HDR Photography

HDR Photography is when you take a series of pictures from low exposure to high exposure and combine them together to make the colors prettier and more vibrant.  It also makes the bright spots and dark spots stick out more.  I like HDR photography because it makes the pictures really detailed and it makes the colors really nice.  I don't like how we can't have lots of movement otherwise there's ghost's when you merge them.  I also don't like how sometimes HDR pictures look really fake and they sometimes look like paintings not pictures.

You create and HDR images by taking an image from low exposure to high exposure.  You have to make sure not to move the camera otherwise it won't align with the other pictures.  After you take the series of picture and it is what you want it to look like.  Open Photoshop (that is what my class and I use.)  When you open Photoshop go to file > automate > merge to HDR, select the series of photo's you want to use. Then you can customize the photo till it looks like what you imagined it to look like.  This is different from automatic HDR functions, like you can find on your smartphone, because you get to adjust the settings and create the picture you wanted.  When you take a picture on your smartphone and you have the camera set to HDR, it spits out and image. A lot of times when my phone spits out an image it doesn't look like what I want it to look like.  So, I prefer taking a series of picture and adjusting it because when I take the photograph I have this image in my head and most of the time I can make the picture look like that by adjusting the settings.

When I was taking the experiment picture of my sister, I didn't want to do it on a blank wall.  I decided to take it on the rock wall near my house, I decided to do it there because there's a lot of interesting things on and around the wall.  There is the ferns coming up from the sides and the wall has a lot of different colors and shapes.  The wall also has moss growing on it which  makes the wall look more interesting.  When I was taking my landscape I wanted to have more of the foreground, but there was a fence and I didn't really want to fence in my shot.  So i moved the camera up so that it still had lots of the field but you couldn't see the fence.  When I was editing my landscape picture, I noticed the cows moved a lot and it took me a while to make it look the way it looks now.  I think I could have tried harder on the rule of thirds and placed the mountain in one of those cross hairs. I also could've thought more about rule if thirds when I was taking the portrait of my sister and made her facial expression something more interesting then a smile.  

Movie Trailer Critique

We were asked to create a movie trailer, this movie trailer could be from a movie we have seen or we could create our own.  My group and I created our own, it's about a girl who goes missing when she finds a picture of a ghost. This girls name is Annabelle, her best friend, Julie, goes out to find her. I wasn't the only one who worked on this project, my group also consisted of Meagan and Cara.  I was the voice actor,  I wrote the synopsis as well.  I also played Julie, Annabelle's best friend who goes to find her when she goes missing.  Me and Cara also filmed most of the scenes that take place in school, while Meagan edited them to make sure we had all the requirements.

We were required to have special effects, a movie trailer poster with all of the requirements, at least five scenes, a voice acting script that was well rehearsed, text lay overs, music, foley and it had to be appropriate for kids in first grade. Our movie trailer was also supposed to be 1 minute and 30 seconds to 2 minutes and 30 seconds. We completed all the requirements, we had lots of effects that we used to make it scarier and have more of a ghost theme. We also all made a poster and then we chose which which one we wanted on our trailer. We chose Meagan's, hers had all the requirements. We had a lot more then five scenes, and we had a voice acting script, that was done by me. We had footsteps on the scenes where we were running away from something or to something. Our trailer was appropriate for the audience, but I think we could've done better.

Our class voted us mostly satisfactory, I agree with my class. I think we could have done better and made it so that the plot was more clear than it is in our trailer. I also feel like we repeated the same scene over and over again just in different places. We had a lot of running, whether it was a shot of the feet or a shot of them running from far away. We also had a lot of scenes of the picture blowing away. I think we could've had one scene of the picture blowing away then have like blacked out or something. I also feel like we could have done a little better with the audience we were making the trailers for. I think we could have made a movie trailer that first grade kids wouldn't be scared of, or something they would have enjoyed. Other than theses things I think we did a pretty good job, I enjoyed making this movie trailer.