Tuesday 4/26/16

I woke up and began my day with Astronomy class first period at 8:00. After class I went to the book store to buy eleven mats for our photos and then headed down to the matting room in the community center. I was able to get Karey to meet me down there so she could help me mat. She told me how to measure out the area that needed to be cut so I could mark it with a pencil. I measured one mat and drew where Karey should cut. After she sliced it I used the first mat as a template of the others by simply using it as a giant stencil. I would trace and Karey would cut, we kinda got into a rhythm. When we were done cutting she taught me a new way of matting called hinge matting. You take two mat boards, one cut and one uncut, you place the print on the uncut side, tape the two boards together to form a hinge, fold the top mat over, position the print correctly, tape it down, and voilà, you get a mat that looks good and is twice as protective as a regular mat. I was able to do this to most of our images before I had to go to senior chapel. When chapel ended James was able to come back to the matting room and help. I taught him how to mat and we finished the last of the prints. We decided that we should print out two more pictures per person so we got back to work. I started printing while James bought more matting board but when all the pictures were printed it was time for lunch. James went to lunch and checked out for the day and I waited for Karey to help cut again. Some of our images were cropped for the book so I had to remeasure the mats for two images. Karey and I powered through tracing and cutting the rest of the mats and when she was done cutting she left for lunch. Once she was gone I matted the new pictures that we printed out and the two that were cropped. Once everything was matted I talked to Karey who said I should hang them in the upper hallway in the community center beside the brick wall. She instructed me to take down the artwork that was there so I did. After clearing four walls Karey gave me advice on where to place our prints and I began to hang them with thumbtacks. It took six thumbtacks per print which had to be pressed really hard because the mats were so heavy. I finally finished hanging them at around 4:00 so I ws finally able to go home. Also, my thumb was really hurting after inserting about one hundred thumbtacks as hard as possible. As of writing this I still have no feeling whatsoever in the tip of my thumb, which is interesting. Pro tip: when Karey hands you a hammer to use on the thumbtacks instead of your thumb, listen to her.

Monday 4/25/16

It is nice to not have to worry about the book anymore since James ordered it on Friday. I was working solo today and that's alright since James worked a few hours by himself last week. I got James to send me all the final edits of our pictures from his desktop so I could begin printing them. The purpose of printing was to display the images in the halls of Lovett to show off our work and also to display them during our presentation to the committee to act as a visual aid. I wanted to print out the images to be as big as possible. The printer in the photo room has a paper roll instead of pages so it can print an image that is as long as the roll. The roll is only 16 inches wide so the pictures were printed out to be 16x24. The roll of paper in the printer was thick, matte, and grainy so after printing one image on that I had to exchange the roll for one that was semigloss. When I put the semigloss roll in I had to adjust the printer settings to maximize the image quality. The printer is very high quality but that also means high prices, ink is $70 per color cartridge and there are 11 cartridges. In order to avoid bankrupting the entire photography department Karey and I decided that I should only print out a few images from me and a few from James. James texted me some suggestion of photos of his that he wanted and I printed out four of them. I also printed out four for myself, one of which was the panorama. The panorama I took from the top of Bell Mountain printed out to be 16 inches tall and fifty inches wide. After printing all eight images I put them in a drawn in the photo room and went home.

Thursday 4/21/16

Today I had to drive up to Elon for the weekend so I had limited time for the project. Luckily we didn't have much left to to in the book. I had time to work after my first period astronomy class so I wrote a short foreword for the beginning of the book before James got to Lovett. Once he arrived he looked over the statement and we went to Ms. Ohayon to get her to check it as well. We tweaked a few things and we were good to go. I left in the early afternoon, relieved that I was finally done with the book. The only thing left is for James to simply order it.

