My Favorite Black & White Photos

Now that my Photography 100 class is over, I'd like to share some of my favorite photos I developed. I really really enjoyed this class, and I can't wait to take the next one through UCSD to enhance my skills and learn more.

This photo was part of my very first assignment of taking pictures of things near and dear. I used a different vantage point to photography my bike.

This photo was taken on the railroad tracks at the San Marcos Civic Center as part of a vantage point assignment.

This picture was also part of a vantage point assignment. Ted had this great idea of me standing on a ladder and taking his picture playing the bagpipes.

This photo was taken at the botanical gardens in Boise, Idaho, using a red filter. This was taken as part of my filter assignment.

Just took this photo for fun.  Getting ready to land in Las Vegas.

Tony warming up before a game.

The Oceanside Pier for a night photography assignment.

This was taken on the Palomar campus as part of night photography. A group of us practiced taking a long exposure of someone walking down the stairs.

I'll continue this post on another day and share more of my favorite black and white photos.

Photographer Report Website

Photography 100 

Photographer Report Website

Black & White Photography, Light & Shadows

I am really enjoying the black & white film photography class I am taking this semester.  I have learned so much in only two months!  Developing film and making enlargements in the darkroom is a lot of work, but it is much more satisfying to see your hard work pay off when you see the final prints. In digital photography, you can see your photo immediately, but with film photography, you have no idea what the photo will look like until you make the final print. Film photography also allows you to be creative which is something that many of us need more of as it gives us a sense of accomplishment and just makes you feel so proud!

Our latest assignment involved taking photos with a focus on light and shadows. I never really thought about taking photos of shadows before, and when you really look at shadows, you will notice many awesome-looking designs. Here are my favorite prints from this assignment.

Photograms

This semester I am taking a black-and-white film photography class, and I am really really enjoying it so far.  To learn how to use the darkroom, our teacher had us create photograms.  Photograms are pictures made without a camera.  Photograms date back to the beginnings of photography.  Some of the first pictures ever made were photograms.

To make our photograms, we brought in any items we thought would make a good picture. I did a little research on photograms and found many examples of cool-looking photograms. One of the examples gave me the idea to use light bulbs as shown in the top photogram. We basically placed whatever items we wanted on the photographic paper in the darkroom, set the lens to the appropriate F-stop, chose an exposure time, and then developed the picture.

At first, I just had the different light bulbs arranged on the paper, but after I made my first test print, I saw that I could arrange the lightbulbs to make it look like an insect flying, and my teacher gave me the idea to add broken glass surrounding the insect to make it look as though the insect may be glowing.  I think the end result is so cool looking!

The second photogram was made out of straws and different paperclips that I bought a long time ago at Staples, and the bottom photogram is a design made out of one of my favorite foods...pretzels!

I had a bag full of items that I wanted to use, but unfortunately we ran out of time. It was so much fun to create these photograms, and I am definitely going to create some more!

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Ansel Adams and Robert Adams Project

For this photography project, we learned a little bit about the landscape photography of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams. Both of these artists were landscape photographers, and most of their work was printed in black and white.

Recreating Ansel Adams' photography was very difficult. For one thing, the majority of his photographs were taken in Yosemite, and it was hard to recreate the beauty of Yosemite in North San Diego County. Time was also difficult to come by because of working full time. Ansel would spend all day waiting for the perfect photo opportunity.  I took a couple hundred photographs trying to get the right landscape. I really wanted a photo with clouds, but, of course, every weekend when I went out to shoot, there was not a cloud in the sky!

One of Ansel Adam's landscape subjects were trees.  I captured this photograph just after sunset at the top of Double Peak, just as a storm was blowing in.  I wasn't sure that this was going to be a good photograph to use, by my teacher (thank you) pretty much did all of the editing on this photo!

Below is the Robert Adams' recreation. Robert Adams' landscape themes always showed how the landscape is changing. His photography was a lot easier to recreate than Ansel Adams because our landscape is always changing with construction and development. This photograph was taken at the base of Iron Mountain. On this day, I was hoping to get some great landscape shots with clouds in the sky, but that didn't happen. I was kind of bummed out about that, but after our hike, at the base of the mountain, we came across this heap of telephone poles, and it made a great Robert Adams' style shot!

A College Visit to ASU

Last month, in February, we took a college visit trip to ASU in Tempe, Arizona. We stopped along the way so I could take some photographs for my photography class, and here are three of my favorites.

This is a long-exposure photograph of the train bridge over the Tempe Town Lake.  I really enjoy taking long-exposure shots and experimenting with the length of time to leave the shutter open.  It is exciting to see the results.

We visited the Polytechnic Campus, and while we were on the tour, I noticed how this blue beach cruiser bike had such a nice contrasting color with the green background.  The sunlight and shadows really added to the soft tone of the scene.

Lastly, on the drive to Tempe, we came across the fields of windmills, and I took many photos, but I like this one the best because of how the windmills look so clean and white against the big blue sky.