Being a photographer today means next to nothing. With Photoshop and an expensive camera, it’s not hard to make money from it. Just take a look at this site called You are Not a Photographer.

It’s “cool” now to use Instagram. And I refuse to link you to that site because there are better ways to enhance photos than sepia-toning all of them. Photoshop, PaintShop, GIMP use anything else.

But there are some things that Photoshop and a nice camera can’t get you, and that’s the story the photo tells.

There’s a Method to this Madness

To convey a story, we learned a few techniques this week, things like where to put the subject of your photo, how to use light and darkness, and why perspective is important.

I used quite a number of the methods in my photography this week, and three of them stood out. You can read more about the tips and tricks in this post here. 

I was stunned by how much light affects a photo. I always knew it was important, but I never really put much effort into selecting the right type of light or positioning the subject (or my body in relation to the subject) correctly. I was a snapshot person.

This week, I changed my tactic. I became more aware of the light on my subjects and how shadows can change an image completely. Now I know how the professionals do it.

Photoblitzing It

This was so nerve-racking. I had misread the assignment at first and thought that I had to get all of the prompts within 20 minutes. Luckily, I reread the assignment just before starting it in Trinkle and was relieved. I loosened up and had a bit of fun with it.

I know we didn’t have to approach the assignment in an artistic way, but I wanted to for some of the prompts. Others, especially the “Two things that don’t belong together” prompt, I was a little more impulsive. While I didn’t interpret it as most other people had, I thought it was clever for where I was.

You can read more about my experiences and see my photos in my blog post here.

Best Set Yet

While I was on Flickr adding all my photoblitzing activities, I also took a look at how to start building up my Flickr presence.

The biggest thing to do (and the only one I hadn’t done yet) was to create a set and embed it in a blog post.

I tried plug-in after plug-in, and I just wasn’t happy with the results. But then I discovered that one of my group members had figured it out!!

Finally, I was able to embed my Flickr set into a blog post, and that’s when I realized this course may become “All About Mary Wash.”

Read more about it here.

A Work Week

The bulk of what I did this week was for assignments. This week asked for us to do at least 10 stars worth of Visual Assignments. The fewer the stars, the less work the assignment.

Here are the assignments I did this week (links will take you to the actual assignment page, not my blog post):

• Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge – ??1/2
• Before and After – ????
• Troll Quotes – ??
• Splash the Color – ???

For a total of 11 1/2 stars!

I was excited to finally get into choosing our assignments. I had looked at the assignment bank before I signed up for this class to get an idea of the type of work involved, and I got incredibly excited.

I wish I had more excuses just to make stuff like this all the time.

So, as you could expect, I had a lot of fun this week working on the assignments.

I encourage you to take a look at each individual assignment’s post for more information on what I did, how I did it, and what I thought about the process:

Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge – ??1/2
Grammar are Everything – Love knows no bounds… except when someone has a case of bad grammar.

Before and After – ????
How Things Change & Stay the Same — Trinkle Hall was a Library?!

Troll Quotes – ??
Triple Troll Link — Is he Peter Pan or Robin Hood? Ah hell, he’s all of the above.

Splash the Color – ???
Erase the Greyscale — a Violet ’49 Mercury is a stand-out

A Week’s Portrait

Daily Creates for week 5 were tons of fun because so many of them required photography!

I did four this week, and you can check them out here.

Fab Five

I also formed up with a new group this week!

@kncrotty @hellobrittanyy @kelsielasalata @bparker5 @sarahhpark2 Hello Fab 5 group! One up on the Beatles. #ds106

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 14, 2013

We will be working on the Group Radio Show coming up soon, and I’m pretty excited about the talent I’m seeing already.

Oh yea, I was supposed to learn something wasn’t I?

Just kidding. I learned a lot this week about composing photos. My daily creates don’t exactly scream “BRILLIANT!” but I think I put most of my new thoughts into the other photos I took this week. Many of the photos weren’t even for this class, but I found myself thinking about stuff and irritating people who were with me.

Is the lighting okay, you think?

Oh, I hope that doesn’t look like something’s growing out of his arm.

I have to be on the floor in the middle of Trinkle’s lobby, DUH! It’s all about perspective.

Just because it’s your birthday doesn’t mean I’m taking a million photos. I have to be more selective about my art.

Really, though, I don’t think this lighting is okay.

I know storytelling is more than just composing a photo, though. After the photoblitz activity, I started to feel more comfortable with branching out and interpreting things how I want to. I’ve been pretty cut-and-paste about my interpretations of Daily Creates, but this week I stepped out of the box.

I’m also loving that this course is helping me form the documentary I have to do on Hollywood Cemetery. I will probably use a majority of photos, so learning about depth, composition, etc. has made me realize I don’t have to make a lame slideshow to music and voice.

Overall, this week has been a blast. I became that person that constantly had a camera in their hand, and it was wonderful. Even in the pouring rain, I was going to get that damn shot.

And DESIGN is next week?!