I figured out the three Daily Creates this week, trying to see how I could accomplish the task as quickly as possible and still satisfy the intent of the assignment. For the first Tweet, it was just too obvious to pick a photo that I had taken while hiking along the Rappahannock River a couple of years ago. The photo in the DC doesn’t look like the end of a trail but just like part of the Quarry Trail.
In the next Tweet, you can tell that writing poetry requires more time, especially with a thesaurus. Technically, I took a photo I have on file of one of my lavender plants and changed it to about 20% transparency, then typed over it with my poem.
For the alliteration Tweet, I copied the image to Photo Editor then cropped out al the cards except one. Then I copied that image to PowerPoint and overwrote with a white pen, all the imagery I did not want. After that, I inserted the fairy bear I found online into the image and wrote “Fairy Beary” above the image before I saved it as a jpeg to flatten the file. It worked and was pretty quick.
Photo Reflection
Becoming a Better Photographer
Photoblitz
Assignments
All my assignments added up to 14.5 stars, as follows: 1256, 3 stars; 1882, 3 stars; 1701, 2.5 stars; 1316, 2.5 stars; 65, 2 stars; and 2109, 1.5 stars. I wrote in detail about my experience in each of these assignments. What stands out is that I did not venture into GIF territory because I am not comfortable working with that. Yet. When I looked at everyone’s work for the Posts of the Week, I printed out about ten assignments that were detailed in how they executed their assignments so I should be able to replicate the process. I also printed out people’s suggestions for software and websites of free tools, support and content that I can use. That is all greatly appreciated and I hope to learn from other people’s success.
This week went pretty well because it wasn’t so much of a technical challenge as it was creating a visual story together for each assignment. I did add paint.net to my repertoire which looks a lot like Photoshop. I think I accomplished each challenge well, and met the intent of the assignments while trying to get out of the box and use some creativity. The most difficult part is to not fall in love with my own work. It’s easy to think I have a great photo, or that it’s mysterious or creative when, in fact, I’ve only been seduced by the effort I’ve put into the image. This is why good critiquing is so important, to bring me back to reality and tell me when, in the end, all I have is a toad and not a prince.
