In week 6 we focused on the specifics of post-production of imagery in photojournalism going through the two main channels of either Adobe Photoshop on our laptops or computers or alternatively using a free app called Snapseed on our mobile devices.
I did download Snapseed and have an experiment with its various functions but ultimately for the workshop task I decided to take the approach of using Adobe Photoshop because I plan on using a loaned camera for my final project instead of my mobile phone camera.
My final project will be based on planned out and still objects, not necessarily moving targets such as in a sporting game. Therefore the first image I chose was something that was similar to that of the style of photo I intend to take for my final piece.
This image had nothing to do with my final project or its theme however it was an effective image for further understanding the ins and outs of the various functions and adjustment layers that Adobe Photoshop does offer. The image (of a shoe) was taken with the flash on, and so I decided I wanted to make the image slightly darker whilst also attempting to bring out the brighter features of the shoe, essentially with the goal of highlighting the shoe and making the background less relevant. I do think it had success, comparing both the before and after versions it is clear to see that with the use of curves especially, I was able to highlight the green and orange features of the shoe whilst dimming the darker background, almost as if the ‘F-stop’ number of the camera lens was on the lower side of the scale. The camera settings were set to normal, however thanks to the manipulation of the image and editing I was able to achieve an image similar (but not exactly like) to one that was taken with a professional camera with F-stop settings, which I thought was pretty important to remember in case I don’t get a second chance with a particular shoot and it doesn’t go perfectly well.
The second image I selected was something more relevant to the course over the past couple of weeks or so, it was an image taken in the corridor just outside of the classroom of another student jumping, playing with different shutter speeds. The image had a large amount of ‘noise’ to it and various reflections of the corridor lights in different places. Whilst I wasn’t able to do much to the image to improve it, it instead served more as a reminder that some images can only have so much done to them post production, and highlighted the importance of properly setting up a shot.
Photographic Journalism 