Doorstop Chalice

One of the first classes I took when I enrolled at Pierce College was a class called “Intro to Digital Photography.” It was a fast paced class that covered very little of a lot of topics, but gave a general feel for digital photography as a whole. I don’t recall exactly what the purpose was for each assignment, but I still have the results and can remember specifics such as why I took it, the teacher’s reaction, and often what I did to achieve the final results. With that, I will attempt to go through the assignments one by one and explain them, starting with the second assignment, as assignment number one did not involve creating any work of my own.

Doorstop Chalice

Doorstop Chalice

At this point I had been taking pictures with my camera for about a month, so I was fairly familiar with some of the features of it, but not all. But something I still was not (and in many cases still am not) that familiar with is odd camera angles. So I was just practicing taking pictures of things from strange angles. I happened to come across this doorstop and, on a whim, started taking pictures of it from an extreme vertical angle. I placed my camera against the wall and attempted to get the doorstop lined up roughly in the middle (yes, I rely heavily on post processing and I’m working on that).

Later on when editing the photo, I cropped it down to the dimensions you see here, then started playing with color correction. Ultimately I decided I liked the B&W picture better because it looks like a detailed charcoal and graphite sketch, but I also like the way the dark red turned out in the color one. My instructor was very confused when she saw it. She wanted to guess what it was, but couldn’t figure it out. I or one of my classmates eventually told her what it was, and she was very excited for how different it was and enjoyed the odd angle. Score one for random practice!

Categorised in: Photography

This post was written by Mikal