Another month has gone by! Time is flying, but I think that these posts help me look back and see everything that I've accomplished. I always need to go back and figure out what I actually did over the past month, so I look at my bullet journal entries to see what I was working on (post about my bullet journal setup here!).
The first few images are from a Studio Photography project. After the natural light shoot in January, it was time to build on that and move to shooting with one light. This shoot was slightly more complicated because there is a lot of work involved with indoor studio shoots. I had to set up the backdrop and the light, connect the light to my camera, and then connect my camera to a computer to do something called tethering. When photographers tether, their images are transferred straight from the camera to a computer where they can make an edit of the shoot. It eliminates the step of transferring images from the SD card to a computer. In the real world, most professional studio photographers have assistants or interns that will assemble a set and set up the lights and tech, but for now, it's me, myself, and I on a shoot. For the one light assignment, my beautiful friend Savanna modeled for me and we had a blast (find her on Instagram here!)
In February, I also FINALLY completed my stop motion project! I created a series of three ads for Tazo tea, specifically their vanilla caramel chai flavor. I had a lot of trial and error with this assignment but I'm very pleased with the outcome. The project took over six weeks, but I look back on all that time with pride because of how much hard work went into it. During the process, Tazo even noticed my work when I posted it on Instagram, so that was great as well!
Another cool event was that I was surprised to find myself published in the school newspaper! My roommate and a friend and I went to get dinner one night and as we were waiting to pick up our orders, my roommate picked up a copy of the school newspaper to look through. She spread out the pages on the table, and even though it was upside-down for me, I thought I saw a familiar picture. I turned it around and it was one of my images! The school newspaper has a specific hashtag for students to use on social media, and they choose a few photos every month to feature in the paper. I had completely forgotten that I used the hashtag, so this was a complete surprise!
I also completed another shoot for Studio Photography, this time a two-light shoot! Photographers will use two lights in a shoot when they need more light than one can give. The main light is called the key light and the secondary light is called the fill light. The purpose of the fill light is to fill in any shadows from the key light. It's not strictly necessary to have an actual light as a fill light, you can also fill in shadows with reflectors or anything of the sort.
There was a little hiccup with studio scheduling for this one, the project was assigned on a Tuesday and the school's photography studio space was rented out completely until the next Monday night. I had a panic about not being able to complete the project, but ended up renting out two lighting kits from the school and setting up a little photo studio in my apartment over that weekend.
These are two images taken from my Instagram stories of that day that show how I set up. We have this lovely big wall across from the kitchen in my apartment, so I moved our dining table and chairs out of the way, pinned up my white backdrop, and set up the lights. My key light is the one you see with the umbrella, the light is actually pointing inside the umbrella and bouncing back outwards to soften it. My fill light is on the right side and I moved it around, I pointed it at the floor for the light to bounce up and fill shadows or pointed it straight ahead, countering the key light. I shot with my lovely roommate Raina for this one.
It was actually a two-in-one shoot, the next assignment was to do a direct flash shoot. It's trendy right now, and that's pretty much the only reason we did it. It was still fun though, direct flash works best with a playful subject and pops of color. Raina helped out with this one as well, she had great expressions for this. It was easy peasy, I left the white backdrop up and just used the pop-up flash on my camera (I would NEVER use it for anything other than this).
And that's the wrap-up of my February! I'm learning so much week to week and I'm happy that I can bring you all along with me :)If you have any favorite images, let me know by liking the post or leaving a comment!
Thanks for reading!
xx, Hannah
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