Collecting Vocabulary

Here's the list of terms Alan asked us to build today before we critiqued the pictures we took yesterday at the Dylan Smith talk.

Before yesterday, I had little idea what these terms meant when considering photographs. My extent of photography mentorship to my students has been just to tell them how to turn the camera on and how to push the button thingie that takes a picture and how to turn off the flash thingie in the gym so they don't get in trouble blinding the basketball players or the refs and how to wiggle the lens thingie back in place when the camera refuses to work. Note my astounding lack of photography-related vocabulary.

I took the above photo with my iphone. And once I got it on my computer, I opened it in photoshop. FIRST I duplicated it so that I wasn't working on the original. Then I adjusted the levels. Then I sharpened it. Then I made sure the size was appropriate for the web (640 pixels wide; 72 dpi). Then I saved it (medium quality). The photo isn't perfect (note the glare that obscures part of the first term in the list) (not even sure if Photoshop can do anything about that). I'm sure there is more I could do to the photo and more I could know about shooting photos to end up with higher quality raw material to edit,  but below is the orignal version before I edited it. The edited version is definitely clearer and more readable.

And I am definitely learning something (a LOT) this week...



Sarah M. Zerwin
Fairview High School
Boulder, CO