This week was an interesting week for J2150. Usually on Mondays we have a lecture. This week was Labor Day, so classes were excused. On Wednesday’s discussion we were told the deadline for “Seeing Red” was being extended by a day due to camera checkout confusion. I had already taken some of my photos for the project. However, I still needed to take some more, because of camera troubles I had later in the day on Wednesday. We spent a lot of our time going over how to use photoshop elements. I found this very helpful, because I, along with many other students in this class, are fairly new to photoshop. The hands on training we received is much more helpful, in my opinion, than the Lynda.com tutorials. We also took a current events quiz on twitter, which I nailed! I also found this awesome video on photoshop scandals http://news.yahoo.com/who-knew/photoshop-scandals-26531726.html. It makes you think twice before messing with some of your pictures.
On Thursday night the “Seeing Red” project was due into blackboard in a .zip file, so that on Friday we could look at all of the photos everyone had taken for the project. We spent the entirety of the class critiquing everyones photos. I found this very helpful to not only have my work critiqued, but to be able to critique others work. Most of the pictures had the ISO settings messed up, mine included. This made me feel much better that I was not the only one in the class having a little but of trouble with the Nikon cameras. The variety in the pictures take was very unique. There were a few repeats of the same red things, but none shot from the same angle or perspective. As each students pictures were being shown the class we were allowed to tell the person what we liked, didn’t like , and what they might have changed about their picture. “Seeing Red” was a great project to start the year off with, and I cannot wait until the next project begins.
For “Seeing Red” I had to take out the camera on both Tuesday and Wednesday. On Tuesday I took the camera out, and I only got one picture set taken before I went back to my apartment. Once back, huge problems arose. Somehow, someway the settings on my camera went crazy. I did everything I could to help myself to fix the problem, but I could not figure it out. So, after about 3 hours of trying to figure it out I decided to give up for the night, and recheck out the camera the next day. On Thursday I went back to the lab picked up my camera, and I was finally able to take some good, quality pictures. The settings on this camera were much easier to deal with. I felt much more confident in my pictures after I was able to use that camera. I did realize while struggling the first day to get the camera to work I was able to learn a LOT about the functions of the camera. As much as struggling to get the settings to work was terrible, I am glad it happened, because now I now and incredible amount about the camera I will be using in the future. Overall it was a great week for learning.
dougfhof 