Due to the snow days of the past two weeks we have to play catch-up with last week’s work. I’ve extended due dates for Friday’s assignment to Wednesday, February 2, 2011.
Photo Challenge of the Week: This week’s photo challenge theme is three or more. You will be shooting images of three or more people. These images can be informally posed shots. These shots should illustrate a normal day at Pickering and can be taken in CTE areas, Phys. Ed classes, academic classes, the hallway or in the cafeteria. We need these shots for inclusion in our yearbook. Design Challenge of the Week : We’ll be working on skills involved in controlling text: letter spacing, line spacing, tabs, tables and designing with text only. The main project will be a poster that demonstrates your skill in all three of these areas. Production Work: Hoodies for the Engine Technology Program at Pickering. Welcome to the second half of the school year! We have reached a number of goals that I had presented to you at the beginning of the year including the following:
Photo Challenge of the Week: This week’s photo challenge theme is work. You will be shooting images of people working. I’d like to see you capture fellow students in other CTE areas working on projects in their classes. Try to have these be candid shots that are not posed if possible. We need these shots for inclusion in our yearbook. Design Challenge of the Week: This week we’ll be working on a few different skills in Photoshop including removing red eye, removing color cast and basic sharpening skills. We’ll be creating a study of this work with before/after shots that illustrate what these basic skills accomplish when applied to less-than-perfect photographs. The end product will be a Flash animation created in InDesign. A sample can be viewed here. Production Work: Electronics t-shirts for TCHS, Hoodies for the Engine Technology Program at Pickering. This week ends the first semester of this school year and all students will be taking a mid-term exam on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week. The test covers theory we've worked on during the first semester. Be aware that this test, along with your final exam, will account for 1/5 of your final grade - so try to do well.
Because this is a short week, we're going to be focusing on repairing some of the common issues that occur in photography including removing red-eye and color cast from our photos. There are settings on the camera we can use to avoid both of these issues - but they still can crop up given some lighting conditions. Fixing red eye is a pretty straight forward process - both iPhoto and PhotoShop have pretty good red eye removal tools. Fixing color cast can be a little more complicated and it is normal to use a variety of methods to find the best solution. Photoshop will do this better due to the large number of methods available. This video demonstrates the various methods. We'll be using some basic color theory to fix both of these issues. The end project for the week will be a before and after study of three red eye and three color cast images that you have repaired. See my sample portfolio for an example. The Home Depot lighting setup that we learned about at the Gregory Heisler Workshop is now replicated in our photo lab. Heather Knapp did some test shots late on Friday and the results are amazing. For around $125 per light – we were able to build portrait lighting that works in a very professional manner.
Last week’s business card design project results are looking quite good. Many of you put your full efforts into the project. This week’s design challenge asks you to take a current company/product or brand whose logo you will redesign. You will be presenting your new logo on Friday, January 11, 2010 to the class and explain why your new design improves on the logo. This week’s photography challenge asks you to break the rule of thirds in your composition. There are a couple of times when this is necessary – large group shots and formal portraits are often shot “centered up” out of necessity – read the discussion on the School of Photography and look at samples others provide for inspiration. Please post your color-corrected and cropped images into a dated folder by Friday, January 11th. Happy New Year and welcome back from the holiday break. I hope all of you had an enjoyable and restful break and that you’re coming back revitalized and ready to work. The first three months have gone well and we’re coming down the home stretch in a number of ways:
During the second part of the year we’re going to continue with the photo challenge, but we’re also going to start doing a weekly design challenge as well. I will be putting the specifications on this home page every week. Make sure that you’re reading this page every week so that you know due dates and requirements for the assignments. These two weekly challenges are 80% of your grade so you want to make sure that you are working on them throughout the week. This week’s Photo Challenge topic is a “rule of thirds” http://www.digital-photography-school.com/rule-of-thirds http://tinyurl.com/27uz4uk http://photography.about.com/od/takingpictures/a/ruleofthirdsdet.htm Look over the suggested websites and submit three images that demonstrate the good use of the concept of the rule of thirds in photography. There are sample shots on each of the pages. Don’t be afraid to fill your lens with the subject that you are capturing. Upload your finished, color corrected and cropped images by Friday, January 7th. This week’s Design Challenge topic is a business card using an abstract logo. Here are the steps you will need to take:
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. 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. The links for the design competitions I shared with you in class today are listed below:
egency.com PETE & C Pin Competition 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. 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. . |
Mr. TuckerMr. Tucker is in his 23rd year as the instructor for the Graphic Arts program. Prior to his teaching career he worked in the flexography industry for ten years and in quick printing for ten years. NEED HELP?Weebly Student Log-in Link
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