Photography & Digital Editing: Milwaukee
¨The Good Land¨
Photography and Digital Editing
This piece was inspired by artist Irvin Perez, Daidō Moriyama, and Megan Dill. These pieces show my view of many areas around Milwaukee, WI as well as some suburbs. These photos were all taken by me within the last year, and all recently edited using 3 different softwares. I got the idea when I found out a family friend was coming in the next couple months, and I wanted to show them some of my favorite places around Milwaukee.
This piece was inspired by artist Irvin Perez, Daidō Moriyama, and Megan Dill. These pieces show my view of many areas around Milwaukee, WI as well as some suburbs. These photos were all taken by me within the last year, and all recently edited using 3 different softwares. I got the idea when I found out a family friend was coming in the next couple months, and I wanted to show them some of my favorite places around Milwaukee.
Inspirations
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Irvin PerezIrvin Perez is a Milwaukee based photographer who goes by his artist name of SouthSide Shooter. I have been following for roughly two years on social media, and have since then loved certain aspects of his photography style. Irvin is a videographer, photographer, and founder of Wisconsin Prod artist page on Facebook and Instagram. I liked his use of space, as well as the way that he adds titles into his pieces. Another aspect I really enjoyed from his works as well as from other artists, was the use of grainy texture.
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Daidō MoriyamaDaidō Moriyama, a Japanese photographer, is known for his photography pieces where he chooses to illustrate the harder and more challenging aspects of life around him, as well as the visuals that are not shown in daily magazines and TV. Almost as if though he uses his works to show the behind the scenes of everyday life. Through the use of gradient and light, he adds a sense of solemnity tone to his pieces. It truly makes the audience think about how it makes them feel.
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Isiuchi MiyakoIsiuchi Miyako is another Japanese photographer, and she is mainly know for her photos where she too documents life and the hardships of the city in which she grew up. Many of her works feature a very grainy texture to her pieces characterizing them as if they are from an earlier time period. In the later years of her career, she also began to take portraits of older people focusing on their skin, clothing, and age. Being she grew up in the postwar era, she also began taking pictures of old monuments and artifacts from things during the war.
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Planning Sketches:
My original plan was to go with a Postcard style digital collage. My plan was to start with a picture of Milwaukee's cityscape. I then wanted to use photopea to cut out the name Milwaukee into the picture. Once I had my main piece done, I was going to use other pictures I had taken to fill in the letters. Unfortunately, I struggled for days, and once I finally got to a piece I was happy with, I had some technical issues and it was all wiped away.
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Process:
When I started working on my original project idea, I really liked my idea, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to cleanly outline and cut out the letter from my original picture so that I could later go in and add pictures from behind to give the illusion of a postcard. Unfortunately after a few days of trying, I finally was at a point that I thought was neat and clean enough to start my project, but my chomebook crashed and it was all deleted. I tried redoing it, but I wasn't getting results I was happy with and feared I would not finish in time if I decided to start from fresh with the chance of the same thing as last time when it all got deleted. Because of these issues, I decided to change up my idea. I still wanted to show certain aspects and places from around my hometown that I really like, so instead of my postcard idea, I decided to take some of my favorite pictures that I have taken, and edit them using similar styles to my artist inspirations. For this project, I used pictures that I had taken using my phone and my camera, and I used photo editors, snapseed and pics art. Once I selected the pictures U wanted to use, I made a folder in my gallery so that I wouldn't have go back and look for them and potentially not find them again. I started off by using snapseed to edit the contrast, brightness, highlights, warmth, and saturation. Once I was happy with the new visual of the photo, I added a filter that is used to make the pictures grainy and I set how much grain I wanted per picture. I then used Pics art to add any words I wanted as that software had a larger variety of fonts to choose from. I think my hardest task through all of this was picking which pictures I wanted to use, as there were many that I liked.
Tools and Photo Edit Software:
For this project, the tools I used include my Samsung Galaxy s10 , my Nikon Coolpix L120 camera, and photo editing softwares, snapseed and pics art.
Samsung Galaxy S10 and Nikon Coolpix L120- I used both my phone and my camera to take the pictures seen in my project above. While working with my phone, I used the camera mode known as pro which allowed me to change iso, focus, color balance, exposure, and aperture. While working with my camera, I am able to change the iso, white balance, and other color options. My camera also has a 21x optical zoom lens which made it a better option when trying to take a picture from distance over my phone camera. The only benefit of my phone was it is lighter and easier to change camera setting on the spot.
Snapseed and Pics Art- I used both of these photo editing softwares pretty evenly depending on which picture I was working with at the time. I tried making most of the changes as I was taking the pictures, but these editors allowed me to go back and really enhance the image I was trying to obtain.
Samsung Galaxy S10 and Nikon Coolpix L120- I used both my phone and my camera to take the pictures seen in my project above. While working with my phone, I used the camera mode known as pro which allowed me to change iso, focus, color balance, exposure, and aperture. While working with my camera, I am able to change the iso, white balance, and other color options. My camera also has a 21x optical zoom lens which made it a better option when trying to take a picture from distance over my phone camera. The only benefit of my phone was it is lighter and easier to change camera setting on the spot.
Snapseed and Pics Art- I used both of these photo editing softwares pretty evenly depending on which picture I was working with at the time. I tried making most of the changes as I was taking the pictures, but these editors allowed me to go back and really enhance the image I was trying to obtain.
Reflection:
I did have a few problems with my original plans on how I wanted to do this project, however I am proud of myself for analyzing my time and progress, and evaluate what would be the best option for me going forward with this project. I was able to adapt and figure out what had to be done to become successful with this project. Although I had a lot of issues and wasn't able to finish my original piece, it allowed me to work with a web
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