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Week 16 Activities & Projects

12/13/2010

Gregory Heisler

I spent Saturday afternoon listening to a professional photographer named Gregory Heisler at a workshop in Philadelphia. Heisler is a tremendously talented artist who is well known for his cover shots for Time and ESPN magazine. He has photographed presidents, rock stars, actors, actresses and millionaires. He is also a teacher and a pretty nice guy.

I'm going to borrow an assignment that he uses to help his students understand how light lands on his portrait subjects. This week's photo theme assignment is monochrome portraits taken with a flash. Shooting in black and white will help you understand how light reflects - that is often hard to see in color shots.

I want to see you submit a series of three images where you are changing the placement of the light. Experiment - try using different light sources - I'll be bringing in a flashlight and a couple tungsten lamps on Tuesday. Use the same model for each of your shots and move the lights around to change the composition of your portrait.

9th graders will be finishing up their calendar and t-shirt projects. A reminder to all 9th grade students - a final CTE area choice needs to be made by December 20th.

It's time to do some marketing!

12/13/2010

Portrait time is over. The FotoTime site has been a huge success and continues to get hits and sales. We've done some preliminary work with our new green screen. It's now time for us to sell our 2011 edition of this year's Shield. In order to do this we need a design for our cover.

The cover design is what we show to prospective customers in order to generate interest in our product. In order to advertise our book, we need a cover design. The main text components of our book are the title, year and name of the school.

This week's major assignment is a cover design for this year's book. It can be created in PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign or any combination of the three. The dimensions for your file should be 8.5 x 11 with .125" bleed on all four sides. If you're designing in PhotoShop make sure that you're design is done at 300 ppi resolution. If you have placed images in your design - be certain to save those linked files as well as your completed design.

We need a great design in order to get our customers interested about what is between the front and the back cover! The chosen design will get the designer a free copy of this year's book - that will save you about $55.00.

Egency's Design Competition

12/9/2010

The links for the design competitions I shared with you in class today are listed below:
egency.com

PETE & C Pin Competition

Week 15 Activities & Class Projects

12/6/2010

Grade 9: Completion of T-shirt designs, burning of screens and printing of t-shirt project by Thursday, December 9th. We will simultaneously be working on the calendar project throughout the week.

Grade 10: Green screen setup of backdrop and lighting to eliminate all shadows

Grades 11 & 12: The SkillsUSA competition will take place Monday at 11:30 AM – all students in the PM class and a select number of AM students will be participating in this competition. This will determine who represents our school’s commercial art program at the district SkillsUSA competition in February. The remainder of the week we will be working on photography using the green screen and the control of lighting in green screen applications.

A new toy…

12/3/2010

I purchased a new cell phone over the Thanksgiving weekend. It’s an android smart phone and I’m amazed at all of the great communication tools available on this digital device. The phone can access our class website, my email accounts and read and post to my Twitter and Facebook accounts from anywhere. The phone also has Google Maps and Google Earth access – allowing me to get voice directions if I get lost in my car as well as tell me how far away from a green I am on any golf course.

There are a number of apps to access information and news quickly – the QR scanner will launch a website, video, restaurant menu or beam my contact information quickly. I can take 5-meg resolution photographs and high-def videos using the built-in camera. These devices are so much more than just digital phones and the capacity to use these as learning and communication tools is in its infancy stages.

The need to learn new skills to design for these devices is going to be a growing part of the digital art world. The use of QR codes is going to be a boom as this technology becomes more widespread. It is my prediction that 2011 will be the year of the QR code in advertising and design world. We’ll be working on some small format digital designs for smart devices in the coming months as well as creating our CAT Pickering QR Code tour of our wing of the building. I’m really excited by these new design challenges and you should be learning as much as you can about this technology.

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Week 16 Activities & Projects

It's time to do some marketing!

Egency's Design Competition

Week 15 Activities & Class Projects

A new toy…

Mr. Tucker

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