Grant | Professional Model

One of our own is officially a model. Look for his face on billboards. Check him out here and here.

Nice job, sir Grant.

Week 5 | Fun Work

Hola!

I hope you're continuing to find inspiration and joy in some of the projects you are completing for this class. I really appreciate how hard it appears all of you are working in pushing yourselves. Please keep it up! As always, don't take the easy way out, always look for different perspectives and angles, whether it's with photography or design. Here's what I want from you for next week.

1. Make sure you know what each of the following terms are, there's a very good chance we'll be having a short written quiz:

Aperture

Ambient light

Aperture Priority

Candid Pictures

Composition

Cropping

Depth of Field

ISO

Shutter Speed

Shutter Priority

2. Take portraits 3 different people you don't know. Preferably complete strangers. If this isn't out of your comfort zone, terrific. If it is, now is the time to step outside of it! What do you want others to know about this person when they look at your portrait? How do you convey the emotion that you see behind the camera to viewers looking at the image? I really want each of you focusing on both creativity as well as the technical aspects. Is the image in focus? That would be the major technical aspect to consider. None of your final images should be blurry or out of focus.

3. Choose the single best portrait you took for each of these strangers and make basic image adjustments. Post these finished images to your blogs. If you really like any of the images you took, I'll help you make final adjustments and we can get them printed.

4. Choose one of the Pixelmator tutorials featured here and complete it. Upload your final piece to your blog and give a brief description of how you completed it.

Week 4 | Fun Work

Hello gals and guys. Sorry I'm getting you your assignment today (friday). Let me know if you have any questions at all!

Five Images of Fall

This week you are going to head outside and take some photographs. You are more than welcome and encouraged to take as many pictures as you possibly want. In fact, you should probably be taking anywhere in the 50-200 range. Most professional photographers live by this concept in some form or another: For every 250-300 images they shoot, they will only keep and use 3-5 of them. In other words, people want to see your BEST work, not ALL of your work. So keeping this in mind, go outside and shoot for a good 45-60 min. Your theme/focus for your shoot is accentuating the fall season. How can you effectively capture and showcase the changing season of fall in a specific, interesting, and unique way? Here's the shots I'd like for you to get:

1. One must be a closeup (CU)

2. One must be a medium shot (MS)

3. One must be a longshot (LS)

4. The remaining two are your choice.

5. Particular things to pay attention to: textures, color, lines, and reflections.

6. No portraits of people.

After you've taken your pictures here is what I want from you next.

1. Upload your images onto your computer and into a specific folder titled Week 4 - Fall.

2. Go through the photographs you shot.

3. Decide which five (no more, no less) you are going to keep.

4. Name those five, using the following naming convention: the file name of each photograph you're keeping should be YouLastName + the subject + the type of shot.

FOR EXAMPLE: if one of my images was a closeup of a pumpkin, I would name it

Long - pumpkin CU.jpg

5. Open each of those images in Pixelmator. Is it in focus? Does it have enough light? What would you do different next time? Remember to duplicate your master layer when you first open it up. You should never be working on the master layer, remember?

Go through the Basic Image Correction process. This would be things like cropping or rotating the image, modifying tonal values using adjustment layers (look on google or youtube for tutorials or find it in Pixelmator). Experiment! Keywords for you as you try to figure out what you might want to change. Highlights, mid tones, blacks, color balance, etc.

7. Make a folder on your desktop entitled Computer Class - Portfolio, and save each of your images using the above name to this folder. Make sure you save both a raw pixelmator file as well as a .jpeg file.

8. Upload each of your jpeg images to your blog with a 2-4 sentence summary for each image of your process from start to finish (shooting to editing), and what features you particularly like about each one.

Have a terrific time and let me know if you need help or want to let me know how mean you think I am. This should be FUN!

Project Help!

Here's a question Grant emailed me here earlier today with, I thought I'd share it and my response for your benefit!

Do you think you could help me out a little bit with this? Right now what I have so far is the silhouette of Caeden's face and I am working on trying to blend to make the skin tone look realisticish. I have tried to find help on the internet and I have had no luck. Do you think you could maybe give me some help by pushing me in the right direction of what to do next or maybe give me some keywords to look up on my good friend "Google".

Thanks a lot, any help is appreciated.

Sure thing, pal. Have you ever heard of this radical idea called..... Tracing? My recommendation would be to utilize the power of layers. What happens when you stack a transparent sheet over an image? You can see through it, right?! Use this same theory in Pixelmator and make sure you are drawing on the TRANSPARENT layer. I'll attach a screenshot to give you a visual idea of what I'm saying. In other words, Don't take your ability to trace for granted, it's not cheating. Just working smarter, not harder. Thanks for asking questions.

Jonny

Week 3 | Fun Work

Hello guys and gals. We're gonna have a good week. This is going to be a fun and hopefully challenging week for us. Our homework for the week will be based off of what we do in class today.

1. Email me (jonny@verylongmedia.com) so I have your email address.

2. Utilizing the image I've provided you with, re-create a replicate illustrated image in Pixelmator.

3. The following are what your document dimensions should be: 8.5 x 11 inches. 240 dpi.

I'm really making you sink or swim here. This most likely isn't a project that you can put off until Tuesday night and do it effectively. I need you to use at least 10 0f the different tools in the toolbar that you described this last week to complete your project.

Next week you will each have 10 minutes to present your art piece to the class. Prepare for this please. I want you to be able to articulate and describe your process and how you completed each step. I will provide a brief list of keywords of tools and things that I would strongly recommend you learn and use during this project to complete it. If you don't know the answer to something or aren't sure how to complete a particular step, use your resources. Your absolute best resource while you are at home is Mr. Google. I promise if you have a question pertaining to how to complete something in Pixelmator that it's most likely been asked and answered online. Use this!

a. Blend modes (multiply, overlay, lighten, etc.)

b. Lasso tool

c. Paint bucket

d. Erase tool

e. Crop tool

f. Hand tool

g. Zoom tool

Timelapse | Inspiration

My friends. Watch here to become inspired.

Fun Work | Week 2

As visual artists we have the unique privilege of viewing people, places, objects, shapes, animals, and such in unordinary ways. What others view as mundane, we might find beautiful and inspiring. We find the simplistic with the "complex" and discover the complexity of the "simple." In other words we look at things differently, which is awesome!

While we will have many goals as we tred along, my overall wish is that you will discover the amazingness of your own eye. Every individual is blessed with the ability to view things differently than anyone else can. Every individual see's things from a different perspective. More powerful than the most expensive technology you can buy, whether it's camera's, computers, software, etc., is your own eye.

Your assignment for next wednesday, Oct. 12 is as follows:

1. Make sure you are following the class blog here

2. Make sure you've personalized your blog as you wish.

3. On your blog, in 2-4 paragraphs, answer the following questions:

How do you view the world around you? What inspires you? Who inspires you? How do you see your personality coming through your photography? What are your hobbies? What genre of photography interests you the most and why (wedding, portraiture, landscape, wildlife, children, sports, etc.)?

4. Utilizing any type of camera you'd like, whether it's a phone camera, point and shoot, or DSLR, find and take 7 images that you believe will give insight into your personality and post them to your blog.

5. Watch all four of these video tutorials for an introduction to Pixelmator.

6. On your blog, please write out each of the tools located alongside the pixelmator toolbar accompanied by a brief description of what each tool does.

As always, If you have any questions during the week please don't hesitate to shoot me an email at jonny@verylongmedia.com