"The Streetz"

Photography is what I do. I got into this work through school, it being an extracurricular subject. I noticed it because I love examining other photos and seeing other photographer's work. When I am able to accomplish a piece of work in photography, I feel really proud of my work especially if I feel that I did a really good job on it and I feel that I must share my work and accomplishment with others too. My favorite thing about my work is that I can change it however I want and keep it interesting and flowing. I can capture exactly what I want and I am able to fix my work in Photoshop if it is not appealing to me. When I say that a piece of mine has turned out well, I mean that I see it has developed how I wanted it to, that the photo piece shows something special about it and captures the image I was aiming for. In all my pieces, I do have somewhat of a pattern because I am taking photos of more or less the same topic, Graffiti or even just any wall or ground art. I like a lot of my photos to either be extremely colorful or in black and white.

When I chose to do photography in school, I chose it because it seemed exciting. My sister does photography and I have seen the pieces she has made and they inspired me to try out photography too. I love being able to capture the things I see in everyday life, while I'm walking down the streets or traveling. In photography, I was hoping to become more advanced in Photoshop and taking a simple photo with many mistakes and turning it into a great piece, which I feel confident about. I wanted to be able to go out in the city and notice unusual things and take photos of them and be able to show others what I saw in the photo. Overall, I wanted to start out as an amateur photographer and by the end grow into a much better photographer.

When making my work and changing it to fit the image I want it to be, I decide how I want it to look and what tools I want to use to make it look the way I want. I decide which colors I want to change or what shapes or people I'd like to crop out or tweak. I chose the theme of Graffiti for my work because it is a constantly changing topic, which I liked because I didn't want to get stuck with the same photos all the time. Also graffiti as a topic allows me to take photos of not only graffiti but the city too and anything I notice in the streets when I am walking around. After I take the photos I usually change them in Photoshop, where I use a few tools since as much as I like Photoshop and was taught how to use it, it was a lot to take in and therefore I used just a few tools. I usually use the burn/dodge tool, or the crop tool. I mainly used burning and dodging because I wanted my photos to be either brighter or darker. I also liked changing my color photo's to black and white because this gave a different perspective to my photo. I just want my photo to be a piece of art that not only I enjoy looking at but that others may enjoy looking at and perceive their own ideas from the photo not only my ideas that are shown.

Just recently, I completed a piece of work that was one of my final pieces in my photography class. It was supposed to show how I have grown as photographer and an artist from the beginning of the year until now. This piece of work was done the way I wanted without any limits. This work grew out my everyday experiences, as I was walking down the streets and I widened my eyes and noticed many objects or paintings or art that I wanted to document. I took photos of what I really thought was interesting and I put several of those photos together in one final piece. I explored taking some of the photos and mixing it with the other photos to create a collage. This was one of my favorite pieces because I was able to showcase several of my pieces all in one glance. This was not only a fun piece to create it was also pretty challenging. I wanted to combine several photos together but it did not always work out but I tried not to get frustrated and rather just let the piece flow together. Altogether, photography was an exciting thing to do but it had its moment of difficulty.

Thanks and Enjoy!