This semester, I have been working on my capstone project, which emphasizes street photography. Starting the project, I had just bought my own camera, so for the first month, most of my photography involved learning all the camera settings. My goal with my portfolio was to take photographs that captured the place I was shooting in best while also showing each place’s different personalities. Taking photos is only the first step in creating a good portfolio; I also needed to learn how to edit the photos to emphasize what I wanted properly. The biggest tool I learned to use was the masking tool. Masking allows you to select a specific area of a photo to edit while keeping the rest of the photo intact. This can be used to remove small objects to increase exposure to the subject and not the background. I used the masking tool mainly to increase the exposure and saturation of the subject while dulling the background just slightly to draw viewers’ attention to the subject. While I improved at editing and ensuring photos did not seem overexposed or oversaturated, I still needed to learn a lot. I also had to learn how to use Canva to create a digital photo book. Canva had good templates to use, but correctly formatting my photos without them being cropped proved challenging. One thing that didn’t work out as I had hoped was being able to geotag my photos to the exact location where the photo was taken. This was because it was too hard to track where I was when photographing, and apps were not working 100% all the time.
Another thing I would have done was focus on abstract photography just a little more so I would have enough photos to include them in the main photo book portfolio. Instead, I added an extra WordPress page titled Extra that contained photos that did not fit in with my portfolio but that I wanted to highlight. What I want to do in the future is take more street photography photos in my free time and print a physical photo book of some of my photos. Overall, I learned a lot about street photography, editing in Lightroom, and formatting a portfolio photo book in Canva.