Blog Comments!

I've commented on Annie's, Sun's and Kara's blog for week 5.

I've commented on Aayush's, Cara's and Ben's blog for week 6.

Things I Love

This is the final blog post!! Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to check out my photographs! It really has been an incredibly fun and rewarding experience for me. When I first started this project, I really did know very little about photography. Now, just about a month later, I am really proud to say that I really have become rather close to my beloved partner. Together, we've captured some pretty incredible moments.

This week, I was able to adjust all the settings for every photo that I took on the "Tv" mode on my camera. This meant shutter speed, ISO, brightness, flash exposure, and picture style could all be changed. I know I've already talked about shutter speed, so let me just quickly address ISO. Based on some research from here, ISO measures how sensitive the camera is to light. The lower the ISO, the less sensitive the camera will be to light. With lower light, you generally want to use a higher ISO (my camera goes up to 6400) if you are not planning on using flash. Under clear blue skies with good lighting, a lower ISO can be used. Kind of along the same line is flash exposure, explained here. Flash exposure basically adjusts the subject's brightness. Exposure compensation adjusts the darkness of the overall picture. And finally, with the picture style option you can choose the picture to be styled like a landscape, portrait, macro...etc. shot.

My final theme is "Things I Love". With this theme I really wanted to just reveal five things that I really enjoy or hold significent meaning to me. This was inspired by the "Ten Things I Love" challenge, this website I stumbled upon while trying to find inspiration for my theme. Of course, there are so many things I love, like coffee icecream, spring, and that moment when you think of something really funny and start laughing but no one else gets it so they think you're crazy (among many other things). But here are just five.  

 

 

1. My family. Kind of a no-brainer, but I'm blessed to have such a supportive family. My mom, in particular, has been very interested in this photography project and provides good suggestions sometimes.My sister loves critiquing my photos and telling me which ones suck. And my dad has been very accomadating in providing transportation when I think of a place to shoot. I love them so much and they are awesome.

 

 2. My culture. Being a second-generation Chinese-American, I have had the privilage of being a part of two very distinct cultures. I have the privilage of eating a Philly Cheese Steak for lunch and Mantou for dinner. Of getting presents on Christmas (and my birthday) and money on Chinese New Year. Of being able to watch "Shark Tank" and a random chinese drama. The photo below shows a jade necklace and a silk scarf.

 3. The ocean. My family goes to the shore every year and among my fondest memories are crabbing on the pier at sunset and  running on along the shoreline with no one else around. I love the feeling of walking on the cool sand and the cool breeze when the sun sets. I remember the first time I ever went down to the shore, I was terrified of the sound of the waves and I sat down and started crying and wouldn't stop. But now, I love that too.

4. Music. Okay, I admit this one didn't turn out the way I wanted to. You may be asking, "what's up with the apple?" Actually, if you look close enough the earbuds are actually connected to the apple, to symbolize an ipod. Get it? Apple? Like, the company? Yeah, thinking back I don't remember why I didn't just use my actual ipod :/  

 

 
 5. Travel. Being able to explore and journey to different places is something that I've always loved to do. I really enjoy experiencing different cultures (in particular their food) and something on my bucket list is to see all seven wonders of the world. I had all the settings adjusted, but photo credits go to my dad. It looks so much better in black and white than it did in color....

 

I'm so glad I choose photography because I have no doubt in my mind that it will become a wonderful hobby even after this project. I set out on this project with the goal of finding inspiration from just everyday objects and everday places. I wanted just ONE good picture that I could be proud of. But now I have 25. I hope that you have found at least one that you enjoy as well. Thanks for reading!

A Day in the Life

With Spring Break finally here, I'm doing my best to try and forget that TED talks are comming FAST. In fact, I'm still in denial mode right now, which means I basically I tell myself I still have five looong days and nights to ponder what exactly it is I plan on sharing to my panel of unimpressed peers and two teachers. Which is probably not a very good strategy. But even in the midst of my busy schedule of alternating between conciousness ( where I eat and stare blankly at my pile of homework) and unconciousness, I have managed to keep up with my scehdule of taking photos.
This week's focus was on action photography, which really built off of everything that I have learned so far. Besides being able to adjust the lens and capture the best lighting, action photography really required some more toggling with my camera. The mode also required some detailed reading, which, having some time on my hands, I did. Two important aspects of action phtography are 1. shutter speed and 2. 1st and 2nd Curtain Sync Flash. I found a lot of information about shutter speed here and here. I won't bore you terribly with the details, so here's just a quick synopsis about shutter speed:

Shutter speed: Basically shutter speed is the measure of time the shutter is open. A fast shutter speed freezes an image in action, while a slower shutter speed creates a blur of motion. The slowest possible shutter speed for my camera is one second, and the fastest is 1/800th of a second (which is pretty crazy). Shutter speed is important to action photography because a photographer needs to decide whether to use a slow shutter speed and capture that trail of motion, or a fast one, and capture the subject frozen in motion. I've experimented with both effects this week.

