Ben’s Photography Blog

2019-20

[benbanatao]

This week was our final week of class and our challenge was to use the skills that we have learned throughout the year to create 3-5 of our best photos inspired by famous photographers. Last week I decided to do landscape photography because it resonated with the parts of photography that I really enjoy seeing and because it really relies on the raw skill of the photographer. When I see a quality landscape photo, it makes me want to visit that place in real life, so I hope my photos were able to bring that same emotion to the viewers. 

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Landscapes

Richard Misrach: 

After observing Misrach’s work, I noticed that he like to keep the subject or main object in the middle of his frame. Most of his photos are very symmetric and you can tell that he spends a lot of time setting up the photo in order to get the right angle. In a lot of his photos he has the horizon right in the middle and usually has something that leads your eye to the horizon. He also only shoots in color but tends to keep the colors very neutral and not bright.

Ansel Adams:

As you can see, Adams only shot in black and white, however, he was able to make his photos very dramatic and loud. The contrast in all of his photos are very high. A lot of his photos were of mountains and trees and large monuments and he was able to make them feel airy and grand.  

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This week we were given the challenge to make photos that were either light or dark, and I chose light. I took each of these photos when I was on a trip in Europe last summer and I actually used VSCO to edit each of them. All of these photos were already really bright so all I really had to do was make them black and white and then make them higher in contrast and that was it.

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For my photography app, I used VSCO and I really liked it. It’s very user friendly and the layout of the app is simple. There are many features that will help you edit your photos and there are also presets that look amazing. I would 100% recommend this app to other students because I’ve been using it for quite awhile now and it has never failed to impress me and improve the quality of my photos. You can also post photos to the public and people can like and repost your work. The only downfall for this app is that you have to pay to unlock certain features, however the free tools work perfectly fine. Overall VSCO is an amazing app.

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This week we were required to tell a story with three photos. So I chose to show the story of an egg. I just felt like it would be funny and sort of surprising because usually you don’t see a story like this.

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This week, our project was to photograph food in anyway we could think of. In my first photo I was inspired by some photos I saw online and I really want to incorporate the dripping milk. I was able to take this photo by taking it in burst mode. My second photo was supposed to be a banana in place of a phone and it’s on my bedside table. My last photo was a box of macaroons that we had in our house and all I did was organize them in colors.

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This week we were given a project about portraiture. The two projects I chose were the self portrait and the project about representing someone without them being in the photo. The photo on the right is my self portrait and it’s me being myself. Skateboarding is something that brings me joy so I decided I would take a photo of myself in action. The photo on the left was taken in my sister’s dorm room at UC Berkeley before quarantine.

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This photo was taken for our land art project. The goal of this project was to incorporate nature into a piece of art. For my project I used sticks because it was the only thing that I could find in my backyard. In my second photo I tried to be more playful and use brighter colors and show the difference in size.

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This is a photo taken for our landscape project. I took this photo a few weeks ago on my phone when I was skiing because I was in awe at the grandness of this view. You can’t really see any man made things that would ruin the photo so that’s why I chose it.

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These photos were created for our surreal project. The photo on the left was created from photos from the internet and the photo on the right was taken by me. I used multiple photos in the same spot in order to make a dreamlike and unreal situation. Both photos were made i. photo shop.

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These photos were taken with a fisheye lens on my phone. A few aspects I struggled with were focus and exposure because so much light would get into the lens and the shape of the lens made it hard for the camera to focus on things.

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This week we’ve been working on our mobile photography because of the COVID-19 impact on our school. We are able to edit these photos on Snapseed. The top row of photos are raw and unedited. The row below is after the editing on Snapseed.

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This week we have been working with Photoshop in order to create blended photos. We have been using various tools such as masking, liquify, and layering photos to blend faces and animals. Once we got the hang of it we could create very realistic photos that have seamless blended photos.

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In these past few weeks we’ve been shooting photos for our Inspired By Art project. I chose to shoot minimalism. I learned that in order to take these photos you should try to keep colors similar and the background shouldn’t overtake the subject in anyway. The point of these phots is to be brief and simple. One challenge I definitely had was trying to find a good subject and background that complimented each other.

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This week in class we’ve started to take photos on DSLRs. We have learned the basic rules and tools when shooting with a digital camera. The other thing that we have learned in class is editing our photos on Lightroom. We use tools such as cropping and editing texture, color, exposure, and many other things that change the look of our photos.

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In the photo on the right our goal was to experiment with over and under exposure when printing our photos. We used certain filters to achieve photos with dark blacks and bright white and others with light grays all around.

In the photo on the right you can see white dots and we were able to achieve this affect by printing our photo and then splashing drops of fixer onto the photo before putting it into the developer.

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These photos were taken with fast (left) and slow (right) shutter speed. We did this in order to achieve photos that captured objects in motion. We tried to capture objects frozen in motion and showed motion with blurry photos.