ASSIGNMENT 5 - CHANNEL YOUR INNER EGGLESTON

I choose to do this assignment along my walking route outside my office in Cambridge, MA. The only time I had to do it was right after work in the late afternoon as the sun was starting to set. This led to some interesting lighting but also some challenges, particularly as I started by taking photos to the left directly into the setting sun. At first, I didn't enjoy this assignment and I don't think any of my photos to the left are good, but after I walked the route a couple of times I started to see interesting things and got comfortable leaning into my creativity. I particularly enjoyed taking the photos downwards. I might have gotten a few odd looks from people passing by but the photos of the leaves with their elongated shadows are some of my favorite from the set. I wasn't even sure that they were going to work out but I had the vision in my mind of what I wanted to get and just took several photos. There were a bunch that did not work out at all, but these two came out rather well. 

I was also excited to apply the lessons from our last lecture in the final photo of this series. I saw the moon starting to shine by the house and wanted to capture it but my camera settings were completely washing out the sky in order to brighten the building. Instead, I purposely underexposed so that the shot captured the moon while darkening the house. I really like the atmospheric mood of that image. 

Moving forward, I'm going to get more comfortable with just try creative ideas and taking risks even if they don't work. I'm ok with taking so many pictures with the expectation that most won't look good or interesting in the hopes that one or two great shots come out. I also want to start playing with composition more -- rather than taking just straight on shots of objects in the center of photos, I'm going to experiment more with creative compositions - items half out of the frame or including more dead space to the side. I'd also like to focus a bit more on editing skills. Some of the Adobe Lightroom editing presets are a bit intense so I'd like to learn how to adjust those better. There are also a few in this set that I'd ideally like to crop slightly or straighten up which I hope we can start to do in future assignments.