And then there's 1st and 2nd Curtain Sync Flash. These two options are really only used for slow shutter speeds. I read a little into it, but the first few sources I found made it seem really complicated. However, after reading this I basically understood the general idea.

Slow Sync Flash: The difference between 1st and 2nd Curtain is when the flash fires. A camera actually has two shutters that form the actual camera shutter; one that opens in the beginning of the shot and one at the end. These two flashes create that light trail behind a subject that you see in those night photos. In 1st curtain, the light trail appears in front of the subject, opposite the direction of motion, which doesn't make much visual sense to me. But 2nd Curtain creates a light trail in the direction of motion, behind the subject.

Whew. So now that that's over...

This week's theme came to me after watching this documentary called "Life in a Day", which is avaliable on youtube if you want to check it out. The whole premise behind the movie was that people all over the world just videotaped their lives on one day of the year, and basically the movie consistede of little snap shots of different people's lives arranged from morning to night. Which is actually a lot more interesting then it sounds. But anyways, I wanted to follow the same idea, so I decieded to take photos of just one day of my life. I know this goes against the one picture per day plan, but I just wanted to try something new. So today, I spent every moment of the day with a camera close at hand. I isolated five different moments in my day that I think were significent and photo-worthy.

10:00 am- I was put in charge of watching my sister for the day, so I decided to spend some time outside in the morning. We had been on the trampoline for about ten minutes before my sister, being eight, declared she was bored and wanted to do something else. I cleverly asked if she wanted to try jump-roping instead and got this picture. Actually, I also took about twenty others, all of her still on the ground, so it was a bit challenging getting the timing right. 



3:00 pm- Haha, this was such an enjoyable picture, mostly because I got to be in it. This just perfectly captures my feelings after trying to get through my science homework. Photo credits go to my mom on this one, although I should have made the room brighter because the lighting is kind of bad. Shutter speed was at about 1/640 (very fast) to capture all those papers in mid-air. Not to worry; those papers wern't very important. But I did consider ripping up my thirty page Social Studies midterm review.

 5:00 pm- Preparing for dinner! Probably my favorite photo of the day. For one thing, I really spent some time trying to stage this display. The black-lidded appliance is probably not something you have at home: it's a rice cooker. Rice is a major part of the chinese diet. In mandarin, the term for "it's time to eat" is "che fan", which literally translates to "eat rice". And yes, I do eat rice most days for dinner. The hand you see is my sister's. She had a great time spilling the rice everywhere. I had less of a great time cleaning that up.

7:00 pm- My sister wanted  to go to the mall after dinner. I really don't like going to the Plymouth Meeting Mall because it's eerily silent, but they also have a pretty cool carousel So yeah, while other teenage girls walked by with their bags, I stayed for fifteen minutes in front of a carousel watching the horses go up and down while spinning slowly. I took this one after it just stopped, but you can see the spinny chair thing is still going. The girl on it looked like she was having a great time, but quite frankly, I'd choose a horse over a spinny chair any day. 

8:00 pm- Just before we left the mall, I HAD to take a night photo of cars. So I set up my tripod in front of TD Bank on Germantown Pike, right before the entrance to the highway, and snapped away. It was actually pretty exhilarating because most of the cars were going over the speed limit and you could almost feel them zoom by. I really slowed the shutter speed here ( 1/5) to get that blurry effect. After about five minutes though, my fingers were almost too frozen to click the shutter.


This was by far the most challenging mode yet. Which is good, because it means that I'm making progress and tackling bigger challenges in photography throughout the course of this project. But I also have sixty four photos of cars in the night that I had to go through before finding the one above. For all my photos, I had to take MANY many shots before I found one that got the motion at the perfect time. Next theme, I will be adjusting all my settings! With the deadline coming fast I might have to cram a little....

