Balance and Contrast

These are four pictures by other photographers that show strong contrasts in scale, color or value, and texture. Some of these images show a symmetrical balance and a radial balance.

Contrast in Scale - Photo By Madison Perryman

Strong Contrast in Color - Photo By Geoff Spivey

Contrast in Texture - Photo By Madison Perryman

Symmetrical Balance - Photo By John Gooden

Radial Balance - Photo By Kevin Shenoy

Project 3 - Color and Grids

For this project, we made grids in Lightroom using pictures that use color effectively, or pictures that we have edited to show color or make color more prominent. These are my grids.

Chilled Asparagus

This grid is a cool color grid, that uses the same picture. Each tile is a different angle of the picture. I cropped, rotated, tilted, and flipped them to move them to be in an arrangement I liked. In addition I lowered the saturation of the picture in Lightroom and then used the split tone tool to make the shadows and highlights a different color. This is how I made the same picture several different colors.

Mardi Gras Complements

This grid is my color complements grid, and similar to the my cool color grid above, I used one picture for the entire grid. To make each tile different, I cropped, and flipped the pictures so each different colored tile shows a different section of the photo. Because this grid was a color complement grid, I changed the highlight and shadow colors so I was able to make the yellow tiles, as the original picture had more of a purple hue. After changing the highlights and shadows, I also changed the brightness, exposure, contrast, and recovery to make the varies tiles that have the same color.

Infrared Lights

This grid is one of my favorites that I made because I really like the color I chose to make it monochrome. I decided to make the preset red because many of the pictures I used for this grid were originally dominated by cool colors and the contrast of a new color that was opposite of the original was very interesting. To make this grid, I made the preset on one picture first and then saved it. Next, I copied the settings from that edited picture and pasted them onto the other photos so they were all uniform in color and size.

Up-Close With Mother Nature

This grid was one that I chose to make based on its subject. All the pictures are close-up pictures of plants, and I like that all the colors were very similar because of this. I changed the crop settings on each of them to change their size and make them uniform, and I also added the same preset. I used a preset that I had made to darken the pictures a bit, but also to sharpen some of them. My favorite part about this grid is that each photo has some similar colors with the ones neighboring it, but the overall tones in each photo are unique.

The Fruit of Fall

This grid is one that I chose to make, and I picked fruits and vegetables that all had similar fall colors and then edited them to have the same preset. I chose this cooler preset because it made the images seem almost monochrome, but wasn't heavy enough that it overpowered the original colors in the photos, which can still be seen, though slightly darkened by the preset. By adding the same preset to all the photos for the grid, the photos are tied together not only by their subject matter, but also by their overall color tone. The arrangement of the grid furthers this because I placed the photos with similar colors is the same row.

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In addition to making our grids, we had to take a photo of our own and edit it in a way to make the color the most prominent part of the photo, as well as the most effective part. This the photo I chose.

Stars Behind the Stage

This photo uses color to set an energized mood. The warm colors throughout the photo bring about thoughts of fire and high energy situations. I edited this picture to make the warm colors so dominant because I wanted to emphasize the importance of the role of the lights. This photo was taken from the back of a display that was wall of glass tiles lit up by the lights behind. While most would look at the arrangement from the front and admire the glass, I shot this photo from the back and focused instead on the lights, which are responsible for the glass glowing so beautifully.

Color

The Color Wheel

Christina Seely

I think the use of a blue-purple color in this picture effectively sets the mood in this photo. When I think of colors in the blue family, I immediately think cold, lonely, barren, which is what I think this photo conveys. The photographer probably enhanced the blues and purples in this photo because the scene is snowy, empty, and has little light. Adding a periwinkle tint to the entire photo adds to these aspects and feelings one gets when viewing the picture. The actual parts of the picture that seem cold an lonely are emphasized even further by the coloring throughout the photo.

Project 2 - Framing and Composition

For this project, we had to take photos using eight different framing and composition techniques that are commonly used by photographers. Then we had to edit them in Lightroom. These are my favorite pictures each of technique.

