My Prior Work - Pt. 3

 Today, we'll be looking at some of my earliest work, some of which going all the way back to photo 101!

In my first photography class, we used black-and-white film, and developed and printed our photographs ourselves.

I feel that I actually did quite well in many of the technical aspects - many of my photographs are sharp and detailed and have a good tonal range. However, some were most definitely not great, and a mediocre or at least less than ideal print only made them worse. Many of my photographs I didn't even bother to print - it would've been a waste of paper to print photographs I wasn't excited about/didn't like and weren't needed for a class assignment.

Then I went to Photo Design - carrying a digital camera with me. Although my first assignment was a portfolio (which at that point was basically just the better out of the pictures I had taken the quarter before), I would start shooting tons of photographs very soon. In some ways, my photography - both technically and creatively - improved, but my main lens' auto-focus is nearly useless and it is almost impossible to focus manually with any precision. Luckily, my skills are improving enough to make usable images, but I'm also hopefully going to be getting an equipment upgrade soon.

First, my favorites from Photo 101 -and, by extension, of my portfolio assignment for Photo 112 -

 

Because color wasn't on the table, and it's impossible to review on-the-fly, I didn't really try much in the way of action photography, and my street photography didn't really "pop" as much as I wanted it to without color, but I found that black-and-white is great for texture and detail that's difficult to capture with a phone camera (or at least was for me).

Later, when moving to digital, I was able to experiment with color and light in ways I never had before - facilitated by having a color camera (of course) and being able to review on the fly and the ability to take enough shots in one outing to experiment and perfect a picture if I took the time and effort and the subject

didn't leave in the middle of it. Still focused on texture, though, but the color and clarity of digital takes it a whole new level!