Vlog!

Oh wow I am so awkward in this....

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/62215667" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/62215667">Vlog</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user17176404">Carolyn C</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

I'm really sorry that the vlog isn't showing up! Above should be the embed code, I don't know why the video isn't comming up. If you click on the first highlighted link, you should be brought directly to the video. Again, really sorry for this technical difficulty. I've been trying to fix it, but it isn't working.

Other People's Blogs!

Please take a look at these blogs! I've commented on these and all of them are really interesting!

O'Neill: http://oneill-luxem.blogspot.com
Jess: allraveledup.blogspot.com
Arielle: aripianoprodigy.blogspot.com

Still Life

I started Theme 3 with a pretty clear goal in mind. After all, the setting was macro photography, and based on what I gathered from my resources on this setting (listed here and here) all I needed to do was find some pretty flowers and maybe some insects lurking around and I would have my perfect set of brillliant nature photos. I don't understand how somewhere along the way I failed to realize that it's around forty degrees outside and still practically lifeless. And yes, I understand how good photographers are supposed to make anything turn out looking absolutely breathtaking and whatever, but try taking pictures of tree bark for half an hour (which, after about five minutes, I stopped doing). The problem with outdoor macro photography during the winter is that not only are there no insects, plants, or flowers, which usually are the subject of these photos, there's almost no color whatsoever. Color is a very important detail in such photos because it provides a heightened sense of closeness to the subject. And the only thing that I felt could spice up my photos, snow, was missing (minus a few flurries that I managed to capture one day). Photography in this setting is also a lot harder than auto and even black and white setting because camera adjustment takes a lot of patience. When I first started, some of my photos came out unfocused. This occurs because of the Depth Field Rule, which I learned a little about from a youtube video. Apparently the closer you zoom towards a subject, the less in-focus most of the subject will become because the thinner the depth field you have. I experienced this rule multiple times while trying to take my photos, which is why the photos below are not zoomed in incredibly close. For this particular week, I took all outdoor shots. I know I promised that the themes would be more personal topics rather than general ones like "nature". But since macro photography is most associated with nature shots, this set was a bit less personal and more focused on the outside world rather than myself. This theme is offically called "Still Life".


In case you are unfamiliar with art and don't know what a still life is, it's a genre of painting or drawing that deals with an arrangement of objects. Still life is a depiction of usually inaniminate objects, like cups, bowls, and fruits. But in this case, I thought "Still Life" was the perfect term to describe winter photography. As I stated in the beginning, I viewed outdoor macro photography as a huge challenge at first. But after I actually started taking my photos, I realized that winter did have life. It was subtle life, like a flash of green from the moss clinging to a rotting log, or the young flowerbuds protected in their shells from the cold. Before, I would have never noticed it, but now I really admire how even in seemingly the most barren of seasons there is a quiet promise of Spring.

This log was very interesting, mostly because it had a blend of so many shades of green and brown on it. Had it been in the midde of Spring, I'm sure that it would have been teaming with bugs and all kinds of other creepy-crawlies, which would have been perfect for a another close up. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't zoom in even closer to really get the texture of this log.

These berries seemed to particually stand out in the winter landscape.They're such a glossy, vibrant red. And they're clusetered so thickly I'm almost reminded of a pomagrantae. After seeing browns and dull greens all day, this pop of color really caught my attention.

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The first hint of Spring, daffadoils, have just poked up from the soil. This picture was a bit unfocused , probably because I was lying in the grass with the shutter practically in the middle of the leaves. But I guess it does give the picture a softer glow

 Remember when I said that I couldn't wait to see the woods evolve over time? Well, two weeks later, they look practically the same. Which is pretty disappointing. I mean, shouldn't trees be practically in full bloom by now? In the woods surrounded by bare branches, this evergreen stands out. Even a trace of snow still on it too.

Of course, these buds, protected against the cold by a thick, furry shell (not quite sure the technical term for it), remind me that even throughout the winter, life remains, ready to emerge in full force come warmer weather. Can't wait to see these bloom!

 

 It was great to be outside again, although holding my camera with my numb fingers was not as awesome. But what was awesome was the fact that my photos were in COLOR! Oh color, how I've missed you. After my first two weeks of  just playing around and not really focusing on an actual camera setting, the macro setting was really a reminder that I have much to learn. I'm really glad that I have had the chance to explore these different modes of photography though. Action mode shots next week! My old camera was really bad and motion photos never turned out pretty, but I'm really excited to see how they will look with this one! 

