This document contains summaries of 12 photographs taken by the student for a digital photography class. The photographs depict subjects like a person playing an Xbox game, ceiling fans in motion, a sunset over palm trees, flowers with blurred backgrounds, icy structures, textured plants, a humorously cut-off boat, a building reflection, colorful stairs that are actually a bus depot, and a monarch butterfly. The student experimented with manual camera settings like ISO, flash, and focus techniques to capture the movement, textures, and compositions in each photo.

1. FAS226 Professor H. JudsonDigital PhotographyKeith A. BastonFinal Portfolio

2. Electronic SurrogateIf memory serves, this picture was taken in the first week of class. Being in New Hampshire, winter-cold and bad weather made it difficult to capture people on film doing active things. This picture is of my best friend’s son playing on his Xbox 360 using the new Kinnect device that senses the person’s movements and applies them to the image on screen. This is similar to the Wii, but requires no handheld devices. I took several pictures from this angle because the timing of the movement and when it showed up on screen was challenging. The lack of detail and darkness of the photograph was due to my inexperience using the flash and setting a Manual ISO on My camera.

3. FAN-tastic EffectsThis image depicts a series of nine photographs of a ceiling fan turned on at full speed as motion capture was the objective. All of the pictures were taken from nearly the same distance, angle, and no zoom. The only differences in the photos were a manual resetting of various ISO parameters 100, 200, and 400, with manual changes in flash timing. Up to this point, I had almost always used full automatic settings on my camera. While I had owned the camera for many years, I was unaware of just how many manual adjustments could be done with the Sony P200 camera.

4. Marmalade SkyThis is another case of being in the right place at the right time to take a beautiful photograph. This sunset is special to me because I have lived in the north most of my life and sunsets there are usually broken up by mountains and pine forests. Being in southern Florida, much of the land is very flat which enables long distances of uninterrupted sight. The palm trees are also a seldom seen sight for me, so I enjoyed the way that they were silhouetted in the evening sky. While the colors could seem surreal to some, the only use of Photoshop in this entire portfolio was to resize the images and to group the fan images into one picture.

5. Blooming FocusI really love this photograph. To me, the colors, shapes, and composition both complement and contrast with each other in a very pleasing manner. Attempting to take photographs with portions of the photograph deliberately out of focus, I experimented with several techniques that were somewhat difficult to accomplish with a small camera set to automatic. In this case, I had to lie on the ground with my neck and camera tilted at an uncomfortable angle, focus closely on the flower, and then move the camera to capture the background without losing the foreground focus. It is hard to say, but this photograph may have looked better if I had been able to take it from further away, to capture the full flower and tree without them being cut off.

6. Icy InteractionBack in dreary, cold, and wet New Hampshire, this picture was shot during the first week of class and depicts the interaction of nature and a manmade object. I shot these icicles several times trying to capture the drops of water melting from them, but I did not want to lose the focus on the icicles or on the background building. I felt that the background building made a nice color, texture, and frame for the composition. While it was just the first week of class, I realized that this picture fit better in a later week’s assignment because I had read the syllabus. I took the photograph for future use just because I was in the right place at the right time. Fortunately, by the time I could use the photograph in class, I had more than enough pictures without it.

7. Simply ComplexIt is difficult to describe why this picture appeals so much to me. It is a very simplistic composition, but the contrasting textures add a large amount of complexity. These textures appealed to me because of the way they are varied; the ribs of the leaves, the softness of the flower petals, the hard and smooth feel of the rock, and the sharp-course-pointed brittleness of the mulch seem so clear to me that I can almost feel them in my hands even though they exist only as light emitted from my monitor. Another appealing aspect of this picture is that the colors are so asymmetrical. The bright pinks and greens of the flower contrast with the muted earth tones of the rock and the orange-rust tone of the mulch is a nice midpoint between earth tone and bright colors.

8. The Boat Is Always Greener…The day that I took this picture, my friends and I were on a boat cruise and I was looking for humorous things to photograph among many other subjects. Since we were moving in one direction and the other boat was moving in the other direction, after I caught sight of it, I hurriedly took the picture and did not intend to cut off the ladies head or realize that I had. The humor that ran through my mind, without being sexist, was that I wondered if the phrase “finally got it” was in reference to the boat or his lady friend.

9. Mirror, MirrorHaving arrived in sunny Tamarac, near Fort Lauderdale, Florida and intending to stay for the remainder of this class, I quickly used the opportunity of warm and sunny weather to get outside and take interesting photographs. I took several photographs of this building, a couple with less zoom, showing the entire building, and a few with a much closer zoom to capture more detail. To me, the most interesting aspect of this shot was the reflection of a nearby building that was much clearer than I expected, and the shape of the subject building (being wider at the bottom) provided for an interesting cut out of the reflection.

10. “Happy Days” TV- ERA StylingWalking the streets of downtown Ft. Lauderdale Florida, I first saw this structure from this angle. I thought to myself what a crazy building. The shapes and colors and texture were extremely interesting. I took this shot from across the street a number of times until I got one without a car or truck passing in front of my camera. When I was finished, I crossed the street and took a closer look at the” building” and found that it was actually a set of stairs, both on the outside and inside, that lead to the second level of the building that you see in the background with similar red railings. This structure and that of the background, is actually the main transfer depot for the city’s bus transportation system.

11. Fluttery Flightof FancyIt is ironic, that I spent so much time trying to catch objects in movement, that while taking this photograph of an unmoving monarch butterfly, I had spent hours chasing and photographing other butterflies. While my focus at that time was on the photography and trying to get good shots, it was only upon later reflection, that I realized I had jumped back in time nearly 30 years to my childhood where I spent some of my days chasing butterflies and other critters for sometimes hours at a time. While I was tempted to use the excess resolution of this image to really zoom in on the butterfly and flowers, I elected to leave the image as it was taken.