Reminiscing

I thought that I would refer back to my days as a photographer. Back in school when I had all access to all of the equipment that I could dream of having now, but dont. The full access to the dark rooms, the studio, equipment I could check out, and the lenses i could use. The Camera bodies I could try, and the iMac/and printers I could edit on. Those were the days, and here is some of my work from those days that show how much I loved those days, and the resources. Sometimes I wonder why I majored in photography. One look at these images and I remember why. I just have to keep it up, and keep practicing so I don't loose the skills I have set in stone. I hope you enjoy my work, and feel free to comment on the photos.
Before: (left)
These are the materials I had worked with, and this was the final image before I touched it up, and changed colors in Photoshop. As you can see in the before image, the background is Brown, and the Napkin comes up slightly. I also emphasized the browns in the cup as well in the final image

After: (right)
As you can see here, I changed the background to green, emphasized the intensity on the cup, and the contents inside, and also fixed the napkin.

Question:
Which one do you like more? What could I have done differently to make the image better? Do you want a special Hot Chocolate made by me now?
This Hot Chocolate was probably the best I have ever made in my life. The first attempt in photographing it was with real hot cocoa, but it turns out, that it was so hot, that it melted the whipped topping, and cookies before I could capture it. So I poured it into a seperate cup and gave it to a girl in my class. She really enjoyed it. Says it was the best she has had in a long time. Yum! So you may wonder what I did to fix this little problem? I just filled the cup to the top with the whipped cream, and added the syrups, cookies, and mints to it afterwards. This gave me plenty of time to fix what I wanted in the image, and take the picture at multiple angles. Lucky huh!

Camera:	Canon EOS 30D
Exposure:	0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture:	f/10
Focal Length:	38 mm
ISO Speed:	100

This is a piece of work that inspired me to do another kind of like it. This photo is done by a man named Jerry Uelsman. He is one of my most favorite Black and White Photographers. Jerry would do all of his imaging in the Dark Room, before all of the photo editing on computers began. I can't say that my work inspired by him is the same, the difference is, that mine were images shot seperately, and then layered digitally instead of being layered in the dark room. Amazing isn't it. To check out some of his work go to: http://www.uelsmann.net

In this image, there are actually 4 images layered upon one another. There is the image of the hands, which I bumped up the contrast on, and then the texture of the cracked dirt that I had placed on top of the hands, masking it to the shape of the hands themselves. Then I added the texture of the pond, and molded that to the shape of the hands and made sure the transparency was just right. After that, I added the waterfall, which was not one of my images, since I couldn'te find any waterfalls in Rexburg Idaho, in walking distance. So I found this one off of google. I believe it was a picture of someone's waterfall of their backyard pond :) Then this is what the final image turned out like. This was one of my final digital prints for my Digital Photography class with one of my most admired photography teachers at BYU Idaho: Brian Atkinson. I have him to thank in helping me learn about masking, and for the cracked dirt image that he let me use. He taught me to start keeping a photo library of just textures, so in the future when I have an image that I may want to mask in an image, then I will have a library full of my own photos to use as textures.

This next image was also done for my final project before I graduated with my Bachelors of Arts in Photography Fall 2007. This photo was inspired by a movie called Gataca with Ethan Hawke, and Uma Therman. In the movie the roles that this actor and actress portrayed, go to a piano concert where the Pianoist has five fingers and a thumb on each hand. So I thought I would create an image refering to the idea of what it would be like to be so different, with the ability to have that extra finger on each hand. My model is my friend Shawn, he was a great model, and was also the hands for the above image. I titled this image: Different

More to come soon...