband had given me on our 1st Anniversary in June (getting flowers from my husband is one of the absolutely BIGGEST highlights of our relationship to me, so I take many pictures of them from different angles -besides I have a passion for flowers). I manipulated the color of the petals by adding a splash of orange using the Photoshop paint bucket and letting it flow when I touched an area of the petals. The sunflower not only made me think of Summer and the sun, but with the added orange, it gave the feel of picnic fires and evening bonfires. It is a great complement to all the activity on the page.
I had so much trouble with my computer and trying to figure out how to post these from where I had created them, but here they are none-the-less and much to my satisfaction:

Here it is! This is my interpretation of Season and Color. I chose this for many different reasons:
Black is not a usual color you associate with Summer, but so much activity happens at sunset and night as well as during the day. At night, the color schemes I noticed were black (also apparent in every photo, including the day), Orange tones from the reflection of light on faces and objects or from the light source itself. Black and Orange are match colors. The accent in this arrangement would be blue as it is present in strong and subtle ways and blue is a complement to orange. The background is the same top left section of the sunflower photo cropped. The leaves appeared to light up a night with fire. Then the black empty color on top left to the bright of the petals on bottom right, went well with contrasting the photo color arrangement of bright to dark with the bright photos against the black background and the dark and the dark photos against the bright background. I liked how the opposites attracted. All the bright colors bring out the excitement of Summer -the black just seems to compliment it all and make it more energetic and vibrant. The contrast seems to bring harmony and balance.
The font I chose because of the fun colors against the black and the text appeared to work well with the rhythm of the flower petals. I used a different font for the "Southeast Alaskan Style" to still look fun and have an Alaska Native feel to it while keeping with the rhythm of the flower and using the accented blue didn’t take too much focus away from the Title and theme. I believe I got the mood I wanted to convey for the emotional response I wanted to elicit.

This was our first attempt and although I didn’t choose it, it was still fun and gave the whole piece a totally different feel. I still liked it.
My oldest daughter, Megan, showed me how to watermark the background with images when my first attempt at filling it with a solid orange didn’t work on my computer (my system is messed up). She used the same photo of the sunflower for the background and set the filter to show it softer. Again, it looks like the sun or picnic fire. This background gave the entire piece warmth and the petals gave the feeling of ray movement or that of a soft, warm breeze.
The fonts I used (like the other) wouldn’t convert to her computer, so she used what she had and played with it and it has a simple and fun feel and looked great against the orange and yellow background. The blue ties in the feel of water and sky.
The color scheme in this arrangement is a more true triad built from two related colors of orange and yellow, with the accent (contrast) color blue.
This project result was our first attempt to turn it into a photo for uploading into my blog. The file size was very small because of how we did it, but I had much more success when I transferred the other project into JPEG format.

24 Shots

I have so many photos that I have taken over the years. Literally hundreds upon hundreds. I take a lot of photos of the same subject from different angles, so my project has essentially more than "24 shots".
I will display first, the photo I chose for each subject first and include my alternate choices after, but I won't always comment on the alternate. The first photo will be my actual subject photo.
This project took me days to put together... ugh... I think I put too much studying into them online and made them more complicated in my thinking than I should, but I really liked the end results:

Symmetrical balance:
This photo with the mirrored reflection of the mountain was just what I had first though of with symmetry. I had cropped this from one of my earlier blog photos below that shows my husband fishing (his favorite spot).

Assymetrical balance:

These rocks were simply amazing! We went to a cinder-coned beach in Maui and the hike in around a jagged beach displayed rocks strewn with the mixture of reds, blacks, and white. I had to try to capture that.

Color balance:

I took this photo of a local wine we had in Maui. It tasted like pineapple and I thought the bottle was just beautifully arranged with color design. Then putting it in front of the flowers my husband had bought me, it seemed to explode with color.

Dominance:

I knew immediately which photo I wanted to use, because the colored contact was an eye catcher on my husband this last Halloween, but I still had to fiddle with the other photo anyway.

