Behold, I present to you, my watermark displayed on a photo. Nothing too exciting, simply my signature and J. Elizabeth Photography listed underneath in Baron Neue Regular, but I like it a lot.

Everyone! Important lesson: sometimes, people will not care if there's a watermark on your photograph. They may just crop it out or photoshop it out or whatever. I am going to try to remember to watermark all my images now, as it is a good photo thief deterrent, though not a guarantee.

This evening I went out to my friend's house to photograph her horses. It was pretty shady, so my pictures of her chestnut Quarter horse, Dixie, weren't overpowered by highlights.

I loved this picture! I don't remember this horse's name, but it was a gorgeous Arabian. When I walked into the pasture, it came trotting over to me. Not sure why, because I hadn't met it before, but I was happy for the photo op. Look at that mane!

This was my favorite picture. Not as high contrast as I was hoping for but it was just a really sweet moment between the two horses. 

I know this picture doesn't technically fit my project details, but I thought it still complimented it. I am not going to print it off for my final, but I just really love seeing the horse in the background and the wildflowers in the foreground. Really peaceful scene.

For my Project 4 (P4) assignment, I decided to work on photographs that could convey my passion for horses. Project 5 (P5), which I haven't begun yet, is basically a continuation of P4. I get to print one picture for P4 and experiment with several different types of papers to see which one will suit my project best. I'm really excited to do loads of annoying printing this weekend! Sarcasm implied.

Anyways, here are a few of the pictures I took of my friend's horses this evening. I wanted them to be a little grainy, very sharp, and black and white. I want to show horses as gritty, graceful, and wild things. I want to show people why I love them.

I like this one. The horse's ears are erect and his attention is focused on me, but he isn't afraid. Just curious. I would be surprised if my professor likes this one. The eye isn't in focus, which is what you'd generally want when you're taking pictures of things with eyes. Eyes are the windows to the soul and all that, don't you know? I ramped up the sharpness in this picture so that the tangled hair would be even more eye-catching. This is the picture I'll probably be printing for P4. It's peaceful and probably my favorite one from tonight.

The zoo is just outside of the University district, nestled in a quiet community. The zoo is quite big, unexpectedly big. Joseph and I arrived later in the day, around 3:30 or so, which left us with about two and a half hours to race through the zoo. Thankfully, it was a cool, overcast day so the animals weren't all hiding from the sun. Yay! 

So the leopard was reclining right next to the window, but I couldn't get a good picture because of the congestion of observers. It was so annoying. I never got a good photo of him. I don't remember what type of bird this was, but I think it was a kestrel. Regardless, it was so pretty.  Giraffes are my favorite animals to see at the zoo. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see them in their display habitats. They had been put away for the night by the time I got around to their section of the zoo :( It was so disappointing. Thankfully, I had a good zoom lens so I was able to get some shots, but this one of the giraffe's tongue was really the only one I liked.  This peacock! Oh man. It was hilarious. As you can see, the peacock is not super happy with this crow. Someone spilled crackers or trail mix or something on the ground and the peacock was eating it. This crow came by and was stealing the peacock's treats. The peacock had his feathers out and rattling, trying to frighten the crow off. Of course, the crow didn't care and would grab a mouthful, fly away, and come back. The peacock didn't even get to eat any, he was too busy fending off the crow. There was this really neat dog, called a maned wolf. The wolf would NOT look at me! It was so annoying. He just walked and looked straight forward. Super cool wolf though. Look at those legs!

Of course, unless you take the stars out of play and insert clouds.

It was wicked overcast the entire weekend, which meant that I was out of luck.

Due to this unfortunate event, I decided to switch my project from star trails to "flower power." The whole "flower power" concept was highly unappealing to me. The idea is to focus on a flower/flowering bush/brightly colored tree and hold the shutter down whilst moving my camera all over the place in every direction. It basically looks like flower vomit. My professor required a minimum of eight shots per flower, but I did more like fifteen to thirty, just for fun. Bring the photographs into Lightroom, then export them as layers into Photoshop (which took a very long time, since I was dealing with DNG files). Select all the layers, set the blending mode to "Lighten," and voilà! Flower vomit!

