Capturing Emotion

Photojournalism is the capturing of a story with photos, so a key piece of the story is the emotion of the people involved. There are some key ways to capture emotion. First, focus on the faces and zoom in very tight on them. By making the photo black and white, the viewer can no longer be distracted by any other aspect of the photo and the expression is the the main attraction. Also to contrast the photo many photographers step back and take a photo of the situation on an average day where no emotion is present.

Best Nine

The final part of my top ten tips project was to make a collage of one picture of each tip. I chose my favorite picture that best represented each tip.

Top Ten Tips: 10

Lock the focus is the technique where you make the background blurry by focusing in on your sucject. To do this, you have to hold the button down half way and pan over the subject you want the camera to focus with the center (or the default setting). Then you can move the camera to move the subject from the center of the frame and take the picture. In my example, Molly's hand is my focused subject (not in the middle) and her face is the center yet the background of the photo.

Top Ten Tips:

The first tip this week was to learn our flash's range, meaning figure out how far from our subject we can be and the flash to still light them up. In the picture of Meredith, the room was very dark but I was  close enough to make the picture come out using the flash. The next tip was to be a director, meaning tell people where to stand and what to do in posed pictures to make them better and more intresting. It took some work to get Michael to get in the middle of the girls. Rule of thirds is the last tip. Its where you move the subject from the middle like my dog Bradley is.

Top Ten Tips: 3, 4, and 5

The third tip is the use the flash outdoors to fix shadows. On the right, we are in a cave and it is very dark, but by using the flash you can see the girl's faces. The forth tip is called fill the frame. In the last photo, by zooming in close on the flower you can see the details and it eliminates excessive background. The last tip is to take vertical pictures. In the photo above , more scenery is  shown because of the orientation.

Top Ten Tips: 1 and 2

Recently, we have been reviewing the Kodak Top Ten Tips and working on applying them to our photos. The first two tips involve having neat, clean backgrounds and keeping your view at eye level of the subject so the entire 'face' is shown. In the picture on the left, I got on the ground to be on the same level as Catherine so the picture would have her face not the top of her head. On the left, the background is good because it isn not messy or distracting and it also contrasts with the color of Tori's shirt.

Photo Mosaic

Today we used about one hundred or so photos to make a photo mosaic on the website www.printmosaic.com. It is super easy and fun!! I used a picture of Chandler and I at Frontier Ranch this summer as the main photo.