Humans seem to be attracted to eyes and his contacts made him freak some people out, especially against the black and colored eyemakeup.

Repitition:

I took this photo at a winery/brewery in Portland Oregon this fall of the wine bottles. I immediately thought of it for repetition.

Scale change:

I liked how big our baby looked standing in the window compared to the crewman in the background working on the deck.

Orientation:

To take a different point of view, I thought that this photo taken from the angle looking up at the fisherman from the water (or fish) was different.

Rhythm or Movement:

This will be the only section that I used one photo for each. The first with the boat, I thought that the rhythm flowed with the top edging of the rocks, waves, mountains in the background, the clouds, and the birds in flight all appeared to have the same movement to them.

The dancing photo gave me the feeling of movement with the tassels flinging out in a twirling fashion.

Pattern:

I took this photo of a broken trellis outside a park here. I liked the pattern of the trellis and how it kind of flowed with the fencing. The reds of the berries and the rust colored mesh of the fencing blended the whole thing nicely.

Chapter 3 Graphic Animal

Now what can I say, besides "I loved this project!" Now that was just plain fun...

I felt that the final image did maintain the essence of the original object.

What I learned from the object from the physical analysis was that (and maybe this may be just the photos I looked at) the creature's tail would appear to be out in photos taken while on land, but the tail rarely stuck out while swimming.

I think what pleased me most about the final image was that it was exactly what I had envisioned it being.

I actually finished this a lot earlier today, but let it sit where I could see it throughout the day to make sure it was what I wanted. Obviously it was since it is now posted.

Graphic Animal Roughsketch

I free handed this from the photo I chose. It was the basic idea of what I wanted. I also thought that a slight flair of our Southeast Alaskan Native Art would help to bring in the flippers without everything being so blunt.

Graphic Animal Idea

The moment I saw what our project was, I knew immediately which animal I was going to use...
My husband and I went scuba diving in Maui this last June and got the chance to swim with sea turtles. I fell in love with the creatures immediately! What an awesome experience! The Green Sea Turtle was adorable and graceful in the water.
After viewing picture after picture online, I chose this particular photo by Jamie Harbord. I got this photo from www.greatbarrierreefinfo.com. I liked it for this project because the angle was really perfect for what I had in mind. The way the light hit the sea turtle was exactly what I was hoping to find and the flippers were displayed nicely.

Project 2A: Expressive Type and Design

Now that was just plain interesting and not as easy as I thought it would be.

I started on my laptop and ended up moving to my Mother-in-law's computer to use her printer so I could print, cut-out, and scan text. However, I had more luck with her Photoshop on her computer than with my own. So I didn't have to go through the effort of printing or scanning. I was able to do this all within the computer. I saved it and sent it to my own email and was able to manipulate it more using my laptop that I am more comfortable with.

I am so thankful to have gotten my book assignment in early, because I would have been cramming at this point due to the unexpected events that have happened in my home-life. I had fun doing this with the computer, but this amount took quite some time. It sure sounded easier than it was.

Even though I knew the basic meaning of each word, I still looked up the definitions online to be sure I was using the right idea of how to apply the text I felt would best fit the word. There were a few words that had more meaning than one such as "Stodgy" had both the definition of being heavy or very old-fashioned and "crush" could mean to crush an item or have a crush on another person. So I chose the basic meaning most people are familiar with.

I think this typeface does the best job of supporting the word "Sludge" for what fonts I had available. I would have liked something more expressive for "Ornate". I manipulated the "sludge" type by using tools like the move tool, smudge tool, and brush tool in Photoshop. The other words only required using the move tool to widen or squash down as well as arching it.

The type I used for "Sludge" gave a pretty good idea of the meaning of the word to start with then I added a lot of black to make it appear to be a murky hole of ooze and dripping. This style of type really made it easy to create the effect I was hoping for in the composition.