Photography!  When I saw what we were doing this week, I was so relieved!  Not that audio wasn’t fun, but I’m much more comfortable with taking photos. To start off the week, I joined a Radio Show group on Canvas.  At the time, only one other person had signed up for groups, so I decided to join Radio Show Group 1.

#ds106 I just joined Radio Show Group 1! Anyone else wanna join me?

— Lara Hampson (@l_hampson23) February 11, 2013

Our team name is Fifth Dimension, and on top of these members being in my Radio Show Group, they are also my new blog commenting group.  They are Casey Ragghianti, Cole Wyrough, Dylan Gott, and Fairuz Maggio.

@cogdog : @l_hampson23 @caseyragg @rwyrough @dylangott1 and I are called 5th dimension!

— Fairuz Maggio(@fairuzmaggio) February 15, 2013

Cogdog suggested we read how to become a better photographer by reading TEN: Ten Ways to Improve Your Craft. None of Them Involve Buying Gear and also about a website on storify to better our photography.

My favourite technique was to change the perspective of the photo.  I unexpectedly practiced this technique at a hair salon and wrote about my experience in my blog post, Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall.  I added my ideas of which technique was the most helpful on the class google doc How We Are Becoming Better Photographers. 

To practice our photography even more, we completed a photoblitz activity which required us to take as many photos as possible given certain criteria, within 20 minutes.  I uploaded my top 5 photographs from that activity onto flickr and chose 3 of my classmates photos which I thought were great examples.

We had to complete at least 10 stars worth of Visual Assignments from the ds106 Assignment Bank.  Everyone had to complete the Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge in order to compare ideas, but after that, we were free to choose which assignments to do.

My Valentine’s Day Assignment, Significant Otter, was worth 2 stars.  I decided to go a little R rated for this to make it funnier (to me anyway).  My next choice, Cannon Ball [splash]! was another 2 star assignment and pretty fun!  It was still early in the week at this point, so I was still enthusiastic about photo editing.  On Tuesday, I had a lot of studying to do, so I only completed two 1 star assignments: Tis [not] the Season! and Colourize It!  Both were pretty easy, so I can understand why they were rated 1 star.  Colourize It! also doubled as my first Visual Tutorial, so I added a lot more detail than I normally would when describing how I edited the photo.  To try something more challenging, I attempted to Picasso Myself.  Being only two stars, I didn’t think it would be too difficult, but I had to learn how to use a new program which took some getting used to. I stumbled upon a three star rated assignment, Photography Collage, which wasn’t difficult at all. It took some time to find 26 photos to stand for each letter in the alphabet, but I really enjoyed doing this one!  Sketch It Out was a two star assignment that I found via Cole Wyrough‘s blog, and although I prefer colour in my photographs, it was neat to see what they might have looked like if someone had drawn them.  Those seven assignments concluded my total of 13 stars worth of assignments for the week.

I completed 4 daily creates this week.  The first dailycreate I did this week was to take a photo of someone other than me using my favourite technology.  There was a battle between my favourite technology being my laptop, camera, and cell phone, but since this week is all about photography, I chose to use my camera.  This photo was taken at Lake Anna (which is very close to Fredericksburg), when my boyfriend and I went hiking this past weekend.  He wasn’t trying to be serious and model or anything silly like that, I just caught him unknowingly.

For my second daily create, Take a picture of something brand new. Like Shiny, I used some of the techniques I mentioned in the beginning of this post to better my photography.  I got pickier in how I wanted to take the photo.  I knew that taking it straight on would be kind of boring, but taking it at an angle like I did, made it edgier.  I created depth as well by including the rows above and below the one I shot, making the wall of Bacardi seem never ending (nothing wrong with that!).

#ds106 #dailycreate Take a picture of something brand new. twitter.com/l_hampson23/st…

— Lara Hampson (@l_hampson23) February 13, 2013

My third daily create, Take a picture of your greatest success or triumph. Make it creative and artistic, included a snap shot of Rugbymag‘s Women’s DII College Top 20 rankings, where UMW was listed 4th!

For my fourth daily create, Take a picture of something you made, be it food, art, or something else, I took a picture of dinner I made with some friends: Ceviche.  Ceviche is raw shrimp that is marinated in citrus over night.  The citrus “cooks” the shrimp, making it edible.  Then we added avocado, onion, and Sriracha sacue, on a flat taco shell.  Mmm!

On top of the daily creates, we also had to pimp out our flickr‘s.  I had already created three sets to organize my photos: Land & Waterscapes, Plants & Flowers, and Animals.  I then created a Best Photographs set.  Earlier this week, I wrote a post about creating my new set and working out how to embed a whole flickr set into the post.  I also broadcasted my post via Twitter.

#ds106 Check out my new set on Flickr and how I created it! ds106.larahampson.com/ready-set-go/

— Lara Hampson (@l_hampson23) February 11, 2013

I was very excited for this week because I love photography.  I’m not a professional or anything, and I only have a simple camera, but I enjoy taking photos and finding different ways to see things.  I didn’t learn much when reading those techniques in terms of TAKING the photographs, but I did learn what the techniques were called and how to recognize a bad photo better.  A challenge of this week was definitely not procrastinating.  There was a lot to do, and it’s easy to put it off all week, but I learned from prior weeks that that just doesn’t work.  I spaced out the tasks and did something everyday, starting on Monday.  Tomorrow, I’ll start the whole process over again but with a new theme!