The day before the assignment was due, I photographed a large variety of Home Depot's flowers in their nursery. After I finished layering all the pictures in Photoshop, I realized that this was kind of a cool technique. I ended up really liking my results, though this isn't really my style.

If I were to do this assignment over, I would avoid shooting flowers with a large amount of white on them, or at least shoot less photos of them, so the buildup isn't as strong. Many of the pictures could have been really neat, except they were too washed out.

Want to hear a secret? Me too, so that's why I had this blog post scheduled to post on May 12 (so hopefully I arranged this blog correctly) but I wrote it on May 11. I am such a sneak.

The second assignment I did for my photography class was an HDR, or High Dynamic Range, shoot. These type of photographs include both light and dark elements, a wide range of exposures. The process to take these photographs is to shoot at least seven photographs of the same scene, tripod required. First, you find the correct exposure, or "normal" exposure. Then, you take a photograph under exposed by three stops, then another one under exposed by two stops, and so on, until you have a photograph that is over exposed by three stops, thus leaving you with seven pictures of the same scene, most of them horrendous. I liked to shoot at least eight pictures, just to add some more options to the mix. After you import the photographs into Lightroom, export the pictures to Photomatix Pro, which will automatically combine the pictures you took and include the darkest parts and lightest parts to create a merged photograph with impressive highlights and shadows.

I must admit, I am not a big fan of HDR photography. It looks fake to me, and almost always overdone. I have seen pictures that really look great with HDR, but overall, I wouldn't do HDR on my own time. Of course, however, since it was assigned, I had to experiment.

The three following pictures are the HDR shots I submitted for class.

   This photograph of the grass is my favorite. It was a windy day, so you can see the movement of the grass. The clouds are overexposed, though.     This picture is the one I am printing for class. It was the one that turned out the best, in my opinion. Kind of a boring photo, but it does the job.

   I have always loved this farm! It's located in such a pretty spot, nestled on the top of a hill, surrounded by more sweeping hills of grass. 

I am ridiculously far behind in this assignment. I assume that I was supposed to be actively posting on my blog since the beginning of April, but since I am a die-hard procrastinator, I am just now getting into this during the sixth week of the class. Oh boy.

The first photography assignment was by far my least favorite assignment ever. In class, Brent drilled holes in body caps for our cameras and then drilled a tiny, tiny pinhole in a piece of copper to place on the inside (or outside, whichever we found the best, or in my case, the prettiest) of the body cap. We were then released into the wild to take pictures.

I honestly thought I was doing something terribly wrong. The pictures were low contrast, unfocused, and ugly. I tried and tried to get something decent, but alas, I failed miserably. I was so afraid to show anyone the pictures because I thought I had done something wrong and everyone else had gotten interesting pictures that were in focus, as well as artsy and unique.

Nope. Turns out they all sucked.

Here are the photographs that I submitted for this assignment. I had to ramp the Clarity slider all the way up to get the picture to look even remotely in focus, add a slight vignette, and convert it to black and white to give it a film-ish feel, which, to me, redeemed the photograph just slightly.

I settled on titling my theme "Mental Illnesses." The idea was to convey a mental illness through a series of photographs digitally manipulated in Photoshop. The first item I finished is entitled "Schizophrenia." The plan was to show the difficult and disconnected world that schizophrenics live in. The subject's mouth has been removed, portraying the difficulty or lack of speech that often is a symptom of schizophrenia. The background of shapes are illustrating disorder and hallucinations or delusions. The soft, abstract swirls surrounding the subject are supposed to be representing the "voices" that schizophrenics often have. The subject is holding his head while giving off a very apathetic appearance.

I thought it might be ironic if I included turquoise as the only color in my photos. I read up on what the color turquoise represents, and according to the all-knowing Internet, turquoise means peace and calm. In a mental illness, especially one like schizophrenia, many things can be confusing and disorienting for the individual.

I will be posting the other two photos when they have been completed.