Sunday, October 23, 2011

Our first full week in almost a month!!! What to do with all that time??? I know! We can be incredibly busy learning amazing things and showing off everything that we've learned so far! So, DVCIers, here are our goals for this week, the last week of the quarter:

  1. We will draw everyday for 30 minutes. I will give you each a drawing assignment. You will be graded on effort and progress. Have fun.
  2. You will finish up your photo unit by creating a series of photos that demonstrate your knowledge for shooting landscapes, sports or action photography, informal portrait photography, still life and your understanding for how to control depth of field. (We'll do studio work later on, when I can get the second softbox I need.)
  3. You will learn to professionally mount and frame your best photos to hang on the wall.
  4. You will begin to learn about Photoshop. This means some vocabulary words. Prepare to learn what RGB, CMYK, RAW, TIFF, JPG, DPI, resolution, hard-copy and file-size mean.
  5. You will (finally) meet up with your partners at GMTCC. You will show them some of your stuff and they will show you some of theirs. They are ahead of us in stuff produced because they are in a one year, 5 hour/day program. Take the time to learn from them.
  6. If the god's smile in our favor, you will be taking a field trip to Burlington to participate in the VT Tech Jam. This all depends on whether we can get a bus or not. If I can't get a bus, then just DVCII will go and you guys will go another time.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

After looking at your blogs about the Golden Proportion, I'm realizing that not many of you really understand what it's about. I figure that I need to revisit it and I hope that perhaps this really nice image of berries that one of you provided me might be more effective than me prattling along in front of the projector.

 This photo is the original photograph. (I put in the spiral) As you can see, the berries are in the lower middle of the frame which gives the photo a sense of weight and balance. However, it doesn't meet the Golden Proportion. (Remember, it doesn't have to to be an effective photo. However, it does need to meet the GP for the purpose of this assignment.)
I pulled this photo up into Photoshop and cropped it. (I apparently washed out the color somehow as well.) You can see that the photo is not much different but small differences can make a good photo into a great one. Now that you all have learned how to crop a photo, I want you to practice cropping to bring an image into line with the Golden Proportion. Save your image as a jpg and post it.

.....And Kira, get off Skype! <grin>

Sunday, October 2, 2011

I Won't Be Here.....

...tomorrow, October 3rd. I have a meeting that I forgot completely about. This puts us in a bit of a bind because EFHS misses class on Tuesday and Wednesday because of NECAPS. So, instead of doing RTN on Friday like we usually do, we'll do it on Monday with the sub. (The sub is Ann Hull, btw who knows her way around a graphic computer.) We'll then focus on the Pumpkin Regatta on Thursday and Friday, and RHS will help me Tuesday and Wednesday.

Respond if you get this, OK? I want to know if this is an effective way to communicate with your guys.