My classmate Dina was assigned an album of my choosing: The Family Jewels by Marina and the Diamonds.

Her job was to create an alternative album cover that represented what the album was.

This was the result:

I think she fulfilled my expectations. The only thing that bugs me is the variety of font sizes on the back, but she did a fantastic job capturing what the songs represent.

I think that it does. Here’s why.

A big element of photography is looking for stories to tell. When you look long enough, it’s all you start to see.

For example, let’s say you’re sitting in a restaurant. You’re eating that godly bean burrito. You don’t think to look for those stories.

Now, they may not do it intentionally, but when they look around, a story will catch a photographer’s eye.

Why is this? Why does a photographer see the world this way? Think about how you learned to walk.

You started out falling on your face, but you tried over and over again until it was something you just, did.

When you look for stories for a long time, it becomes something you just, do.

While a camera is a pretty important tool for a photographer, their feet are just as important.

To change the perspective of a picture, you need to move physically.

Yes, you can use specific lenses and settings, but it’s artificial. It can almost be like a lie.

There’s a huge difference between the feel of a zoom lens photo and a photo where the photographer moved to authentically capture the subject.

For this project, I sacrificed my neck to get a picture of Redwood’s clock tower.

I have a condition that makes my joints hypermobile, so it probably wasn’t the best thing for me to use this method, but it came out pretty good, in my opinion, at least.

“You know, I really don’t think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be – you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.” -Gary Winograd

I personally think you learn from both. To be your own critic, you need to know what exactly you’re looking for to criticize, and that’s what teachers teach you.

It’s impossible to truly learn from just yourself or just a teacher. You need both.

I had to do a lot of cropping to this picture because of how I framed it. Analyzing this picture taught me that I needed to work on how I framed photos.

I looked back at the metadata and saw the settings it was taken on. I could see that the numbers (e.g., aperture, ISO, etc.) were completely out of range. I had to do a LOT of exposure editing on this one. I now know how I can prevent this in the future.

We were assigned a project in which we got a random item from the dollar store and made an advertisement selling it.

I partnered with my classmate Dina to sell a pink “stuffed” monkey labeled “Fuzzy Friend.” We named it Pinky Pal.

Pinky Pal was advertised to be a friend to buy if you don’t have any. We had our English teacher pose with it, and she happened to be wearing an outfit that matched the monkey.

We used Adobe InDesign. Neither of us had used it before, so it was very confusing and frustrating at first.

We somewhat got the hang of it and created the masterpiece shown above.

While designing the page, I learned how to use InDesign-ish. I do know what button (well, some of them) does what though!

I also used Photoshop to remove the backgrounds of the pictures of Dina and Ms. Forsythe, our English teacher.

I learned how to use my creativity and humor (along with Dina’s, of course) to create a masterpiece.

It might not be the best, but we had a lot of fun doing it and learned some pretty neat skills.