Bridgette Goes to College

I honestly don't know if there are two assignments for this week or one. I think we're supposed to have 8 photos total to present at the end of the class so I went ahead and took some pictures anyway. Close ups and macro, of course. Enjoy some images of this fun Halloween decoration. And some dew on blades of grass.

It's the last week of digital photography and I don't even know how we got here.  The assignment (assignments?) for this week was to take more "specialty" photographs. So I decided to take pictures of my other BJD Lavender, as well as some scale props and put the macro settings on my camera to use. Although at this point in the class when is my camera not on macro? Most of the pictures I took inside, and they turned out a little grainy because my ISO was up so high. I never was able to figure out a decent DIY lighting configuration from lamps and bulbs around the house, so mostly I used light from the window. I only took a few pictures of Lavender outside because she's floppy and needs restringing (and her wig has a tendency to pop off at inopportune times) so I didn't really want to battle with posing her in wet grass. For the outside pictures she's safely in her stand on the deck. This picture was me actually trying to recreate the o...

This digital photography course is coming to the end. Not just yet, but soon, and for the last couple of projects I get to do my own thing. So that means dolls. And figures. And miniatures. And apparently books. Pretty much anything that requires shooting close up or in macro. I don't have an actual SLR camera, so I'm doing the best I can. But if I did, you can bet I'd be putting that macro lens to good use. I said something in my post about color that I might end up with a series of books in chairs. I more or less did that. You can't see very much of the chair, but I got some fun shots of some pages of The Lord of the Rings. Because if I'm going to take pictures of books, they might as well be my favorite books. I have more book pictures below, but I didn't just take pictures of books! Here's this cute octopus! I should really learn how to dust. Oops, here's more LOTR related items. I'm not the only one with a weakness for Funko POP fi...

This assignment on texture allowed for some fun macro shots. I mostly took photos of black lace, because I have an over abundance of it in my closet and they're all very different. I did take some other photos of glitter ribbons, which did not turn out that great, as well as a few photos of a Lucy Van Pelt figure because she has a very unique wood carving texture that I'll show below. I wish I had more photos of some different stuff, but *excuse alarm wailing* this week has been absolutely crazy at work with there being parking lot construction to fix the plumbing, so we've had no bathrooms (yes the entire week), and I was managing the matinee performances of The Secret Garden for school group field trips. We had three shows in two days with over 300 kids at each. And no bathrooms. But enough about that. This is a post about photographing texture, not my excuses. On with the texture!

Once upon a time I used to make "photostories" of my dolls, way back when I thought I was a really cool teenager. (It's everyone else that was weird and lame, not me.) My favorite one I did was of my dolls playing with Lego's and then my cat came in and knocked everything over. I remember having a lot of fun, but things change and I'm an adult now. I keep saying it, so it must be true. Who am I kidding? Nothing has changed. I'm still weird as hell, except now I get to play with my toys to learn how to be a professional artist.  Anyway, for this assignment I had to tell a story. I love stories, and I love telling stories. I also love things that tell stories without words. So I'm not going to tell you what's happening because it should be plain, no matter how you wish to interpret it. I was torn between this one and another one. I loved how the helmet looked in the first picture, but this one didn't have anybody's heads cut off. ...

This assignment shouldn't have been as hard as it was. I literally live in a room that looks like the scene of Rainbow Brite's murder (although not as much as it did once because I'm an adult  now after all). It's not like I didn't have plenty of things to choose from. Aside from my eternal struggle with indoor lighting, nothing I was shooting had any sort of emotional quality to it. I was just taking photos of things that are colored. I thought maybe I should pick the emotion first, but I didn't know what that should be. Then I stepped on a dead leaf in the garage. Abandoned Childhood. Ok, "Abandoned Childhood" isn't an emotion, but isn't this picture somber and dramatic and depressing? Like the child who owned this bear has grown up and left it behind, along with her hopes and dreams and happiness. This is the original image. I really wanted it to feel dark and depressing. And maybe a little old and dusty. I took pretty much a...