Final Reflection Questions

I came into Photography pretty much not knowing anything.  I had taken pictures before but they were typical family photos with everything centered perfectly in the middle.  It was definitely shocking when I realized that pictures didn't always have to be centered.  Even though I had seen photos that were not centered before, I never thought I could take them while making them look "good."  The first pictures I saw in this class were very "artsy" and I thought mine would just turn out awkward and strange if I tried to take a similar picture.  I soon learned, I would be capable of taking those "artsy" pictures too.  Before I came into this class, I did have a little bit of knowledge about photography in general.  I had taken a week course the summer before freshman year and learned about aperature, shutter speed, f-stop and other photo terms.  Later in this year, I definitely used my knowledge of these terms especially when thinking about composition of my pictures.  The skills that I needed and want to continue sharpening in this class were using light (natural or artificial- off camera flash)  and also thinking about different angles and taking pictures zoomed in on an object, as opposed to capturing a picture with the entire object in it.  The steps that I have taken to improve these skills have mostly come in the form of taking more pictures and really focusing on the projects that we have been doing in class.  I've focused more on taking intentional pictures versus taking a bunch of pictures and hoping some turn out.

I have always enjoyed photography but what excites me now is taking lots of picture over the summer of nature and other objects while sharpening my skills that I learned this year.  I'm also excited for the projects next year that we will be doing in Intermediate Photography.  I wrote what was my strongest and weakest photo for each assignment, but in this reflection I will write about my favorite and least favorite project.  My favorite project was the Still Life project because we got to play around with light and off camera flashes, which I had never done before and I was kind of worried about.  Lighting was always intimidating to me because the flashes I had been using before were built into the camera and never really benefitted the image.  The Still Life project made me realize the potential light has to enhance your photo and I would love to have another project next year that involved lighting.  My least favorite project was the Color project because I found it really difficult to find objects that had all the right colors that I needed to make split complimentary, monochromatic or other color combinations.  Finding the colors was hard, but making an interesting photo using the photos was close to impossible.  I think the project would have been better if we could have taken the pictures at home instead of limiting it to the Branson campus.  All in all, I loved this year and am super excited for Intermediate Photography next year :)