Mini Art School: Working with Digital Images

When I was young, I loved to capture memories by taking pictures. This was before digital cameras, so I went through a lot of film. I didn't start playing with composition until years later. For me, considering composition became a part of the process of taking a picture, but I still enjoyed editing the images afterward. It was great to be able to change the composition after the fact, especially if I didn't get it right the first time.

This assignment served as a reinforcement for me. Not only did it make me more conscious of how I consider composition when I take a picture, but it also reminded me of the art classes that I have taken over the years. Composition was a huge consideration, especially when setting up a still life.

When I searched my collection of digital images for photos to edit for this exercise, I became aware of how I already set up a composition for a photograph. I tried to keep our Multimedia Montage Project in mind too, trying to find photos that I might like to include on my website. My first thought was to find a picture of Rutgers. This one is one of my favorites:

I used Pixlr Express to play with cropping and ended up with the following composition:

What I find interesting about this composition is that it makes me feel like I am there, breathing the cold air. Before I cropped it, the sidewalk was the focus instead of the air. It was not my intent to generate a sense memory of an experience, but that is what happened for me when I changed the composition, which is really interesting to me.

One of the other photographs that I chose was one of Columbia University:

 The columns inspired me to explore the vertical, as the instructions for this exercise suggested. I came up with the following composition:

I also added a filter which made the image a little bluer, which enhanced the feeling of winter from my perspective. I also like that it made the photo seem older. However, since the focus of this assignment was cropping, I should mention that I like how this composition emphasizes the columns. And I am looking forward to seeing how considering composition influences my projects for the rest of the semester and beyond.

I also chose the color echo and border variation exercises. Here are my two favorite results:

I enjoyed learning to use the dropper tool in a new way. I had never used it to change the color on the fly. As I dragged the dropper around, it changed the color of the item that I was working on at the time in a sort of continuum, so I just kept moving it until the text, for example, became a color that looked visually pleasing against the background that I had colored in the same way. The result of the border exercise is a bit comical to me. I find a lace border on an astronomical image to be hilarious for some reason. I suppose it is the contrast between the traditional and the scientific. It certainly made for a fun exercise, though.