Extra Credit

Want to take a slow shutter photos but do not have a DSLR? Try SlowShutter. SlowShutter is a great app for iPhone users who wants to take cool blurred pictures, and it is featured by Apple in “App Store Essentials: Camera and Photography”.

In the app, it has 6 shutter speeds that you can choose from and also a B shutter that can let you shot as long as you want.

Besides that you can also change the capture mode: automatic, manual, and light trail. In the automatic mode, the camera controls the amount of light that the aperture captures; in the manual mode, the light will accumulate until you finish the shot; in the light trail mode, you can chose the sensitivity of your camera to the light. It also has a live preview function that is really useful when talking photos (that appears to be LP in the shooting page). You can see both the outcome of the photo while still seeing the scene that you are taking. This makes it easier for users to get a sense of what is happening in the frame.

For the visual elements, I think SlowShutter did a good job that most of its icons and functions can be well understood and easy seen. However, the flash icon is one of the two flaws in this app. Because I don’t think it looks like a flashlight. The icon appeared to be more like a video recorder when I first opened it. The second flaw is the app seriously needs to be updated to support iPhone 5. From example, it looks kind of awkward of having some black spaces above and below when taking a shot.

Overall, I think SlowShutter is an easy and useful camera app that people can use to take beautiful slow shutter speed pictures.

 

 

 

These are photos that I took:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other app that I downloaded is Hipstamatic. This is another camera app that is recommended by Apple in its “Camera and Photography” section. The main function that this app does is a postproduction and flash control. In other words, it is an Instagram app that you can control your flashlight that makes cool effects.

What makes this app unique is that you can play with different combinations of lens, films, and flashlight that it provides in store. There are around twenty different features that you can buy in store to play with. These are some cool features that I used to take photos.

It is also really impressive to have the old camera interface as the menu of the app (and also the icon of the app). It makes you feel like taking a picture in old cameras: you can look through the small square glass to take your picture. It also makes the dusty effect when you see the image trough the “glass”. These give the user a great visual effect of using your phone as old cameras and you can also purchase other interfaces that you like in store.  When you view the photos that you took in the photo gallery, it actually gives the information of what lens, film, flash that you use. It is really useful if you want to take a picture with the same effect. Another thing that is good about this app is that they give you pictures of how they look in the real world when you want to choose different lens, films and flashes.  They also give you photo examples when viewing them, which can give one a great visual idea before choosing the lens, films and flashes. However, the only

bad about this app is if you want to use more “lens” or flashlight effects, you have to buy it from their store. Besides that, you can set up your favorite camera combination. This function is really useful when you feel tired of

changing the flash, film, and lens one by one. They also provide the user a visual image for the whole combination, which I think, is really cool.

 

 

 

However, the set up for this app is kind of difficult. When I first use this app, I was confused by the buttons and visual elements they have. I also have a problem switching the lens and films that it has (I do not know that the back icon that it had in the bottom right corner can lead you to the other side and switch the features). I think it is a better idea to give some tutorials or at least some explanations for first time users.

To sum, this is a great app to have that you can shoot cool combination that you discover. Despite the flaws that I talked about, I would really love this app when I am tired of the multiple steps of postproduction.

These are photos that I took:

Paint to Life: Class Registration

For my paint to life project, I like to present how anxious AU students are when they are registering class. I used Repentance of St. Peter by Guido Ren in the beginning to act like I am praying to succeed in registering. However, it turn out that I failed because the bad register system that AU has.

In this movie, I used three camera movements: dolly out (in the beginning, 0:11), pedestal down (when I am shaking my hands and feet, close up (0:49)), and  zoom in (when the page failed to load, 1:07).

And also included several shots: middle shot (0:11), over shoulder shot (0:25), close up (0:49), extreme close up (0:58), wide shot (1:16)

Video Link

Diversity Project

For this project, I grouped with Malcolm. He works for the AU athletes, so we decided to visit his work place and experience his work life after school. The hall of fame is the room that we first entered. There was also another trophy collection on the back side of me.

He then showed me his office where he usually do post production for pictures and videos that he took on the field. However, this doesn’t sound as interesting as it should be!

In order to not being bored, there is place that he can watch people working out and laugh about them. (Just kidding). By sitting there he can see how hard working other people are, so he has a motivation to go back to his computer and work harder.

He also brought me to the arena which there was a women basketball game going on. This pictures showed how he usually film videos when a game is happening.

Overall, I enjoyed the experience with Malcolm working for the AU Athletics. However, this is not an easy job. You have to take photos/ videos and also do post production and only get paid for $10/ hr. But  I think it is fine as long as he enjoy his work. I hope I can see him some day when I watch AU athletics matching with other teams!

