Photography Reflective Essay

Chapter One

Introduction

Photography has served many purposes throughout its course. Whether it be art, hobby, passion or assignment, many have encountered a digital camera in their lifetime. If one contrasts that with how often a person uses a camera on their cell phone, the numbers would jump drastically. What makes these two photographing devices so different? This was the focus of my senior project. As technology continues to progress, many predict that photography careers will soon be a thing of the past. I chose to delve into the life of a photographer, and see what it takes to produce a ‘simple’ photograph. My goal was to prove that not everyone has the ability to do what photographers do, and more importantly, to find out the complexities

The two of us spent a total of 32 hours editing the photographs from the four shoots. We spent approximately 4 more hours printing. On top of the commute to the shoots and back, plus the duration of the shoots and all work involved, a total of 76 hours was dedicated to producing the photographs. Upon my return to Sanger, I began to photograph different things I encountered in my daily routine. I started working on several single-subject compilations to prepare for my final set of photographs for the Art Hop in April. I continued working on my display until the beginning of March, at which time I finished editing, printing, and mounting eight photos that would be on display at the Art Hop. This is where my second mentor came into play. Dawn Pearson, who is the photography teacher at Sanger High School provided me with means of printing and mounting my photographs, and also helped critique my images. The process of taking, choosing, editing and printing these final photos took over two months to complete. Approximately 72 hours a week for 9 weeks was dedicated to producing the final eight photographs for

I don’t make up these prices I have to weigh out how much I need to make with how much time it takes me to get things down and how much time I can afford to put into each project. Being over booked can be just as stressful as being under booked.

ML: Do you feel, with camera phone technology on the rise, that your job is becoming less appreciated?

JM: OH yeah! BIGTIME! Not so much camera phones but photo editing apps like instagram, little photo, vintage camera and any other app like that. It has presets that make people think it takes seconds to edit photos when in actuality I don’t use any presets at all on Photoshop. I do everything from scratch that way I can understand how these effects in these apps are achieved, where people that just use these apps have no idea how to get these looks with out the app. Everyone these days thinks they are photographers when you have an app that can make a picture look good, I’m not against these apps I use them on my phone too but to depreciate the skill it takes to edit is what