February 23rd

I've been shooting in my garden and around the neighborhood,  hoping to get nice images to create a nature-type section for my photo portfolio. I've done about three hours worth of shooting in my neighborhood alone,  and got the idea of not only including  still images in my portfolio,  but maybe being able to incorporate time lapse videos as well.  So I set up a little studio in my kitchen and chose a daffodil bud that was almost ready to bloom.  I set up an interval timer to take a picture about  every minute or so, and framed up the shot in my camera.  I used a single desk lamp to light the flower,  as well a makeshift softbox to evenly distribute the light on the flower, reducing the harsh shadows. I did this using an unfolded plain white napkin. Here's, rough edit of an overnight shoot consisting of over 500 still images played back at 25 frames per second.  Hopefully I will be able to shoot other nature-type time lapses to create a longer video with an overall theme.
*edit* in case the link didn't work,  here's the url
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUwE6H0gzfQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

February 3, 2013

So I didn't meet with my mentor this day, but he told me that for future projects, I should familiarize myself with adobe lightroom. So i downloaded the program, and spent a few hours learning the interface.  I'm not a very organized person with my photographs, so I pretty much have folders of pictures all over the place.  And from what i've found, lightroom requires you to be fairly organized.  I thought there would be an easy way to just kinda drag and drop photos to edit, but from what i found over my time using the program, you have to assign folders to import from specific locations, and you also have to create output folders (in an organized way).  So after a few hours of organizing, i was ready to start editing.  Thankfully, the actual adjustment settings were very similar to adobe photoshop, so i didnt have to learn a whole lot of how things worked (adjustment-wise).  So overall, things went well and this new program is really teaching me to organize myself digitally with my photography.

January 29th, 2013

The first meeting with my mentor went a little better than expected.  I met him at his house when he got back from shooting a project, and we basically just went over the guidelines of my senior project.  We talked about what i could possibly do for my physical presentation, and what i wanted to get out of this whole project.  When I first got there, i didn't really expect the meeting to be as productive as it was.  We went through different ideas of what i could do, and what would be the most suitable for a final presentation.  And towards the end, we even got to show off both of our previous works, and what we're proud of.  I even got to share my technique for different things he wasn't sure of how i shot.  So overall, i think the first meeting went a lot better than expected.  What i thought would be about 15 minutes turned out to be about an hour and a half of just throwing around ideas and different shots.