Lumier Project Redo

Our Lumier project is about just having a really bad day. It starts off with our character getting a text messages about a really bad grade on paper. She furiously types back and then puts on her chap stick. She is so mad that the Chapstick seems to fly out of her hand and on to the floor. As she reaches to pick up the Chapstick she falls on the floor. As she goes to get up she bumps her head on the table, falling back down to the floor. As she tries to pick herself up again and on to the table she slips not once but twice. Finally she gets up and brushes herself off. Thinking her day can’t any worse she starts to walk out of the room. As she walks away she runs into the table and then walks straight into the door. She becomes frustrated so frustrated and stomps away.

Take 1

Take 2

Take 3

Take 4

Take 5 (Final)

Visual Review – Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams is considered to be the greatest photographer in the world. When taking into account that he lived in a non-digital world, his accurate exposures are well known for their clarity, and he also is known for promoting high aperture shoots which broke the generally accepted aesthetic standards. The photos that he took are mostly landscape photos of the national parks and coastal areas in the west coast. Influenced by his father when he was young, Adams went to many exhibits and bought his first camera the age of 14 on a trip to Yosemite National Park with his parents. Adams started his career from there. As a promoter of taking pictures through a small aperture, he formed a group called f/64 (which is the highest aperture that cameras can reach during his time). His idea of imagining the final print before taking the shoot developed into his  idea of Previsualizatioin and Zone System. This master control concept and technique allows him to control nearly all of the potential variables on the camera, and determine the best exposure and development of time for every given photo.

Since all of his pictures are mostly low aperture, we can say that all of his photos are sharp and has a greater depth of field. Although he took close ups of photos of flowers and plants, he never preferred using high apertures to get a soft image of the object.

Adam’s pictures have lines and curves, especially when it comes to rivers and deserts. For instance, one of his most famous pieces The Tetons and the Snake River (1942) portrays a meandering river across the photo, with the end of the river dividing the whole picture into two unequal portions: the mountain with the sky on top and plain that the snake river runs across.

Besides using low aperture to break the rules in his time, he used red filters to block infrared sunlight to make the sky seem dark. In his first project he shot a picture called The Face of Half Dome by using red filters. This photo became so popular because the red filters to made the sky look dark in contrast with the snow, and also because of the unique perspective of the mountain in the center, making the mountain in half as well as the whole picture.

The only portrait shot project that he ever did is Born Free and Equal: The story of Loyal Japanese-Americans. The reason for doing this is because of his frustration of seeing how unequal the Japanese people was treated after the attack on Pearl Harbor during WWII. Adams wanted to use his camera to record how “how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment”. One of the most famous pictures in this book have small girls standing on the playground raising their hands up like bird’s wings. The photo was taken at a low angle, relatively low aperture so that we can see other people’s hands held up, paraphrasing the children in the camp wants to be free like a bird.

Ansel Adams’s accuracy of exposure was not only considered as a masterwork back then, but also today as well. The sharp images that he took help us reproduce his pictures that are 50 years old, and the choice of composing the lines and curves are also makes landscapes elegant and gorgeous.

Weekly Photo-Soft

What a nice day to shot! I like the foggy weathers because the fog can diffuse the light that makes it look softer (the lights in the background are the traffic lights and the street light). Usually it should be really bright to give people cautious and brightness; however, in this case, both of the light source got soften.

Self Portrait

This is the 3 original photos that I took:

 

 

And this is the what I did to them:

What I basically did is:

 

 

The photo that I am sitting is the top layer, then the black and white one, then the pinkish one.

I first adjust the brightness/contrast and the level of the three photos due to the fact that my camera chooses different amount of exposure for each photo. I then turn the color of the photo that I am pretending to smoke to a black and white one, and change the hue and saturation of the photo that I was in my halloween costume (which I am a dinosaur) in to an extreme pinkish color. After that, I make the black and white one into an oil painting texture, and liquified the pinkish photo. By finishing all of these steps, I carefully erased the first layer; therefore, I can have the other two pictures appear in the whole frame. I also mosaic the girl that is sitting behind me.

Weekly Visual Review-Webpage

In my opinion, a good website must have a user friendly design. For example, easy layouts for user to understand the structure of the page, clean colors that are just easy enough for people to read what the text is saying.

The website I choose is a personal website for a photographer named Andi Mayr. The reason why I choose his website is because the colors that Andi choose is clean and the layout is really simple and straightforward.

