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.