Finals week and graduation

This is the last entry in this blog... well, this blog series at least. The semester is coming to a close, and finals are over Friday night (and I do mean Friday night, as many of you know), so this blog is wrapping up as well.

It was an interesting assignment, and a good way to get started in the blogging world. This is the first attempt I've made at blogging, and it helped having a guaranteed audience in the class, and some easy topics that could be taken from assigned reading. That said, I'm not sure it's for me.

I've been thinking it over, and if I continue blogging I'll do it on a different platform, one that doesn't claim ownership of the pictures I upload, and I'd do it on a different topic. I'm not sure what at the moment, but I might look into it in the future.

For now, though, I'm content to finish up my last semester at school and get ready for graduating next week. My parents are flying out, my projects are going to be done, and it will be nice to have a little vacation in Hawaii before moving back to the mainland and figuring out what I want to do with the rest of my life. A little late to be still working on that, but there's not much I can do about it now.

So aloha to my classmates who've been working on this assignment with me, and aloha to my teacher. Have a fabulous summer, and whatever else comes after that.

Portfolios

Unlike my current trend these last few weeks, I was very productive yesterday. I worked for several hours in the school's computer lab putting together a couple different portfolios of the work I've done throughout my college careet.

I have three different portfolios due, and they're all taking on a different theme. The portfolio from this course is online, and is a little limited by the number of pictures I can upload, but it's looking pretty good. There's a mix of graphic design  (although not as much as I'd like) and photojournalism.

My portfolio for my seminar course, on the other hand, is more influenced by my double-major in marine biology. It's geared toward a set of underwater photos that I took over spring break. I added some of them to my portfolio for this class, and they're some of my favorite photos. Merging my two majors is always more fun than focusing on one or the other.

Either way, my portfolios are looking good, at least to me. Hopefully professors and potential employers will be suitably impressed as well.

Multiple photos in one

In keeping with my last post showing a lightning photo, I thought I'd talk about another lightning photo today. I won't show this photo online since it's in the recent National Geographic magazine, but it's even more gorgeous than the I showed you recently.

The photograph also uses a technique we talked about earlier this year, the idea of taking multiple camera shots and combining them into one photo.

The photographer used a tripod and took multiple photos with exposures of 20 seconds during a night lightning storm. He then combined 70 frames into a single photograph. The result is a scene with multiple lighting strikes in the same area. They light up the sky, the clouds are white blending into purple then dark gray. The lightning, which looks like it's hitting the ocean, is a white-yellow with the area surrounding it a glowing orange. The ocean is slate gray and a stunning forground.

If you couldn't tell, I love the photo. But I'm also conflicted. That photo didn't actually happen. You can't go outside during a lightning storm and see that image. It's computer generated, a special effect. And I'm not sure how I feel about it. I love art photography, I love photoshop, and I love that a reader, not a National Geographic photographer, submitted this image. But still, it's not quite real, is it?

It doesn't really matter. If you get a chance to look through National Geographic (the April Titanic issue), see if you can find the photograph. It's a smaller photo, at the bottom of page 18.

San Francisco Lightning

I was browsing through news stories at work last week and came across something that I loved. Naturally, it was a photo, one of those gorgeous, unusual photos that I always wish I could take. It's a shot of lightening hitting the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. I first saw the article on msn but when I was looking back to find the photo for this post I found it on the San Francisco Chronicle website. The photo was taken by Phil McGrew, and it's absolutely beautiful.

I know you have to not only be talented, but also extremely lucky to get a photo like this. That's probably my downfall. I'm not lucky, so these photos don't usually happen for me. But I enjoy other people's luck, because I love seeing these types of images in the news.

Hope you guys enjoy it too!

Merging photos

We're updating blogs in class today, and I'm still a little short on material... are you tired of hearing that yet? Anyway, the best I can come up with for today is a little blurb about photoshop again, and putting multiple photos together.

A few weeks ago in class we took pictures on our downtown campus and used photoshop to merge them together. I worked with a partner to take photos, so photo credits on this go to Andrea (thank you for letting me use your photos, yell if you want me to take this down because it belongs to you).

The three photos I merged into the main photo are pretty obvious, the flower in the lower left, the palm tree on the upper left, and the HPU sign in the upper right. I think my favorite is the palm tree, just because there's already a palm tree there, but I like the way the merged photo looks, it's more vibrant.

This composite is obviously not the most talented work I've ever done, but I'm not used to merging images in photoshop quite yet, so this is what early efforts look like. And it's not terrible... I don't think so, anyway.

Government journalism?

I've been a little behind in my classes lately (all semester) and I'm just now getting to the spring break readings for this journalism class. This particular article, The Reconstruction of American Journalism, is unusually long. Needless to say I don't have the entire article memorized, or even remember the entire thing, but one aspect did stick out for me.

The article mentions that today, and in the future, journalism will need to be financed by alternative means, and stop relying on advertising. The article suggested that in the future one of these alternative means will be the government.

Maybe I'm honing in a tiny detail in a huge article, but that proposal caught me a little off guard.  You may have heard of the idea that the government help to finance some journalistic endeavors, but I hadn't. It goes against a lot of what I learned both recently and through high school. Journalism is supposed to be a sort of watchdog for the government, holding it accountable for its actions. Can the news industry really fulfill that responsibility if its partially funded by the government? It seems like a conflict of interest.

If anyone in class is still reading this blog (I know, the semester is dragging on, projects are due, finals are around the corner, I've been lagging myself) what do you think? The proposal surprised me, did it surprise anyone else?

Writer's block... so more photos

Unfortunately I haven't been intensely motivated to find something to write about the last few weeks. School projects, spring break (during which I had more fun and did less homework than intended) and impending graduation are getting the best of me.

In particular, I've been having minor panic attacks about finding a job after graduation. The financial reality of actually taking an unpaid internship because I can't find a full-time job is a little stressful, so is the prospect of buying a car, insurance, moving, etc.

So instead of writing a longer post today, I figured I'd post a few photos I've taken recently. Nothing special, but a few odd shots that I got while I was out that I thought were interesting. You might agree, or they might now be your taste. That's part of what I like about photography. People can take radically different photos, and even though one person might not like them, another person might fall in love with them.