Assignment 3: Blurred Reality

This assignment is worth up to 3.6 points and is due by Monday February 15, 11:59 pm.

Photographs by:  (left) Ansel Adams Snake River (right) David Levinthal Wild West

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”  Albert Einstein

Assignment:  The Photography

The job of a photographer is to communicate something to someone.  A photograph without a message will quickly be forgotten and begs the question, why was it ever made in the first place? 

One tool a photographer has for attracting a viewer and offering them something to think about is the use of focus, in particular shallow focus or sharp focus.  In photographic lingo focus has either, great depth of field, (meaning everything from the front of the photograph to the back of the photograph is in sharp focus) or shallow depth of field, which is sometimes referred to as selective focus, because only a narrow section of the image is in focus.

You control the depth of field with your camera's aperture.  Make sure you have read pages 22 -27 in the text.  The aperture works in tandem with your shutter speed and ISO.  Make sure you understand how these work together. 

Also make sure you know how to adjust the aperture in your camera.  There are a variety of ways to set your aperture in your camera look up you camera model online to find out how.  Follow the direction on page 159 Project: Using Depth of Field. 

Make at least a dozen photographs that explore the different types of depth of field.  The subject is up to you.

Experiment with shallow depth of field and great depth of field.  Shallow depth of field is most dramatic when there is a long distance between your subject and the background.  If you put your subject right up against the background you will not see any blurring of the background. 

Keep in mind how your lens focal length effect DOF.  A wide angle lens will limit your ability to create shallow depth of field.  On the other end of the spectrum a long telephoto lens will emphasize the blur of a background.

If you can't adjust your aperture experiment with your camera's scene modes:  portrait mode will give you shallow depth of field and landscape mode will give you great depth of field.  However the smaller cameras will struggle with this assignment because the distance of their lens to the back of the camera is short and will limit achieving shallow depth of field.  In this case experiment with having a long, long distance behind your subject in the portrait mode.

Assignment:  Photoshop

First, make a contact sheet of all the photos you took this week.

Next, edit four of your images using the Bridge - Adobe Camera Raw - Photoshop workflow method. 

• Edit 2 form this weeks assignment - Blurred Realities directions on page 159 of text
• Edit 2 from last weeks assignment - Time is Free

Save your 4 edited photos as JPG files and resize them to be no longer than 1080 pixels on their longest side. We need to do this for posting in the discussion forum.  Size and file type are restricted in the forum.

How to Submit

Upload your PDF contact sheet into Canvas using the green submit button

Due by Monday February 15, 11:59 pm.

Upload edited files into Discussion Forum (see next page for directions on your post).

I will grade this assignment with the week and write individual, private comments in the grades section.