Rule of Thirds

Frame Within a Frame

Close-Up

Diagonals

Bird's Eye 

Bug's Eye 

Leading Lines 

Fill the Frame

Project 1 - 30X2

For our first project, we picked two subjects to shoot, I chose the red berries and a light post near my house. I played around with the settings on my camera while shooting, as well as trying out different settings in Lightroom to edit my pictures. These are my favorite five pictures of my subjects.

Dangling Below

This is my favorite pictures I took of the berries because of the way the sky contrasts with the leaves. I also liked that the berries were very sharp, and the background was softer. I didn't do as much editing with this picture as I did with others, but I felt that it didn't need very much editing to get it to look the way I wanted. I started out by changing my camera settings to super-vivid, which helped me to achieve the brightness that I wanted to capture. From there, I heightened the contrast in Lightroom to make the sky brighter. I also changed the hue and saturation of the red in the berries to get them to contrast and stand out against the green of the leaves. Lastly, I added a very slight vignette to darken the edges of the image, and to emphasize that the focus of the picture is the berries.

Interlocked

I chose this picture not because of a contrast in color, but the contrast of something natural to something man-made. To make this contrast even more prominent, I darkened the background and saturated the berries. In addition to darkening the background and brightening the berries, I sharpened the picture and increased the clarity to accentuate the texture of the metal chain. I also added a blue hue to make the metal appear colder, and increased the recovery to darken some of the highlights, especially in the background.

Things Are Looking Up

This is one of my favorite photos of the five that I shot because of the angle. I used the super-vivid preset on my camera, as well as adding the ‘Color Creative - Yesteryear 2’ preset in Lightroom. In Lightroom, I also changed the hues and saturation of the picture to make the light post have a purple tinge, to darken the blue of the sky, and to accentuate the clouds in the background. I also sharpened the paint of the numbering on the post. I was sure to make the clouds stand out against the blue in a way so that they look illuminated. In addition to these edits, I also boosted the recovery, clarity, vibrance, and sharpened the image a little. I like this photo not only because of the angle, but also because I like the purple-blue hues and the vividness of the post and the sky.

Intricately Etched

The sharpness of the leaf's pattern is the original reason I was drawn to this photo, and the more I edited it, the more I began to like it. I used the color swap preset on my camera when I took the picture that muted the color in the background, but when I was editing in Lightroom I decided to make it black and white. I used the preset ‘B&W Creative - Look 3’, and made the black in the photo deeper. Next, I sharpened the leaf to make it more defined and added a dark vignette under the 'Paint Overlay' style. I wanted to do this after looking at my inspiration photo I had posted on my blog. It was a photo by Michael Kenna that had heavy vignetting, as many of his pictures do. With this photo, I tried to do something very similar by making it black and white and adding a vignette.

Fall Flowers

This is my favorite photo of the five that I chose because I love the fall colors. When I took this picture, I didn’t use a camera preset, and the background was blurred. When I got into Lightroom, I added the preset ‘Color Creative - Yesteryear 2’ and the colors became much more vibrant. I sharpened the picture because I wanted the foreground to be sharper, but sharpening also gave the background much more depth. After sharpening, the tree and leaves in the background look like they have been eaten away, and when I saturated the colors in the background, it made it seem like they glittered. To heighten this effect even more, I increased the exposure, clarity, vibrance, brightness, and recovery.

My Summer

This summer, most of my time was either spent here in Portland, or at the Oregon Coast. I visited several different beaches including Gearhart, Manzanita, and Neskowin. After going to the beach so much this summer, my appreciation for the calmness of the Oregon Coast has grown. At the beach, I was able to escape my responsibilities and enjoy my summer with my friends. In addition to staying in Oregon, I traveled to Texas to visit my extended family that lives there. My dad, my brother, and I go every year for about two weeks in July. This trip is always one of my favorite parts of summer vacation because it is usually the only time during the year that I get to see my dad's side of the family. My favorite thing to do while in Texas is go to the lake, and experience new things with my family. This summer, I only had the chance to go to the lake once, but I got the chance to go on a Segway tour through downtown Austin with my family. Though my summer wasn't as exciting as I would've hoped, I'm still a saddened to see the season come to an end.

Gearhart, OR