Weekly Blog - 6-26-21: Photography

 I really enjoyed this week's assignments. Both the Olympic Museum field trip and the photography category assignment were inspiring to me and helped me view photography in a broader light. I've been doing portrait photography for over ten years and find that I tend to get stuck doing the same, comfortable style of photography, so this was a great opportunity to try new things and get out of my comfort zone.

1. Landscape - I caught a gorgeous sunset and wanted to use the unusual lighting that streaked across the clouds as my landscape photo. Unfortunately from where I was, I couldn't get the perfect angle I was looking for but I'm overall happy with the lighting and coloring. 

2. Architectural - I went to Palm Springs and found the lobby inside the Rowan hotel to be really beautiful. I wish I had brought my tripod so I could have taken multiple exposures to blend together, seeing as the window above the bar was very bright compared to the ambient light in the hotel lobby and it took some post-processing to darken.

3. Product - This was my first time experimenting with product photography, but I tried to apply my previous knowledge of studio lighting techniques to achieve a stylized and clean look. I used a flash through a scrim as well as a bare flash with a blue gel.

4. Street - Again, I went to Palm Springs and walked around the main downtown area looking for unusual art and eye-catching places. This was one of the only times I've tried street photography but it was challenging to deal with large crowds of people in the way of the shot as well as isolating the subject from a busy and unwanted background a lot of the time.

5. Still life - Something I loved while looking into still life photography was how much it reminded me of classic renaissance paintings like this:

I tried to recreate that color scheme and lighting but found it a little difficult. I would like to try this style of photography some more, but with more interesting props and better lighting equipment to replicate the soft light of the image above.

6. Conceptual - I found this to be the hardest category for me because I'm used to shooting portraits, and not typically with complex or abstract ideas inspiring them. So I struggled to come up with an interesting idea. I'd like to try again with a solid idea that I've given a lot of time to and preparation for.

7. Nature - When looking into inspiration for nature photography I was struck by some gorgeous long exposure photos, especially those of waterfalls and beaches. Unfortunately, I didn't have the chance to find somewhere like that where I'm living, but I definitely plan on taking some photos like that in the future.

8. Portraiture - This was the category that I was most comfortable with and have the most experience in. I wanted to try some different lighting techniques compared to the clean, basic lighting I'm used to utilizing for studio photography, so I used two color-gelled flashes on either side of myself and took a few varying self-portraits to play with the lighting setup. I really liked the effect and want to continue trying less standard lighting setups.