It’s been a while since I’ve had to take photos using a camera other than on my smartphone, and it was definitely a challenge at first trying to come up with what my subjects would be for this assignment. I first had to go out and buy a camera (I needed one anyways) and finally settled on the Canon G7X. I then was stumped as to what I wanted to take pictures of so I just started taking pictures of random stuff (of course my cats got their glamour shots in). I found that if I carried the camera around with me then I was more likely to just take photos and have opportunities to take photos so I carried it around with me for a couple of days and I think I got some good shots.
My first photo is of my house. It rained earlier this week and has been really windy the last few days so as I was approaching my house I thought I’d take a picture of the beautiful blue sky behind my house. I am still trying to get the hang of how to use my camera but I think I successfully metered the sky so the exposure was correct. For my indoor photo I used the inside of my mom’s car with natural light coming through the windows. I actually used the levels to make the backs of the seats a little darker so that it had more contrast. My foreground and background photos are from my messy desk at work. These were actually my first photos with the new camera and I was testing out using the touchscreen and manually focusing on the foreground and background.
For the rule of thirds photo I took a picture of a statue that is outside of Douglas Park which is next door to the Long Beach Airport. The area where the statue now is used to be owned by McDonnell Douglas and they used to build airplanes on that land. Once Boeing bought them out they demolished the airplane building hangars and are turning the area into a business park. I was in the car when I took this picture and my mom was driving. I thought there was some cool lighting on the statue and I tried to frame it appropriately. I actually rotated the image a little bit in Photoshop because it wasn’t perfectly straight when I took the photo. I also sharpened the statue a little bit.
For my last picture, the lead room picture, I took a picture of my cat Seymour. He is a very difficult model to work with. I had my mom distract him with his favorite treats. I used Photoshop to adjust the levels and make him look a little darker and make his eyes and white fur stand out more. I also played with the selective color and brought out a little more of the reds to complement the green wall in the background.