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Assignment 2: Bad Photos
| Assignment Day | January 20, 2011 (Thursday) |
| Due Date | January 27, 2011 (Thursday night) |
Copy of Prof. Marc Levoy's @ Stanford first assignment (with minor changes).
Motivation:
Cameras in automatic mode try to take care of the technical aspect of photography for you, and just let you frame the scene and shoot. They will attempt to make sure the scene is not too dark, not too bright, not blurry (in focus), and so on. These goals don't always match up with the photographer's intent. For this second assignment, you'll be playing with the settings on your camera to produce photos you can't easily produce in automatic mode. You'll be taking photos that your camera might consider "bad" in some technical way, but are nonetheless interesting to look at, and even artistic.
Instructions
It is assumed you know have your flickr account set up.
- Take some photos that meet the requirements listed
below, and upload them as an album titled "CSCI 4900/6900 -
Bad Photos", and add comments below each photo explaining how you took the
photo, what relevant camera settings you used and why, any image processing done to the photograph afterwards, and most importantly, which requirements each photo covers. See the example solution below as a guide to what we're looking for. While your comments aren't required to go into quite as much detail as the example solutions, please note that if you don't add comments to your photos, you won't receive any credit for the assignment.
Each photograph you upload should meet one or more of the requirements below, and you should make sure to cover every requirement with at least one photo. In other words, for each photo you upload, it should fulfill at least one requirement for the assignment, and among all of the photos you upload, every requirement should be fulfilled at least once. You should upload at least five photographs for the assignment (but no more than 10 please, or we'll never have time to look at them all!). Be sure to state in your comments (ideally right at the top) which requirements each photo meets. Note that these general rules apply to this assignment and all subsequent photo assignments in this course.
Now, for Assignment 2 specifically: remember, even though the photos you take are supposed to be technically "bad" in some sense, we want you to create things that are interesting to look at. The "badness" should be intentional for an artistic purpose.
- Requirement 1: At least one photo must be poorly exposed. That is, most of the image should be either very close to black (underexposed) or close to flat white to due oversaturation (overexposed).
- Requirement 2: The main subject of at least one photograph should be motion-blurred, either due to movement of the subject or movement of the camera.
- Requirement 3: In at least one photo, nothing at all should be in focus. It's hard to take a good looking photo where nothing is in focus - be creative!
- Requirement 4: You should use the wrong white balance setting for at least one photo, for some intentional effect.
- Requirement 5: At least one photo should be poorly composed. Scan through this web page here, and search on Google for "rules of composition". Read about them, and then intentionally break a few. If you're not sure what to do, you may want to consider an exactly centered subject that produces an oddly symmetric photo, a confusion between the subject and a background object, or a horizon that isn't level.
- Submit your 3 best photos (covering different requirements) to our flickr pool for critique (submit at most 5 - one for each requirement). Critique at least three other submisions of classmates, critique photos head of our submission if possible, if not possible, then wait a few hours until you can.
Example Solution
Here is the example solution from Stanford 2010 Class again, and note that they used Picasa Web, not flickr) to this assignment to both let you know what we expect, and hopefully also inspire you to take better photos than the (Stanford 2010) TAs can. You don't have to meet the assignment requirements in the same way as they did - surprise us!As in the earlier assignment your work for each assignment should be done by you specifically for the course.
If you have questions or comments about the photos we used in the example solution, feel free to add them as comments below the corresponding photograph on flickr, or email our class email list (better if you do it on flickr directly).
Grading
It's hard to judge artistic quality, so rather than grading the individual photos, we will assign grades based on whether you met the requirements of the assignment. For each requirement, you'll be given a check for meeting the requirement, check-minus for not quite meeting the requirement, or check-plus if you do something spectacular that makes the grader's jaw drop.
FAQ
Q: My Camera doesn't have manual focus. How can I force everything to be out of focus?
A: Even if your camera doesn't provide manual focus, you can usually force the focus to be anything you want. Just point at an object that's not in your scene but at the desired depth, press the shutter button halfway to autofocus on it, then with the button still half-pressed, swing around to aim at your scene and press the button fully. Does the exposure come out wrong when you do this? We'll talk in class about focus-lock and exposure-lock functions, which not all cameras have.
Q: At what resolution should I upload my photos?
A: Flickr resizes your photos for viewing, and gives you 300 MB of free storage per month (at most 200 photos shows for the free accounts). This should be enough that you can safely upload full resolution images for the course. If you're worried about running out of space, you could also resize your images in Photoshop, Flickr, or a similar program before upload to something smaller.
Q: Are we allowed to edit our photos in Photoshop before uploading? How much editing is acceptable? Do we have to say what we did?
A: In general, most requirements won't necessitate any image manipulation in Photoshop, and for this first assignment, none of them do. However, some requirements for future assignments will specifically involve image editing, and even for those that don't, you're always welcome to process your images in Photoshop or any other program. Just keep in mind that if you do edit your photos in Photoshop, you should definitely state what you did in the Flickr caption. For example, you might say: "I used Photoshop to increase the saturation and darken the sky". Finally, keep in mind that Photoshop should not be used as a substitute for proper use of your camera or for faking a requirement. For example, for this assignment your underexposed or overexposed photo must be that way from the camera -- you're not supposed to just take a normal photo and use Photoshop to make it way darker or brighter.