The main project was to again make a teaching piece about a plant or animal specimen of our choice, by taking the necessary pictures, researching, and creating the appropriate layout. Seeing as I had some white shrimp in my refrigerator (and they are interesting to look at), I decided to do my piece about shrimp anatomy.
Taking the photos for this was fun. My professor had a ton of different lighting set-ups for us to use. To take this, I ended up submerging the shrimp underwater in a flat-bottomed glass bowl, to eliminate any out-of-water reflection due to it being wet. The bowl was placed on a sheet of glass raised about a 4-5 inches above black velvet (which was to absorb light below the shrimp). For the actual light, I used a set-up of four surrounding LED lights on the end of flexible necks. With two of them I pointed up at the shrimp from below the glass platform, to back-light the carapace and legs. The other two I pointed obliquely across the top of the shrimp to catch some of the features facing the camera. It took a bit of set-up and test photos, but the pictures came out incredibly clear and I am very happy with them. They were then put into a layout in which I tried to show most of the shrimp's general surface anatomy.
That was the "teaching" portion, but there were many other assignments for the class as well. Some of them are portraits that I won't put up for privacy reasons, but here are some others from the class. They were mainly for experimenting with our cameras and getting used to photography in general.
Black-and-White conversion:
Boring? I can buy that. But it was great really finding out and playing with how to digitally convert color photos to black-and-white and avoiding the "Convert to grayscale" option, which is horrible. This was taken at the Cylburn Arboretum in Baltimore.
Sculpture photography:
The idea was to take 3 outdoor photos of a sculpture to be theoretically used to present or promote the sculpture by whatever institution it belongs to. These are 3 (of many more I took) of a 1906 bronze piece by Emile-Antoine Bourdelle titled, "Fruit."
Architecture:
These were taken when I did a half-day rotation in the Hopkins photography department. Architecture photography wasn't an assignment, but it happened to be what I helped do during the rotation. These were really fun to take, because I got to crawl all over the hospital rooftops to get them. 3 are of the construction of the new wing of the hospital, and one is of part of Baltimore's harbor.
The panoramas were stitched together from 3 and 4 shots, respectively.
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