Ava's Introduction Blog

My Story After a lot of time struggling to make different ideas come together, I decided to do my photo story on animals. My original inspiration for this was because I have been wanting to volunteer at an animal shelter around the area- just to help them out and maybe work on their personal branding to help get some of the pets adopted. I reached out to one specific place and they never got back to me, so I thought of the next best thing: going to a pet store and interviewing an employee. I went to Friendly's Pets in Greensboro and interviewed one of the employees that seemed the most approachable. He also happened to be one of the only males who I have seen working there (I have been there many times, they let you play with the puppies and cats). I simply went up and asked if it was okay for me to ask him some questions for a project and take some pictures, and he was more than happy to help me out! Refreshing. I took some pictures while there, but I tried to focus more on the ...

Overview This week in class it was our task to play around with colors, hues, and creating swatches and name plates in InDesign. Our task was to go out and take a picture of something in nature that would inspire us to create a swatch of the main colors apparent in the picture. After we created that swatch using a three by three grid, we had to create a fade or tint to the colors as they went down the row. We took these same colors and made name plates with them, adding a title that we could potentially put on our LinkedIn profiles. The Inspiration Our first task was the capture the photograph we were going to extract our colors from, which I mentioned above. I am a huge fan of sunsets, but I did not want to be too mainstream and capture a sunset; luckily, my sorority and I went to a graffiti wall in downtown High Point on Saturday afternoon and I was able to capture some really cool colors in the art that was on the walls. I also wanted to use this image because I did not think m...

My idea for the magazine article is to interview Juliet's House, a place that fosters, socializes, and takes care of kittens they get from the shelter. They nurture many kittens and make them ready to be adopted! I like to think of them as the middle man between the shelter version of a cat, and the pet store ready version of a cat. I heard from Dr. Altman here on campus that they are always looking for volunteers, and animals are a huge passion of mine- especially cats. Unfortunately, they suck at replying back to their email in any kind of timely manner. With that being said, although I emailed them a week in advance to this forum being due, they never got back to me. To problem solve, I went to the Guilford County Animal Shelter, and they told me I was not allowed to take pictures of the animals. Two dead ends, so I resorted, ONLY for this blog post, to just take pictures of different things or aspects of the communications building to show that I know how to take these differe...

Tools and Techniques For my poster recreation, I decided to morph together the tv show friends poster with the scary movie 3 poster, my favorite show and my favorite movie. I started by uploading the friends background as my background and found the characters of scary movie that I wanted to use. I uploaded them to photoshop, each in their own tab, and used the lasso tool to outline the figure I wanted to use. Once I used the lasso tool and the character was cut out, I then made each figure a smart object so I can move it around independent of the background it was in, and finally put a mask on it in order to take only the figure out of the original photo and insert it into the poster I was creating. I did this with each character I used, including the cast of friends. Once I had everyone where I wanted them, I inserted the scream guy into the background and used the blending mode for the individual layer in order to fade out the scream guy into the background, changing the opacity. I...

The Meme My inspiration for this meme was to use Mr. Heagney's head because of something he did in class. For my class, he accidentally made the project due March 7th instead of February 7th, and because of that he moved the assignment back another week since he messed up the dates. As nice as that was, and as appreciative as I am, I knew I had to poke some fun at him and make a meme out of it. Out of all the teachers I have had, he seems the most receptive to having a meme made out of him, so I hope he does not get mad. My idea about having him be a weather man came to me because weathermen and women are always wrong, they are notorious for it. Since he was wrong, I decided to go that route with my meme. My Process I started off this project with saving a picture off of Mr. Heagney's Facebook. I found one that I could easily manipulate and crop so that it fit onto the head of the weatherman. Since the photo was a headshot, it was even easier to manipulate. I first cropped ...

How To Achieve This Filter In order to recreate the filter I have made in photoshop, you have to fiddle with the photo filter layer, the color balance, brightness/contrast, and the exposure. I decided to use four adjustment layers instead of three because I was trying to darken my photos and put a bluer tint on all of them. Using the photo filter helped me pick the blue color that I wanted to tint the whole picture, the color balance helped me adjust the individual colors that made up the pictures like the purple, blue and yellow, which I made more present or decreased the presence of. Then, I increased the brightness a little to bring a little more light into the picture solely to brighten it and not draw much attention to the brighter areas. After that, I contrasted the pictures a lot because I thought it made the blue tint look better and I wanted all the pictures to be darker since they were all light. In the end, I adjusted the exposure down because it complemented the c...