 

 

Amazing blogs that you should look at!!

I've commented on Kara's blog, Alyssa's blog, and Chloe's blog. Please check them out!

Childhood Relics

So I'll admit that this week's theme was a bit challenging to think of. I spent the first day of the week, camera in hand, running around exploring every nook and cranny of the house like a madman. After my last theme, which consisted of almost all outdoorsy shots, I was ready to spend some time indoors. I did some quick research to find some tips about taking black and white photos and found a useful link here. But even after taking a bunch of random black-and-white photos, all I saw were many pictures that just lacked that "spark". I don't really know how to describe this "spark" and I'm not even sure if it's a legitament thing. But I feel like the best photos are ones that you can just take in and somehow become transfixed upon, because there's some quality in that photo, a graceful line, an interesting shadow, that just draws you closer. But anyways, day two of theme two wasn't much better either and I was getting kind of frustrated, when suddenly I realized that I never went down to the basement while on my hunt for a good photo. There's a good reason why I never go down to the basement, mostly because it's like a daddy-long-leg haven down there, but also because my basement isn't finished. Through the years, it's kind of become like a massive storage room, with tettering christmas decorations on one end, old bycicles on the other, and just about everything in between. Anyways, I made my down and started looking around when suddenly I saw baskets upon baskets of my childhood things. Dollhouses, stuffed animals, Burger King toys, everything. I found this stuffed monkey from my childhood, who I'm pretty sure I got in China the year we went back there on my seventh birthday. I felt rather bad for the neglegted monkey, so I vowed to bring her back up the world of day with me. But then I suddenl noticed in the corner, directly under a shaft of light, was my rocking horse, Rain (named after the character in the movie Spirit). Rain wasn't technically my rocking horse, she was actually my sister's, but just looking at her made me remember all the times my sister and I played together when we were little, and how once upon a time the two of us were both able to fit on that rocking horse. And then suddenly, inspiration hit me for my next theme:childhood relics. This was my first true photo of the week. The lighting comes from this little window (not in the photo) right above the chair.

So the next day I sat in my room and looked around for anything that had sentimental value. On top of my dresser is this carousel, which I remember I've had FOREVER. I'm pretty sure it made the move from our apartment to our house, which was probably eleven years ago. So I took it downstairs and asked my mom if she remembered when she had bought it, and my mom told me her friend had actually given it to her when they were in college. So yeah, the thing's practically an antique.

I love trinkets and pretty things, especially from different countries. I have carved elephants from India, a Kimmidoll from Japan, and of course a bunch of inexpensive little things that I get when I go back to China, like fans, clay dolls, paper cuttings, etc. I love them so much. But my favorite object is probably this silk plush jewelery box that my grandmother gave me when I was younger. The setting of objects that I have here is actually exactly how they are situated on top of my nightstand. If you notice the picture frame in the back, the image is actually cut from colored paper. The fan I got from China last time I went back.

 

So the whole week I was thinking about my childhood and then suddenly the topic of games came into mind. I remember back when I was probably three or four I found some marbles on a little playground that I used to always go to. I never really knew how to actually play with them, so I rememeber that I would just take them out of my desk and kind of admire how pretty they were. So my next photo is about marbles. I really tried to experiement with the lighting here and get that interesting shadow. I love how no two of the marbles were exactly alike.

The next day I decieded I photograph one of my favorite games: chess. Just to set the record straight I actually suck at chess. But I love the strategy involved. The rules are rather basic, and yet the game is so complex. Since my parents didn't know how to play, as a child I kind of figured it out on my own, which is why I'm not very good. With this shot, I wanted to make the chess pieces more realistic and life-like. The king, of course, is the centerpiece in this photo.

 

Taking pictures outdoors was a lot of fun, but I think I actually enjoy indoor photography even more. Just the stability of the setting and the variety of objects to work with make indoor photography extremely interesting. I loved being able to adjust the lighting to my needs, something that I can't do outdoors since I depend on sunlight. Next week's pictures will all be in the macro setting, so look foward to some more outdoor shots, especially of tiny details! I'll also probably be getting my clothes REALLY messy next time too. Joy.

 

 

Awesome Blogs!

I've commented on Rebekah's, Annie's and Jenny's blog.