I’d say that the most challenging part of this website was creating the written content for the Case Studies.
This was difficult for a few reasons.
Phone Or Photoshop?
Many of the photos on my portfolio are from before I had access to Photoshop. They were from Covid Era so all I had was my phone. Now, I had Photoshop to edit and watermark them, so it brought up the question of: Do I explain how I edited the photos on my phone or in Photoshop?
Because of this, I began writing content for the case studies in the “Process” category because the most important part was more how I set up the items to take the photo and less what I did to make the photograph look better.
I realized, after talking to one of my classmates, that photographers use filters all the time and that the message of my portfolio is that you don’t need expensive equipment to take great photos—nearly my entire portfolio is proof of that, so I decided to explain how to achieve the effect I did in my photos both on a phone and in Photoshop.
Photos Taken A Long Time Ago
Many of my photos were taken years ago. I didn’t know that it would’ve been helpful to future me to keep a log of any edits I made whether that be names of filters or the exact number of brightness increased.
Alas, I kept no record except being able to click on edited photos and look at the adjustments. However, the photos in the “Editing” category had a special process done to them. I had trouble remembering what exactly I had done to create that effect.
For example, in “Black & White,” the desaturated look was not achieved by just removing the saturation. The inside of the flowers was a darker color and it’d be reflected in a desaturated version. I had to play around with the settings again to figure out what I had done.
Building On Each Other
I believed that I was supposed to keep the explanations strictly to phone editing or Photoshop, but I decided to combine them. Most of my photos were edited on my phone after I originally and then taken into Photoshop years later to prepare them for the web.
Highlighting this process within Case Studies was important because it showcased an extra step that photographers need to take sometimes after taking a photo. A great example was the “Flowers In A Bottle” Case Study where I edited the photo first on my phone, decided I didn’t like it and started over in Photoshop.