Wednesday 4/20/16

Today was our biggest day of progress by far. After my English class ended at 1:10 I immediately drove to James's house to work on the project. When I arrived he had already printed out a thumbnail sized picture of each image. We used these to organize the book by laying them out on a table and pairing them up on their respective pages. Since we last decided the order of the images for the book some things had been moved around so we had to rework a large section of our pairing process. Once this was done I downloaded the final versions of the photos I had been editing at school and we downloaded all the photos to the book publishing software. We decided to use My Publisher to make our book because according to our research, they have the best print quality. The problem is that the My Publisher software is utterly horrible. This drove James insane because he was in charge of ordering the book an therefore he was the one working the computer. There is no easy way to position each photo on the page like there is in say, powerpoint. The image doesn't lock into place like it should so there is no way to figure out if the some of the image is being slightly cut off by the side of the page and also no way to know if the images is even centered on the page. On top of all this, the pages are a different shape than the pictures so we if we wanted the image to take up the whole page then we had to crop it. We cropped the pictures that looked good cropped and we left the others as they were. And then the program started to crash. The first time this happened a sheer wave of panic washed over us as we sat silently praying that our progress was not lost, thankfully it was not. It ended up crashing a few more times which took up a ton of time. Once we were finished uploading photos I came up with a title: From Shore to Summit, Uncovering the Beauty of the Peach State. I had to leave James's house at 5:30 because I had a Astrophysics field trip to so see Neil deGrasse Tyson at the Fox Theatre. While at the show I texted with James as he sent me font suggestions for the book and options for page numbers. He also texted me every time the program crashed, which was amusing. By the end of the night we almost finished with the book.

Tuesday 4/19/16

James and I were able to work extremely efficiently today and we accomplished much more than I expected. I had to go to school because I had English class at eleven and Astronomy last period. This gave me some free time to work on editing my images on the desktop in the photo lab. I worked during the period before lunch and then again after school because I had to wait until 4:30 to bring home James's sister. I managed to edit a total of around twelve images at school, the more I edited the faster I got. I began to become more accurate with my mouse movements on the slide bars so instead of having to move it around a dozen times I just had to adjust it only one or twice. I also started to realize what needed to be changed with each picture more rapidly. This meant that when I got back to James's house we were able to finish all of our editing in only a few hours. James had already started editing his images earlier today so we both had about fifteen images left. However, the images I brought back from Lovett were not the edited copies so I kinda dropped the ball there. The other big thing we did today was choose a cover photo. Our original plan was to use three images and have them all on the title page together but once we tried that we realized that it looked too busy. That meant we had to choose just one photo. After much arguing and discussion we settled on a photo I had taken of birds at sunrise on Ossabaw. After that we began to brainstorm a title but we couldn't think of anything that wasn't cliche so I went home and we called it a day.

Monday 4/19/16 Week 3

Today we made a great amount of progress. Our goal was to finish narrowing down the photos, a process that is taking longer than we expected. Our work day began when James and I went back to his house right after our last class. Yesterday we had narrowed our list of photos down to around 200 total, about 100 from me and the same from James. Today we closely examined each photo and decided whether it had a place in the book. There were a few pictures that we really couldn't agree on, pictures of mine that I liked but James didn't and vice versa. On one occasion we even brought in James's mom to act as a tie breaker. After hours of careful consideration and discussion we finally finished choosing which photos will go in the book. Something that helped us was that we had to choose which images would look good beside each other in the book and complement each other. Each image had to have a partner that would adorn the opposite page. This helped us because we were on the fence with some photos and when we couldn't find them a suitable partner we cut them from the book all together. Pairing up the images was still a challenge though, we had to find images that weren't too similar but still had colors that would complement the opposite image. When everything was sorted out, the final total image count was 59, 31 from me and 28 from James. These numbers surprised us both because we weren't trying to have an equal amount of photos per person. We were just picking the best image we could, regardless of who took it, and it just happened to turn out that the number of photos per person was surprisingly similar. After finishing the pairing process we moved onto editing. I had the images that were most difficult to edit so James helped me with those. The first and potentially most troublesome images was a series of photos I took on top of Bell Mountain with the intention of turning it into a panorama. Surprisingly, photoshop made this process quite easy and we were finished in under 20 minutes. The next two images were a total of 5 images I took in two different locations at Tallulah Gorge to combine into HDR images. I had done HDR editing a couple times before so it didn't take too incredibly long for me to sort them out. After finishing those I assisted James and he assisted me as we each edited our own, non-HDR and non-panorama photos. We would give each other our opinions on which part of the image to edit and advise on how much adjustments should be made to each picture. We called it a day after editing a total of around 10 or so photos.

