Draft Outline
For this project, I felt the theme was very open with no strict guidelines as to how to interpret it. Throughout this course, I have captured most of my images on walks and out it nature. Some of my favorite images were taken outside and I want to continue on this adventure of getting more comfortable with nature photography.
I chose to go with Emerging Forms of Togetherness. My interpretation for this project is going to be stages of early spring. As of late, the winter chill is starting to wear off and floral buds are beginning to bloom. People are getting ready to really kickoff the year with new spring energy, myself included, and I want to reflect that with images of these changes in our environment. These images will hopefully, portray new life in nature and capture natures delight, that signifies change in humans shown through mother nature. I want to keep my strategy relaxed and allow my surroundings to dictate what the results will be.
I hope to also support this theme with at least 6 sequential image that are edited in an unifying theme. I’m inspired to get outside and capture images within my natural surroundings, with my dog, of course.
First Catalog
To begin this thematic project, I brought my camera on my dog walks through out the week. My goal was to capture the spring like details that I found along the way. The places I went to, I frequent weekly, and along the way I could already see the changes beginning to bloom around me. I wanted to focus on the little details that I found and capture closeup images of my findings. I ended up taking many pictures with various focal points but only a few are useable.
I am still unsure of what direction and mood I will be editing my images and I want the images to speak for themselves. I also brought my pup Lenny, and I tried to capture some images with her in them. I want to include images of my pup throughout the series, because she’s the one that is with me during this process and feel that it aligns with my theme of Forms of Togetherness. This theme is enjoyable because there are so many ways to interpret the concept and in front of the camera and behind it. I’m capturing images with time spent by myself, with my dog and the images captured reflects the concept of forms of togetherness in nature and all the elements it requires for the spring change.
I will continue to photograph images on my dog walks, and document the changes that I see around me. As we get further into the warmer months, I’m excited to see the more dramatic changes in nature.
Here are some of my first edits:
Work In Progress
For this portion of the project, I brought my camera with me on my daily walks with the pup. I focused on capturing more spring like florals and anything that caught my eye in nature. I also had to wrap my head around cropping and editing my current images with the proper settings of 16×9. I found with those settings for the images, it gave it a completely different look and I fell out of love with a lot of the images I had already taken. But it’s a good challenge to work within the project parameters and not within my personal preference. I also took the instructor’s feedback to capture more pictures of my dog. I really feel like my photo series was needing more of a variety of subjects, and I don’t know why I wasn’t taking more of her. I am going to continue to take more pictures of her going forward and still keep with my Spring theme.
I also kept my editing practice very simple and similar to my first photo edits. I think the subjects within the image stand out by themselves, and just needed a bit of help in editing. I focused on brightening the hues of various colours within the images and adding light filters to the images for consistency. I have also been taking advantage of the “detail” tab in the develop section of Lightroom. Overall I am pleased with the direction and am excited to continue to develop this series.
Second Edits:
Work In Progress 2
I continued to capture more images that were the proper size and format of 16×9. I also edited previous photos from the first week of images to the proper size. I really focused on images of my dog and its starting to feel more like a collection of images and instead of random pictures of plants. I think I’ll end up having to edit out images from the whole series to make it feel cohesive. Since all of my images were taken at different times of the day and different locations, it was a little challenging in the editing process to create a consisted mood.
The Series Draft
Here is the first draft of my series as a PowerPoint PDF. It was really nice to see all the images together, and lined up in a meaningful way. I ended up with more pictures than I originally had thought but I am pleased with the outcome. I might still consider slight image edits, just to increase consistency throughout the series. I am also still going to play around the order of the images and assess whether each image belongs within the series. Overall I am happy with the direction and progress made so far.
Celina_Baulcomb_fin247_photoseries_WPThe Voice-Over PowerPoint Series
Youtube Link to PowerPoint Video Narration: https://youtu.be/orUDz7BrpI4
Celina_Baulcomb_fin247_presentation_WPFinal Revision
Throughout this photo series I have learned so much. I found through this process of creating a series that even after coming up with a theme or idea, you still need to allow for change to pivot when it’s necessary. I learned so much about photo editing and, the process of editing, filing, and organizing images with LRC and photoshop and setting up a good system for yourself to keep organized. I can also understand the power of editing and how the depending on the mood you’re going for, you can do so much with the edits by enhancing or removing or tweaking images. During this series, I was having a lot of fun by taking images of florals and different plants, but what made these photos a series was the addition of my dog. She added so much interest, movement and texture within the images and she is ultimately what the series is about.
Looking back on the beginning stages of the series, I had placed emphasis on trying to create “pretty” images, but I found my favorite images were the ones that were imperfect which added another layer. The direction of my series also evolved once I had feedback to go off of. After receiving feedback from our instructor and my peers, the direction of my series became much more clear and I feel it that’s when it became a real series. From there I was able to focus more on what was missing and try and capture images that would fit into the rest of the theme. I also found when putting the series together, that you can create a story with the order of which images are placed. From there, I knew I wanted to create some sort of story combined with poetic style narration for the series that discussed the subjects while also creating a story line. I found the lack of tight restrictions for the narration allowed me to add another layer of mood to the voice narration. Next time, I would have liked to also add music to the narration which I think would have tied the video together nicely. But this is all a learning process and I am pleased with the outcome.
Creating this series was a great experiment and now I have images that I will always have and cherish. I hope you enjoy them too. Thank you!
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