Blog #4 - Working With Digital Images

For the first activity I chose a variety of personal photos and tried some creative cropping. These are some of the my favorites :

It was an interesting process because I feel like I thought about cropping as a tool in a completely different way. Of course I've cropped photos before, but always to cut out unimportant things and to focus in on the people in the picture. In this exercise I tried to choose a focal point that might change the meaning of the picture as a whole, therefor making cropping more of a design tool. In the first photo above, I focused in on my engagement and wedding ring, which changes the emphasis of the photo from a vacation snapshot, to a romantic focus. In the second, the focus becomes something that could be an advertising shot. The third changes the focus from a group meeting, the the emotion of one participant. And the last switches focus away from people altogether to focus on something more timeless. Amazing how much you could get out of one picture!

In the second activity, I experimented with choosing colors from the original picture to create a layout. What I discovered as really interesting was that colors are made up of many tiny little colors. I tried to choose black, or green, and discovered that I was getting a subtle shade of that color. At first I was thrown by this, wanting to get more vibrant colors. But as I started to play around, the subtle shades actually helped create a unity in the layout that was soothing and peaceful. The color in the second one actually came from my skin tone!

The third activity I did had to do with using borders to help create a different feel in a picture. Often times in education you see layouts, websites, and presentations that are created using as much "fun" color as possible. I've come to see that this is not always the best design concept! From the exercise done below, I am really interested in using a variety of border shapes to emphasize images. You can see how each different shape changes the feeling that the image creates in the viewer. The soft, fuzzy borders of the first creates a dreamlike feeling, whereas the white, jagged border creates a more lighthearted feeling. I never thought of borders as just as important as the image itself before!

Design is more than just making the picture look nice. It's about using tools like cropping, a color palette, and    borders to create an image that does the job you want it to do. Using those tools helps the images to create the feeling you want them to create. The Design Basics Index states that "the rest of our color education happens on a more instinctual level during a life-time of observation, enjoyment, and hands-on practice" (Krause, 2004, p. 207). By allowing our instincts to help us use these tools, we can tap into the real benefits of design!