Sunday 4/18/16 Week 2

Today James and I decided that we needed to finish phase two of narrowing down our photos. Phase one consisted of us going through our photos independently and narrowing them down to the photos we liked. Today we met at James's house and went through our narrowed down photos together. After phase one I had 240 photos left and James had 500 left. We went through all 740 and decided kept only the ones that we would be proud to see in our book. We also had to avoid keeping two similar images. For example, I had a really cool star trails photo that I wanted to use but that meant that I couldn't include another impressive photo I took of the stars in the same location. It also turns out that many of our photos are nearly identical and we will have to compare them side by side to determine which one we want to use. After going through the majority of our photos we ran out of time and I had to come back to James's house after dinner. Then we were finally able to complete phase two. The further we get in narrowing the photos down the harder it's getting. Sometimes we disagree on which photos should go in and it is hard to come to an agreement. We both want the other person to get their favorite photos in the book but the thing is that the book will have both our names on it. We are having to walk the fine line between letting the other person put the photos of their choice in and keeping the book true to the original vision.

Thursday 4/14/16 week 2

James is out of town visiting Cornell so I worked alone today. I had to wake up early in the first time in a while because I had a class first period. I forgot how bad first period was but once I began working on my project I had less trouble staying awake. After first period I went to IT and got them to instal Lightroom on the desktop computer that I use in the photo room. Lightroom, being a fantastic program, helped me to exponentially speed up my editing process. I was able to download all 1800 of my photos on to the desktop and sort through them one by one. My plan was to narrow down the amount of photos I took so I could focus on only the really good ones. So on I went, looking at every image. Every. Single. One. It took me hours but I finally narrowed it down to only 244 images. By the time James and I next meet up he will have done the same and we will look through each other's photos together and hopefully begin selecting which ones deserve to go in the book. In addition to looking through my photos I also continued to edit my star trails image that I took in Ossabaw, which I consider my best picture from the project. I used Lightroom to adjust the colors and light in the image. I significantly lightened the dead tree in the foreground and then transferred it to photoshop. Once in photoshop I went through with the healing tool and removed all of the spots that my camera creates when it takes long exposures. This took a long time, but not as long as it took me to edit out any light streaks across the sky from planes. The upside is that this image will surely make it into the book. Also, when choosing images for the book, James and I will be impartial towards whose images go in and whose don't. We will choose the best images regardless of who took them.

Tuesday 4/12/16 week 2

James and I got much more pictures yesterday than we did today. We had big ambitions but bad luck. Our day began when I picked James up from his house at ten o’clock. Our first stop was a bridge over Freedom Parkway in not the best part of town. I timidly parked my car on the street and we walked onto the bridge. The view from the bridge was excellent for photographs and genuinely a nice place to be. I used a wide lens, a fifty, and a telephoto but my best images came from the fifty. The fifty-millimeter lens was the correct level of zoom to perfectly frame the two tallest buildings in downtown. Our next stop after the bridge was the Porsche headquarters by the airport where we hoped to get a good view of planes landing. My hope was that we could use our telephoto lenses to get a good picture of the puff of smoke that comes from the planes wheels when it lands. However, when we drove up to the Porsche HQ they told us that we needed an appointment. From there we went to the airport to see if we could try and get a better view there. No such thing happened. After this massive failure we gave up and went to lunch. While we were eating it dawned on us that we were finished shooting for the project. If we figure out that we need more photos while we are editing then we can go out and get more. We drove back to James’s house as a sense of relief washed over us; we were finally done taking pictures. At James’s house we downloaded Photoshop and Lightroom on his computer and began sorting through our photos. I compiled 175 thirty-second exposures of the stars into StarStax, a program that specializes in star trails photos. The image turned out well and I’m pretty sure it’s going in the book. The last thing I had to do was but all my images in separate folders on my external hard drive. After half an hour that was done and I headed home.  

