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Hey there, my name's Gia Biagioni and I am in my second year here at Central Michigan University . I am a Photojournalism student also pursuing a minor in Entrepreneurship. I have always loved taking photos whether its of the sky, my family, my pets, or even just the land around me. My favorite thing to do in my free time is to read, I got a few new series over winter break that I look forward to getting around to. I have two cats, Wendy and Loki, and I always miss them so m

Knowing how to focus your shots and pick what you want to shoot is very important when it comes to thinking about your video and what you want from it. He mentioned thinking ahead about the things you want to shoot and exactly what shots you want to get. Stockman brings up the example of knowing and videoing moments in a wedding, how he had to think about what would be happening next and what people would want in the video. By doing so, he said that he was able to get a fairl

The biggest part of this portion of the book that stood out to me was that you need to be able to adjust to your location and absolutely KNOW your plans for a video. Stockman talks about a lot of different examples of filming ideas so there’s not a ton of helpful information in this part to me because of it mostly being examples. However, adjusting and knowing everything beforehand stood out a lot. While I did find some of his examples to make this an easier read and think th

At the beginning of this reading, we learn about kind of the rules of video production. A couple of these rules that stick out to me were moving around and keeping things short. With moving around, I found it helpful to think about how my mind works. I thought about how my eyes wander all over the place and gather a lot of information about where I am, and I think it’s important to incorporate that into videos. I feel like a lot of people are the same way in having their eyes

While doing the sportraits I would say that I feel like I leaned on pinterest a lot for pose inspo. I am however very happy with how the photos turned out, especially for the field hockey ones. I do think that I probably could have done better with the equestrian team photos, but having the black background and so many different black things was definitely very difficult to deal with while making everything still pop. We originally wanted to try and get photos of sports that

Doing the in class “sportraits” was a very fun experience. I decided to play around with the gels a little bit and really like how it turned out. I don’t think that I’ve been this happy with my results yet this year. In doing this in class experience, I feel like I can tell just how much I’ve grown in my abilities. Everything with this assignment just came a lot easier and quicker to me. Everything from the lighting settings to the posing. I definitely think there’s still a l

Doing the fashion assignment was definitely an adventure. We had our two models scheduled and we were going to do them on the same day… then one of them got sick. Unfortunate. But we were able to reschedule and get them done anyways. This project was a big learning experience in the use of lighting equipment outdoors in a natural setting. I will say it was a little difficult for me at first to even be able to tell that the lighting was providing the main source of light. I th

Doing this Portable Studio portrait, I wanted to have a more interesting subject instead of just a basic person standing in the frame. I thought that taking photos of the CMU Police Department could be interesting for this project. I actually enjoyed my time doing this project with the police department, however I did get a bit concerned about the fact that they said the photos couldn’t be anywhere public. Setting up the backdrop and lighting was a bit difficult given the amo

For the in-class fashion assignment, I feel like I definitely struggled because some of the outfits that our model brought weren’t exactly what I was feeling. I was a little dissatisfied with these outfits, but we made it work. I think that what we were able to come up with was a doable outfit, however, thinking back I feel like I could have come up with something better in terms of outfits with the clothes he brought. I struggled a bit with the lighting as well, at first it

Doing this assignment in class was definitely a learning experience. I photographed Jasmine in her gymnastics leotard. At first, I had the strobe lights at way too high of a power and had to adjust them a few times to get it just right. For the medium and tight shots, I used the gold reflector to add some color into her face. Trying to come up with what poses I wanted her to do was probably one of the hardest parts of doing this assignment in class, but the group that I worke

In these last few pages of “The Hot Shoe Diaries” by Joe McNally, he shared only a couple shoots that he did. One of these shoots included a muscular man posing with this really nice light coming from behind him. The other shoot was with firetrucks from a station that McNally had said he saw or worked with during 9/11. He also shared the different difficulties faced during these photoshoots as well as how he dealt with and fixed them. I think that the way McNally perseveres a

When I was doing this assignment at home, I first struggled with simply getting the lighting equipment because I had to rent it from the Roberts camera store in Indianapolis. When I did this, I realized that I had forgotten to rent a pole to hold the light on, which was a little inconvenient because I used Eric Holladays approach that involved more photoshop. So, I ended up having to make someone hold the light way up high for me but it worked.             I actually am very

Reading this section of “The Hot Shoe Diaries” enlightened me to different things that I didn’t think were possible while taking your exposures or that I just simply didn’t even think of. Some of these things, I thought you could only achieve in the post-production while editing. These techniques included creating double exposures in camera rather than in post-production, lighting MRIs so that they’re visible, lighting with different colors at different angles, and even just

In this section of “The Hot Shoe Diaries” McNally talks more about lighting different subjects in a bunch of different places. Subjects such as a puppet maker, ballerinas, even just random photoshoots to make it look like it’s the Joker in Gotham City. Out of all of his shoots in these pages, I think that the Joker one was among my favorites, I enjoyed the lighting and effort put into it and I also love the creativity when it came to solutions whenever he would have problems

Doing the location lighting with cars was a really cool experience for me. I think that being able to see the different ways and techniques that different people used was interesting. While I did like one of the techniques far more than the others, it was still a great experience to learn about all of them. I think that the way Eric Holladay lit the cars was by far my favorite and I really enjoyed figuring out how to combine all the photos in photoshop in order to get to the

My experience doing the bounce flash assignment definitely had its ups and downs. At first, the flash we had would not connect to my camera, like it would go on my hot shoe but it would register as “incompatible” so I ended up having to use my partners camera because the flash worked on hers. Once we got that all figured out, it was definitely very interesting to see how the bounce flash affected the photos we took. Between shooting with no flash and then different levels of

After reading more into “The Hot Shoe Diaries” I think that it’s really kind of crazy how many places and ways you can use different flashes. The way that McNally used flash in a canoe and in the water on multiple occasions is astonishing to me. I can’t imagine having my camera and equipment that close to water, like risking ruining all your equipment for that? I get it, it is a very cool photo in all scenarios but risking thousands of dollars of equipment for it is kind of i

After reading the first bit of “The Hot Shoe Diaries” I have definitely learned more about flash (not that I knew much in the first place). I do believe that this book will be a good reference while I learn to use flash more. I have never really done work with flash besides a couple of projects in high school photography classes where we were just learning how to use flash and not necessarily going in depth with it. In those projects, we used umbrellas and diffusers, so I lea