Blog Post 2 Design

    For this week’s Design Blog I wanted to share some things I have learned so far in my Digital Photography class. Some things learned included how to use and edit photos on lightroom. Some tools like the crop tool and tone curve. Also I went out and bought a new lens this week so I tried to have some fun and try and teach myself different ways to shoot with a 50 mm lens for my camera. Some issues I had shooting this week mostly had to do with autofocus on my camera. 

Autofocus

I had some issues with autofocus while shooting this week. Many factors included lighting conditions, lens limitations, movement complex scenes and some camera settings. The lighting conditions caused some issues because I think it had to do with the time in the day and the fact that it was a gloomy day. I think that the low light and harsh contrast had the autofocus system confused making it hard to to find a focal point. I feel that I had some issues with my autofocus because the lens I have has a slower autofocus that affected the performance. For example I had one issue shooting in autofocus when I was trying to get a shot of very slow running water. The camera kept on trying to reset and adjust itself. An example below is a picture of bad autofocus.

Crop Tool

 

While using Lightroom I had a chance to play with the crop tool to do some photo editing of pictures we took in class. The crop tool is a very essential tool in photography for several reasons including framing, correcting composition, highlighting detail, focus and aspect ratio. Framing helps by allowing me to reposition my subject or even eliminate other distracting images or lightings around my main image. Cropping also helps by adjusting aspect ratios to fit specific formats that may include social media or print requirements. Cropping an image also draws attention and helps focus on a main subject by removing unnecessary space in the background. It can also realign the image if it was not taken at a great angle, improving the photos overall balance. 

Tone Curve 

The tone curve tool is used mostly to adjust the tonal range and contrast of images by using graph structure, adjusting tones, S- curve for contrast, fine control and individual color channels. The graph structure is the diagonal line on the graph on the tone curve tool, the horizontal axis represents the input tones from shadows to highlights and the vertical axis is the output tones. Now adjusting tones on the curve can create points to adjust specific tonal ranges like shadows, midtones and highlights. The S curve increases contrast by darkening shadows and brightening highlights. Another setting that can help improve an image is the individual color channels which can help adjust RGB channels for color correction or creative color grading.