Monday 4/11/16 week 2

Today was our first day shooting in Atlanta for the project. At around 10:30 I drove over to James’s house to pick him up so we could start our day. It wasn’t until I got there when I realized that I had forgotten my tripod, so back I went to my house. The day was off to a positive start. Our first stop was at my grandparent’s apartment, which is on the thirty-sixth floor and has a fantastic view of Buckhead. My grandmother let us in and we set up our tripods on their balcony. We both used almost all of our lenses to capture a variety of images with different effects. After taking our pictures we ate lunch with my grandmother and packed up our gear. James and I then drove downtown to Piedmont Park where we would be able to get good photos with trees in the foreground and skyline in the background. While walking around the park we came upon geese with about eight goslings. The goslings were so unbelievably cute that we stopped for probably half an hour to take photos. We got amazing photos because it would be impossible not to, given our subjects. We then moved on to the pond where there was an impressive array of animals such as turtles, ducks, geese, and that weird kind of white ugly duck that nobody likes. We took some photos of the animals but they didn’t come out very well. Our attention was caught by the downtown skyline looming over the park so we moved to the other side of the pond to get pictures of it. Our pictures came out just as we had planned but by the time we finished it was time to head downtown. James’s dad works at a company that owns many downtown skyscrapers so he arranged for us to go up on the roof of one. The one we got access to was the tall one beside i75 with the green and gold top. Once on the roof we towered above all of Atlanta. I have never seen anything like that view and I was in awe. We spent almost an hour on the roof taking pictures from every possible angle. After our hour was up we headed back down the fifty floors to the lobby. Our next stop was Little Five Points, which was decidedly less exciting than the roof of a skyscraper. I don’t think James or myself got any good pictures there. After the disappointment of Little Five points we called it a day and got dinner at Ponce City Market. We actually would have gotten pictures there too but it was raining.

Friday

Today was our last day in North Georgia because we had to get back for prom tomorrow. We had stayed up late last night so we woke up around eleven o'clock this morning. About an our after we woke up at the McMurtrie's lake house we got a surprise visit. While I was in the shower James was cooking breakfast on the stove. When I got out of the shower I saw a visibly confused James. While he was cooking, a man walked up from the basement stairs and into the living room, startling James. The man looked to be about seventy and had on old clothes. Eventually the man introduced himself as Bob McMurtrie, Jack's grandfather. James did not know Bob before this so their interaction was awkward and quick. After recovering from Bob we packed up our stuff and headed back to Atlanta. Before we left we spent some time trying to capture a good shot of Lake Nottley which turned out to be a lot harder than it might seem. See, Lake Nottley's water level was still extremely low meaning we couldn't get a shot of the lake without twelve feet of shoreline in it. After continuing to struggle we gave up, called it at day, and headed back to Atlanta. We didn't want to leave our trash at their house so we strapped it to my roof, figuring that we would find a dumpster close to their house to leave it in. Twenty frustrating miles later we finally found a dumpster in a literal dump. So it turned out that we drove around while not seeing one dumpster for half an hour until we saw all the dumpsters. The rest of the drive was business as usual with me driving and James sleeping. We got back to Atlanta around four o'clock for what should be the last our our project this week.

