Project Documentation

1-3 Photographs are due on the class blog no later than one week after each project critique

Taking Your Photographs:

You should photograph each project with adequate lighting, and in clean spaces with no interference or clutter in the background. Smaller projects can be photographed in the ceramics photo room (HH 147), which has a grey seamless, tripod, and lights. Larger work should be photographed in the sculpture gallery or cell space (or on location if it was site specific). Clamp lights can be borrowed from our classroom, and track lighting in the gallery spaces can be rearranged. Make sure your camera settings match the lighting conditions in order to achieve white balance (incandescent vs. fluorescent lighting, daylight, etc). Try to avoid the combination of light sources (if photographing in a room with windows, it’s better to take your pictures at night). Use a tripod for longer exposures to avoid blurriness. Zoom in on your project to avoid including unwanted distractions in the background.

Take more images than you think you may need! Frame and shoot the sculpture from many different angles, try different lighting configurations, etc. It’s better to have many images to choose from than to have to re-photograph!

Editing Your Images:

After uploading the images to your computer, choose the ones you think have the best quality. Use Photoshop or a similar program to correct each image as needed. Crop the edges at a reasonable distance from your project. Adjust the color balance, brightness and contrast so that whites are white and not grey/yellow/blue. Ask for help if you do not know how to do this.

When editing images, it is best to keep your original file and “save as” your edited files in a separate folder. That way, if mistakes are made, you can always go back to the original image.

Changing the Pixel Ratio and Resolution:

The size of your image needs to be altered in order to post it on the blog. Once you have completely finished editing and have saved your edited version of the image, change the pixel ratio as follows (in Photoshop, this can be done under “image size”):

Your image should be no larger than 1000 pixels in either direction. For portrait images, set the pixel height to 1000, and for landscape images set the width to 1000. The resolution should be set to 72 pixels/inch (this will make the file size much smaller, which is good for uploading to the web).

Once again, I suggest saving these files separately (perhaps to a folder called “images for blog”), so you can still have a higher quality version of the edited image for future use in your portfolio. All files must be saved as jpg’s in order to be posted on the blog.

Uploading Your Images to the Blog:

Go to introtosculpture.blogspot.com, and click “sign in” on the upper right hand corner of the page. Log in as introtosculpture@gmail.com, with the password given to you on your assignment sheet. Once you’ve logged in, click “new post”.

The title of your post should be the title of your sculpture. In the content of the post, first type in the dimensions of your sculpture (height in inches x width in inches x depth in inches, for example, 4” x 6” x 128”). Underneath the dimensions, type in the materials you used to make the sculpture separated by commas (for example, “wood, steel, string, toothpicks”).

Next, upload your images. To do this, click the button in the menu that looks like a picture. Browse your files and choose which ones you are going to upload. Upload them one at a time, and make sure they are oriented to the left on the post, and change their size to “large”.

Lastly, make sure to type your name (first and last) into the “label” section of the post. Then click “post” and view the blog and make sure everything looks as it should (correct spacing, spelling, etc). If you see mistakes, edit the post by clicking on the button in the lower right corner that looks like a pencil.

Remember, these images will be viewed at Midterm and Final critiques, and will influence the grade you receive for this class. Take the documentation of your work seriously! It’s important that you learn how to do it well.