On the top of the starting page, there is Andi’s name and his job title; in the middle, it has four rectangular photos that are projects of the photographer that represents categories of human, landscape, sports, and random; at the bottom, there are other categories that Andi provided to viewers (and the mountain icon is a link to the main page). I think Andi puts the four pictures in the middle because they are the four most viewed categories that people view on his webpage. I think Andi makes these categories as four huge pictures because he wants these to stand out from everything else that makes viewers easy to select since it is the four most viewed categories. In addition, when your mouse stops at one of the pictures, the picture will fade and become whitish, then underlined and capitalized words will come out. This makes viewers more easy to select things that they want to view at. In the middle of the four pictures, there is a diamond that I guess is his logo. Overall, the main page is straightforward of its ideas and it gives us a simple and clean feeling.

Then when I choose one of the category pictures, it will lead me to its gallery. When its loading, Andi’s logo will pop up and continue flashing until the page is done loading. I think this is really cool because on one hand it is indicating the age is loading, and on the other hand, by making the logo as a loading icon will make viewers remember his logo. After the page is loaded to the gallery section, the page then turns into a page that has other category links at the top, in the middle there is an individual picture, and the bottom remains the same (except they added a button to the top). In order to see other pictures, you need to scroll down, but it always lets one picture to show at the time (that it has a pull back effect). I think the point of Andi doing this, to remain the page as clean and simple as possible for the views to review his projects.

In his films section, which is usually shoots commercials, combines both of his front page and photo gallery concept. The layout is the same as the photo gallery, but when we leave our mouse on the film snapshot, the photos will fade and the background will turn into white with black words on them. The text contains the name of the film, the producer, the director, and the actors.

For color choices, Andi did a good job. The basic colors of his webpage is black and white except one place that he has a red heart to show acknowledgments of Lena & Flo for producing his webpage with him. Black and white is one of the most classic colors to show high contrast and simple. Personally, I like to use this color a lot because by using this color it gives me a feeling that the whole work is simple.

Colors and layout are two really important elements in website design. The concept of web design is to be simple and straightforward. Although you can have complicated combinations and fancy colors, it is easier for a viewer to understand the content in the webpage if you have a clean layout and contrasted simple colors (or not colors that are hard to read). So I think Andi did a good job of designing hisj personal webpage with Lena & Flo.

Andi Mayr’s Webpage

Weekly Photo – High Angle

This is a photo that I took from one of the bushes on our campus. I was really close and tip toeing when I took this picture because  I want to have the blur and high angle effect.

 

Sequence Title Review – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

The film sequence title I choose is from a 2005 spy and dark comedy movie called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Although the movie is acted by real people, the sequence title is animated. This title sequence outstand itself from hundreds of others that are listed online by having a great color choice (great contrast too), cool negative spacing, themes (having guns and kisses in the whole clip), movements with the music etc.

First of all, I really like the choice of color, which the filmmaker uses mainly black, white, and orange, and only using yellow once. They use black and white because these two colors are the classic colors for negative space, and they movie uses orange (that looks kind of red too) for kisses and blood. I am not sure why they used yellow in one scene that all the people are in a room socializing. But I am guessing that they use yellow because this color can represent rich people (because yellow can represent gold and money). In addition, there is a scene which has plants growing that acts as a good color transition: it is between the scene that a hand is holding a gun with women poster in the background and a mansion that is full with people. The background color changed from orange to almost black, and the leaves changed from white to orange.

The title sequence also did a good job of representing themes in the movie. Since the movie is a spy-based movie, there are some scenes that are representing the spy theme. In the beginning of the sequence title, there is a man going over a fence that thought nobody saw him but a few seconds later an eye appears and sees him, which acts like spying him. In the middle part, where everybody is partying in a house, a hand pushes a woman down the balcony, which acts like a spy that wants to assassin the woman. Since this is also a crime movie, there are lots of parts that we can see guns and bullets. There is one scene that one of the names is hit by a bullet. Despite the guns that appear in the movie that can represent crime and violet, there are parts that have blood dripping on the scene. For example, when we see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang appear on the screen, there is a bullet shot on the last Bang and blood dripping down.

I also like the way that the clip uses negative space. The clip is filled with negative space, but there are two scenes that I really like. In the scene that the woman is falling from the balcony, and passing the moon, the film did an awesome job of having negative space transition when she is away from the moon and she is passing the moon. There other one is when there are three men holding guns on their hands, and the negative space color changed when there is music beats.

The camera moves in the clip is pretty simple: it is either panning or pedestaling. But the movements with the music are really cool. For instance, when the blood and kisses appear in the last few scenes they usually appear with a beat. In the scene that we can see highways, the names of people appear from the poles and disappear from the poles (see the photo). In addition, when there is a wind blow sound in one scene, the camera pans to the right very quickly.

Although I haven’t seen the movie yet, by watching the sequence title, it really makes me want to see it already. The cool effect that the clip did is a great way to start the movie. No wonder why this movie is on the top 5 list in one website I found.