Thursday

I woke up fairly late today, that was a mistake. James had already been up for hours and he began making hot dogs when I woke up.  Hot dogs turned out to be strangely good breakfast food. After demolishing a plate of doggies we got in my car and headed towards Tallulah Gorge. The drive took an hour and a half but the curvy roads make it a blast. By the way, all roads would be better if there were full of cambered corners. Anyway, Tallulah Gorge was awesome, or as James described it: gorgeous.  We hiked around Tallulah Gorge for four hours and took some incredible photos. Tallulah Gorge might as well be the stair capital of the world because I don’t think I’ve ever been up and down as many stairs as I did today, not counting Buddy Warren’s middle school track day. While on the South Rim Trail James and I got really lucky and captured some great pictures of some vultures and what I think were hawks. James got a great picture of one in front of the waterfall and I was able to capture a longer exposure photo of a vulture during a dive. I really liked how the longer exposure resulted in a cool sense of motion. We then hiked along the rim trail for a few miles (another bajillion stairs) and figuratively stumbled upon a damn where we were able to get some long exposure pictures of the water flowing off of the damn. Because the light was fading I was able to leave my camera open for two seconds, which resulted in a really cool photo. Since Tallulah Gorge was our only destination for today we began our journey back to the lake house where we are staying. I’m really looking forward to later in our project when we can look through and edit our photos for the book.

Tuesday

Today was a very interesting and productive day. We woke up in our tent around 9 o’clock after having survived what seemed to be monsoon winds. Seriously, our tent literally blew away and I had to chase after it for a solid 20 yards. Our solution was to put large rocks inside and it worked gloriously. Foggy eyed and cold we made our way to my car, which was coated in mud and filled with food. We made ourselves some cream cheese bagels and began our day. As with any day at the campsite it began with a hilarious ride down the mountain. See the campsite happened to be at the top of the Tray Mountain off-roading trail, which was full of boulders the size of futons and ditches big enough to hide said futons in. This resulted in quite a bumpy ride, but that didn’t stop James from trying to sleep in the passenger seat. I almost crashed on multiple occasions because of how hard I was laughing at James flop around beside me with his eyes closed. Miraculously, he did actually manage to sleep, which still boggles my mind. Once we made it down from Tray Mountain we made our way over to the base of Bell Mountain in Hiawassee, Georgia. The road up to the summit turned out to be another off-roading trail. I put my Jeep in 4-low and made it up three quarters of the trail. I had to park it when the train became so rough that some of the ditches were over four feet deep and too steep for me to even walk down into. We walked the last half-mile of the trail and made it to the top by 12:45. The top of Bell Mountain is like nothing I have ever seen before. It had 50 feet of sharp white rocks, which were covered with colorful graffiti. We climbed up the rocks to get an amazing view of the numerous Hiawassee lakes. I used my wide lens to capture view and also the graffiti rocks in the same picture. I also used my telephoto lens to take up close pictures of the lakes. From there we climbed/slightly fell of the rocks and went back to the car and on to Brasstown Bald, the highest point in Georgia. It was an incredibly steep ride up to the peak but once we got there it was worth it. From viewing platform on top of the mountain you can see for miles, even North Carolina is visible. I used the same photography techniques from Bell Mountain and the pictures turned out great. After coming down the mountain we went into Helen, Georgia to pick up some friends who came to visit us while camping. Also, Helen might be the worst town in America. For some reason the city planners decided that Helen should be an alpine Bavarian town instead of a normal city. This was a bad decision. Once back at the top of Tray Mountain I did some astrophotography and called it a night.

Monday

Today was our second big travel day. After the 4-hour drive to and from Savannah the 2-hour drive to Helen was a welcome relief. We had initially traveled to Savannah to attend a photo workshop taught by Katherine Kolyb. The trip was amazingly helpful and a huge success as it helped us capture a number of impressive photographs of both the forest and the beach. James’s blog goes into greater depth on the trip. But alas, today we traveled up a Jeep trail to the top of Tray Mountain above Helen, Georgia to capture some fantastic pictures of the stars. Along the way we stopped at a antique store where I captured some portrait shots of the owner in front of his 1965 International pickup while James took some pictures of the inside of the shop. We also stopped in a field to take pictures of a tractor and some farm equipment. Farm equipment is cool. I got a great shot of the tractor with grass in the foreground and a mountain in the background. Once at the top of the mountain we set up camp and spent a couple of hours in firelight doing astrophotography. I captured some amazing pictures of the stars since there is absolutely no light pollution here. As I type this James’s camera is taking pictures of the sky and we will hopefully be able to combine them into one star trails image.