Top of the Ladder

This is my representation of ending college. I don’t really know what I am going to do with my life so I am somewhat scared of the future. But I also feel so happy to be in college that I don’t want to leave.
This is how I thought of my title, “Top of the Ladder”. We as college students are at the top of the ladder we are happy, safe, secure, and have some consistency in our lives. However at the end of college we are at the top of the ladder. We have to fall all the way back down to the bottom rung and work our way up in the business world.
My parents tell me all the time that college will be the best time of your life. But now that it is ending I’ve been even more afraid of the future.

Sorry this is kind of depressing.

Stretch streching

This is our ace pitcher Alex Alemann, I’ve known him since freshman year when we all lived in Reinert. His nickname, since he is annoyingly tall, was stretch.

This photo is of him in stride going towards the plate. I wanted to get the picture just right so that he was in full stride.

I took the picture with a machine shutter, with the 70-200, with the full 2.8 aperture.

Going back I would increase my shutter speed even more, there is a little bit of a shake in his bod which makes things blurry.

This picture was fun to take, I felt like I was breaking the law or something. This picture is of a staff member of Pius Library.

What I wanted to get out of the picture was the lines. There were a lot of weird lines that I tried to make completely horizontal but it didn’t really work out. I tried to match the tilted poster with the MacBook with the desk, but that was kind of difficult.

That plastic cloth backdrop was actually really helpful for the composition of the piece. It simplifies the right 3ed of the picture…. I didnt really know what the subject is in this photo either, I just liked the angles that I was seeing so I actually tired to make that my focus. The lines, were really close to being something cool maybe I shouldn’t have tiled the camera so much to get the sharpness.

darker side of man

This was a fun photo session. I took this photo of one of my fraternity brothers. I really tried to use different matches of aperture shutter speed and ISO. I also used my telephoto lens to make it even more fun.

Like I said I took the picture of my friend in his apartment. He, like all of us, have a dark side. I feel like I got that out of this picture. Using my telephoto lens’ aperture the picture came out really… and I mean REALLY dark. But because of the telephoto lens there was a lot of information that I could use in photoshop.

I got to photoshop and I tried to pull out his face as much as the photo would allow me to. But what was great was that it turned out really well.

Balloons, who doesn’t love balloons!!!!

after I took this shot I was really mad. I had just gotten the really nice telephoto lens but I had no idea how to use it. Erik was even there next to me, helping me out and i missed the picture!

What I liked about this picture is that I got a good shot of the balloons blowing in the wind. Also it was really cold and the girl, I couldn’t tell who it was till she got closer, who was a friend of mine was complaining on how bad it was carrying all that stuff. 

If I could go back and do it al over again I would focus a little more on her midsection. A tighter picture with the cardboard as my bottom corner frame. I also, now know how to use the telephoto lens correctly so hopefully I wont mess that one up again. overall this one was SOOOO close but SOOO far!

color, light, mood, and texture, all in one

I had to work really hard with this one. I was standing with my camera messing around with this fountain for a good 45 mins to an hour. This is the best i could get. I also did some editing. The picture is of the fountain on the first floor of the Student center. I really liked the texture of the water, the light of the stairs, the mood it brings, and the colors of the brown, blue and white. All of this turned into probably my favorite photo I’ve taken so far. 

Something that I wish I could have done was to edit it a little more. I tried to adjust the brightness and contrast with some things that Erik showed me but I feel like I could have done more. 

The troll of the Couples’ Bridge

This image was taken under the Couples house bridge. I felt like a troll taking this picture, but I realized that I probably wouldn’t have the opportunity to take a view of a troll. The side closer to the actual house was emptied out and had a lot of really cool colors on the bottom of the rock bed. I ended up taking close to 250 pictures for this assignment so it was really difficult to pick one for this assignment.

This particular photo was taken with automatic aperture setting, manual focus. The lighting was a little to much for my liking for this particular picture but I like the framing.  I was trying to frame everything to make 5 major triangles. The sky, the B-School, the rocks, the shadow and the bridge. The composition forces you to look into the middle of the picture.

If I could go back and do it again, I would have (I think) use a quicker shutter speed so that the sky and the rocks would be less bright. The rocks are to bright for my preference. However, I was able to catch a lot of the colors from the rocks and the wood grain form the bridge.