So much damn blogging this week.  Lots of stuff happened this week.  I joined a new group for a radio project.

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

— Fairuz Maggio(@fairuzmaggio) February 15, 2013

While blogging this week, I made the unfortunate mistake of commenting on my old group’s blogs instead of my new radio group… Oops…  I tried to make up for it today when I went back to reread the assignments for the week to double-check everything, realizing my mistake I instantly went to go comment on my new group’s blogs.  I tried to fix it, but alas it may have been too late.  When i went to look at my new group’s blogs, I realized that lots of us have similar tastes in different things, which was very interesting.  I apparently inspired Lara to do a new visual assignment on making new drawings of things–that was pretty cool.  Also, I may not have been the only one of my old group members that missed the comment on new group’s because Nancy commented on my Color splash assignment.  I also had some commentary with Professor Levine on twitter when I needed help with my flickr slideshow.

@rwyrough What kind of problems? Did you switch editor to text mode when pasting the code?

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 13, 2013

This week was based mostly on the idea of improving our photography skills.  We got a lot of practice and a lot of tips to help us out with this process.  Here’s a link to the most helpful tips.

Another thing we did this week was the photoblitz assignment.  For this, we had 20 minutes to take photos of a few different things and then choose our best and blog about it.  This required some planning and thought because 20 minutes is surprisingly not that much time when taking pictures.  I tried to incorporate as many of the tips to improve my photo skills as I could, but some didn’t come out quite as planned.  After I decided which ones were my best, I went and looked at the ones that everyone else did.  There were some really good photoblitz pictures taken my my classmates!

Also made a best of Flickr post.  You can see my decisions here!

I did 3 Daily Creates this week.  Here they are:

This one was to make something new.  Just made cupcakes.  Well my girlfriend did, I watched.  They were new.  Until I ate them.

This one was to cut something up and put it back together.  Flowers are cut up and arranged…  They were my Valentine’s gift to my girlfriend.  The bottle was from coping with her…

This was Bryce Canyon, Utah.  A place I never want to return to.  It was windy, high up, no railings anywhere–not my cup of tea.  I went there over the summer of 2012 with my grandfather, dad, two uncles, brother, and 3 male cousins.  Man trip on my grandfather’s bucket list.

Now the visual assignments!  We had to do ten stars worth of assignments and each one had a star value that reflected the difficulty level of the work (I think).  Anyway, there are lots of things I did this week with it.  Here is the assignment generator.  I ended up doing a total of 11 stars.

The first assignment was the only one required for the week.  We had to pick a valentine’s card from a bank of cards and then add a caption to it.  It was worth 2 stars.  Here’s what I did.

The second assignment I did was the Color Splash.  This was my favorite assignment, just because it was really cool to do, and interesting seeing what you could do with a splash of color.  I also used it as my first tutorial.

The third assignment was worth two stars.  I believe it was called Triple Troll Quotes.  I’ve explained the whole process here.

My fourth assignment, Changing the Mood was to change the feeling of a photo by changing the hue, saturation, etc.  Not sure how good of a job I did with it, but it was worth two stars and I thought it sounded fun so I did it.

My last two star assignment was changing the photo to a drawing.  Really cool and easy so I did it a few times.

This week I learned a lot about taking photos and how not good I am at it.  Granted, I think I improved a good amount from the pictures I’ve taken before, but it’s a long way up.  There were also lots of the processes of the visual assignments that I learned about.  I’ve definitley recognized how challenging photography is, but just like everything else, practice makes perfect.  I did enjoy it all, but it was more challenging than sounds.  Sound was a lot easier.  As for the whole blogging process I think I’m getting burned out on it I think.  It takes a lot of thought to diagram eveything, linking it all up right, and embedding everything.  I don;t think the fact that I have to type four papers a week helps either.  Very stressful.