Summer work 2020

PHOTOGRAPHY

For photography I used the software app Picsart

For my first image I took a photo of a painting of a tree I had made. I then edited it to create a yellow hue which also darkened the background and gave it a nice contrast between yellow and purple, however I did then decrease the saturation a slight bit as changing the hue has made the painting look quite warm toned and so I wanted to try and cancel that out. To add depth I increased the shadows of the photo and increased the highlights

This is the original :

This is a photo I took whilst in a sweet shop on holiday in wales, as soon as I walked into the shop I knew I wanted to try and edit a photo of the setting, this is probably my favourite as I love all the colours, again I increased the hue to have a more pink tone with I think created quite a nice aesthetic and allowed the colours to blend a bit better.

To create the softer look of the image I decreased the shadows and also highlights, I’ve seen edits of photos like this before and wanted to mimic the effect.

This is the original:

Now as much as I like “classically” editing photos I wanted to change it up a bit, so for this I took an original image of a mirror in my living room and also of an emu that I saw on holiday and I thought it would be funny to see if I could somehow put the two photos together and make it seem like there was an Emu in my house!

For this, still using picsart, I used the cutting tool to cut out the picture of the Emu and turn it into a “sticker” I then pasted this onto the photo of the living room, duplicated it so it would seem like the correct angles you would get if it were in real life -hence adding the top of the head at the bottom of the photo- individually changed the saturation of both Emu stickers so the lighting would look the same as if it were in real life and erased the part of the emu covering the sunflowers so it would look like it was standing opposite side of the room and that the reflection would basically be physically possible

This is the original of the living room:

And here is the sticker once being cut out of the original photo:

For this photo, again I thought it would be funny to edit something strange into an “ordinary” photo.

This is a nice family photo of myself, mum, sister and brother on holiday...however if you zoom in you’ll see I edited a small version of Hugh Grant that I found online into the background I did this as I wanted to play around with the concept of people showing up in the back of photos unintentionally sometimes even photos of a celebrity before fame in the background of an others normal photo.

For this I used the same cutting tool as I did previously and practically the same method as I did with my last image however as the photo i used of Hugh Grant was not of good quality I had to make sure it was small enough to fit both the proportions of the people in the photo in relation to distance and also look real enough without any obvious signs low camera quality

Here’s the original photo:

And for my final photo I chose to edit a picture of a section of a trees branches that I thought looked cool, I’d had this photo in my camera phone for a small while knowing I’d wanted to do something with it but I couldn’t think of what to change.

Eventually I decided to change the hue to give off more warmer tones, creating the illusion that it was taken at the time of sunset, however I also lowered the shadows and highlights to almost nothing to give it that soft look once again I quite like the way this image turned out as you can see a lot more detail of the branched due to the lack of shadows

Here’s the original photo:

Writing

For this segment I decided to write a review of one of my favourite TV shows...Game of Thrones

REVIEW OF GAME OF THRONES

It’s been over a year since the finale of Game of Thrones, which left Bran Stark, the three-eyed raven and King of the six kingdoms to some mixed reactions from fans, many of whom were unhappy with the ending...myself being one of them.

However arguably no finale is ever perfect or satisfies everyone, this finale however seemed to satisfy only a small number of people. So much so that some disappointed fans created a petition for season 8 to be rewritten which reached over 1 million signatures.

Perhaps the ending wasn’t as good as it could've been, but it does make us appreciate the intricacy of the show and the earlier seasons, my personal favorite being season four with the death of tyrannical leader Jeoffrey at the infamous “purple wedding” which we find out was orchestrated by Lord Petyr Baelish and Lady Olenna Tyrell.

We all knew Jeoffrey was going to be killed off at some point, but we weren't expecting the second episode of season 4...at his own wedding! That alone shocked us and made us think “if they’ve just killed off the king in the beginning of season four what else have they got coming" and sure enough they didn’t disappoint, with the complications of Tyrion vs his father Tywin, who accuses Tyrion of murdering Joffrey and demanding trial by combat leading to an adrenaline pumped battle of the mountain vs the viper, left us all on the edge of our seats, not even to get started on the graphics of that fight because if Game of Thrones is known for anything I can assure you it’s the stunning visual effects that are definitely not for the faint hearted, although as the highest budgeted show at $15 million per episode you can expect that level of quality that goes into every episode

And it’s a mix of all these aspects that led the show to such great success and fueled the careers of some absolutely brilliant actors and actresses who have gone onto star in further critically acclaimed work, one of my personal favorites is Sophie Turner who can also be recognized for playing a young Jean Grey in the X-men movies including the most recent, Dark Phoenix, which to be fair didn’t do amazing at the box office but I think it is underrated, I quite liked it however that may be a bit biased as I am a fan of her as a person so arguably I would've liked her portrayal in it no matter what!

Thank you for reading,

Amber Thomas