Reflecting back on this week I definitely saw a theme in everything that I was working on during Visual week. Everything seemed to be based on the good the bad and the ugly parts of my college career. So welcome to my college experience through a series of photos!

So for starters I now have a new set of people that I get to stalk (well some and new and some are familiar faces). That’s right, we have new comment groups that are our radio show group. I just joined a random group on Canvas and was happy to see that Kristen and Tiffany both are in my group since I loved both of their blogs from reading them in my comment group. But now we also welcome Tim and Kyle into our group, and we now have a new name of the dot.commers (which Kristen came up with and I love!). So here was our tweet to our lovely professor which announced our group forming in the world.

@cogdog@kristenlamb2 @tsharpie07 @kyledex22 @teldridge3 we are the dot.commers

— Karissa Mary Marie (@krisavball08) February 14, 2013

Right away this week started with learning about many different things about photography and I really wanted to be sure to apply them throughout this whole entire week. I think that there was a lot of progress throughout this week and I hope that I can improve even more throughout the semester. I know that I certainly can improve some more, but what I have so far is something to be proud of. In fact, I really focused on three different aspects while taking certain pictures during this week and really enjoyed how they came out, you can read a lot more about them and see the pictures here.

I took this new knowledge of taking photographs and went off to Trinkle for “the good” part of this blog post. This isn’t because my pictures were good (although I really liked them), but Trinkle is where my schooling all happened and I love being in there more than anything. I went into this challenge with a plan and ended up coming out with a different perspective on the building that I always go to. It was a lot of fun walking around trying to find quick inspirations and find the best photo that you can, and I really enjoyed editing them as well. You can see a collage of all of my photos right here, and you can even see some on my flickr as well.

Speaking of flickr, I pimped mine out! Kind of, I actually really struggled with this part because I was doing most of it on my iPad since my computer was not working at the time (go figure). But I really enjoy how I can make different sets so I can sort my things not only by tags, but also in sets. What can I say? I enjoy being very organized (except my room will never be organized ever).

My daily creates for this week were a little bit slacking in my opinion. I just didn’t have the inspiration that I usually do because they just didn’t seem to really appeal to me. However, I really seemed to focus on my volleyball career and my love for math, two things that were a huge part of my college career. My first daily create allowed me to play around with the lighting of the picture while I took a picture of someone using my favorite form of technology. My second daily create paid a tribute to how much I hate Salisbury University’s gym (this is a long story that I told) when I got to draw a location that I never want to go to again.  Lastly, my third daily create was about the good of my volleyball career when I got to show a picture of my biggest accomplishment about how my volleyball statistics impacted the program. Only one of daily creates allowed me to experiment with different photography skills, but I got to really do those during my photoblitz challenege.

Probably my favorite part of this week was the visual assignments where I got to really work with GIMP at it’s finest. I must say, it finally felt rewarding to conquer GIMP since I always seemed to struggle with it in the past. This week I created exactly 10 stars. I had so many different things that I wanted to do, but unfortunately the time and resources were a bit lacking for my ambitions this week. However, I really enjoyed all of these challenges. The one that I enjoyed the most was my Ode To Goolrick  in which I performed the 3 star challenge of returning to a place a photo was taken and frame it with the current setting. I think I really enjoyed this because of the storytelling aspect of it, plus it was nice to return somewhere else. Another one that I really enjoyed was the 2 star challenge to create a caption for a Valentine’s day card because it was a great way to be creative in just a selective amount of words, so you really had to get the picture to have a funny valentine. The one that was the easiest was the one star challenge to take a picture of a post-it note, in which I ended up using a post-it app to create someone a bit different than the rest. Then the two that made me laugh the most were the two star challenges of putting an animal in a human situation and making a GIF of a tacky informercial. I think because I enjoyed doing these so much, it didn’t really seem like work. I started out just working on them late at night during the week and ended up working until almost 4 in the morning, it didn’t seem like work because I was enjoying what I was doing, and that is what it’s all about.

Overall, this week was awesome! I think it was a step up from audio, but it was a lot of work and I’m glad that I managed my time very well. I really enjoyed the visual assignments and I found myself wanting to do more and that is what creates a passion and drive. However, between the visual assignments, photoblitz and daily creates I found myself pressed for time even after spreading things out. This week I can say I feel more confident using GIMP and understand what good photography is all about, which are two things that will be very critical in future weeks I am sure.

Thanks for reading!

Princess Karissa