Blue Blossom

Digital Collage

11 x 17"

2022

This project required me to experiment outside my comfort zone and into a medium that I was very much inexperienced in and uncomfortable in. The project was to take pictures of ten different textures, edit the images in Lightroom, and feather and adjust them with tools in Photoshop. I used an iphone 11 camera instead of a high quality camera because during this time I didn't have a high quality camera yet. The pictures of the textures could've been anything that I wanted it to be, nothing specific, as long as it was visible and different from the others. Although the goal of the project was to use ten photos, taking more pictures of different textures was definitely encouraged so that I can later pick out the best ten out of thirty or more compared to just picking from just ten only.

Some of the challenges that I experienced during this project, was the use of Adobe Lightroom, camera focus and positioning, Photoshop settings, and exporting. This project introduced me to Lightroom and it was confusing to navigate through all the settings, tools, and files. Everything looked so clustered and there was a lot of importing images to be done. During this time, I barely ever used photography and adobe programs together to create a composition, so navigating and adjusting my camera settings to get the best lighting and focused photos was a stressful experience. I was familiar with photoshop but I was yet to go in depth with it, especially with editing and feathering images. This project introduced me to the feathering tool. It was a tool that helped morph or create seamless transitions with more than one image. The last struggle I had to go through was the exporting process.

The goal of this project was to help me experiment with two different mediums and use them together to create my own composition of my choice. It really did help me get adjusted and comfortable with Lightroom and Photoshop, as for my photography skills, they definitely improved as an outcome of this project.

I was able to solve all problems and challenges in this project with the assistance of my professors at my university. I would email them or ask directly in person for assistance. I was able to navigate through Lightroom with less confusion than before and as a result I was able to give all the textures different hues, masking, tones, and presences. I used a tripod to help position and focus my camera for better quality pictures, I also noticed it was best to take a picture in the best available location with the best lighting as possible. The feathering and masking tool in Photoshop took me a while to figure out, the masking in particular was very stressful and frustrating getting it to work with my images but I managed by looking up some notes and a video about it. Importing the projects for proper submission was crucial for me as an artist and student because it was necessary for my project to be finalized correctly. I managed to import my work by looking back at my notes and asking classmates.