After the initial Photography project I wanted to look at what I had done and expand on this. I have enjoyed photography in the past so I looked upon my previous works in order to enhance in what I viewed was my weakest section – my editing. I identified two holiday photographs I had taken as suitable candidates to edit.
Firstly I edited and cropped a photograph of a Turtle I took. With this image I used the rule of thirds in order to draw attention to it. With it being the primary subject I wanted to show this by placing it in a suitable position using the said rule of thirds option in which states that an object is more focused when it is on the lines.
For this image I looked at lighting too, The image was really blue so I looked at enhancing the turtle by making it lighter and adding a darker glow around it. I also wanted to simulate natural light in the top corner in order to split the background up and make the image appear more dimensional than it is.
After spending a lot of time tweaking this with brushes and techniques I feel I have achieved my aims to an acceptable standard. While it is still rough around the edges I am quite pleased with what I have managed to produce. If I were to edit it I would look more deeply into the turtle and perhaps add some different colours to it as I feel this would make it stand out more, however with this there would be a fine line between realistic and cartoony and I want to maintain the realism I feel I have achieved.
After that I looked at a photograph of the Pyramids that I had taken. My aim for this piece was to brighten it up and play around with colours. The way I decided to this was by using brushes and layer styles on the sky. While I learnt several methods during this process through the use of tutorials and playing around I wasn’t really happy with the outcome. I feel the sky is too linear and could do with addition of clouds or more intricate details with the colours to set it off. Overall I am very disappointed with this piece as I feel some design details were clumsy and caused pixelation around the pyramids and the photograph wasn’t the best choice with the subjects spread out in my opinion. However this has been a learning curve and has allowed me to see the benefits of having a good photograph before editing and I am going to take this advice in the future making sure I get a good photograph before editing so I don’t waste my time.
I continued to edit some photographs to improve my quality and then I decided to go and take some original photographs with what I have learnt. I decided to go to Bournemouth beach and play around with my iPhone 5’s panorama setting taking photographs of the pier, beach and beach huts. Following what I learnt from editing and as demonstrated above I decided to go with a much simpler editing style. While this necessarily didn’t work out for the pier I felt it worked very well for the beach huts. The mixture of colours combined with the very desaturated but not totally black and white image created an eye catching piece in my opinion. I felt not making everything else black and white but still drawing attention to the colours made the image feel very surreal. I played around with blurring once again but with before I felt I risked overkilling the image by doing this so I felt it as default and instead touched up the general quality of the photograph instead.
I am very happy with the outcome of this work and overall I feel I have made significant progress in learning about photography and editing. Though only a few of the images came out like I wanted the general point about how to take photographs and the editing of said images allowed me to progress past the initial project and learn some very important lessens on subject matter, over editing and colours.
Declan Barry Design 