Course Evaluation…
I really liked this class because I liked the freedom that we had. I enjoyed being able to set my own time frame of getting work done and that I picked my own stuff to do. I also liked that I branched out and tried new Photoshop techniques that I wouldn’t have done before. No, I’m definitely not perfect at the program, but I feel that I have become a lot better at imagining what I want the outcome to look like and getting it done. In the beginning I had problems because I wouldn’t really know what I was doing while I started and had no clear end point. I then learned that it’s okay to fool around with the program but it’s essential that I know what I want the end result to look like.
The only thing that I can see that would work better with the program is that I preferred that my last name never be used on the internet which worked out for me (since Rocket acts as a last name I guess) but other students had their last names posted and I’m not sure if this was ever discussed. Next time maybe every student should fill out a form at the beginning of the class including things like Twitter, site, etc and whether or not they want their last name to ever be used in class texts.
About halfway through my digital story, which was doing Photoshop prompts, I started to wonder if what I was doing was a “digital story.” So, I went back through my blog to think about this idea. I decided that this was indeed a digital story, here’s why…
When I started playing around with creating images on the computer I was in middle school and I was experimenting a lot with Microsoft Paint. Here’s something that I did from those days:
Click it to enlarge it. I have about 10 pictures like this one. I spent so, so many hours in front of our old HP desktop tinkering with these pictures. I only used Microsoft Paint on these, no other program. I did a lot of counting pixels and stuff like that and all of my images are perfectly symmetrical. Anyway.
Then when I got to high school I got to play with Photoshop when I joined Newspaper. I was clueless for a while but I picked it up pretty fast and was the to go guy for all things design related and eventually became the Design Editor. I remember the day that I found out how to make “iPod People” and we used that technique a lot in the issues to follow. I think my favorite work I did for that class was when we did a piece on “ghostriding” and I got my brother to stand on our car and I filled him and the car with black. When that got in the paper it looked awesome with the text wrap. Anyway.
Basically my Photoshop prompts do tell a story. You can see that I learned a few things comparing the first prompts to the last ones. But, it’s also part of a larger story of how I got interested in all of this in the first place. I deleted most of the old pictures I made when I was trying out filters, effects, etc in high school. I slowly graduated from learning filters to learning tools, and I think that’s an important piece of this story. Anyone can hit a few buttons in the Filter Gallery, but it takes more skill to learn how to use the tools.
I just had that realization and I think it sums up the class pretty well for me. Building on what I learned in this class I wrote a paper for my American Studies 201 class about memes, YouTube, and Web 2.0. One of the major themes of that paper is that Web 2.0 sees the internet itself as a tool for the user. Just like Photoshop won’t make you an amazing artist without any effort, you cannot use technology and expect it to make you better than everyone else. I could use the most expensive Nikon camera and Caitlyn could use a disposable camera and she would still take better pictures than me. Caitlyn knows how to use the camera as a tool to get what she wants, whereas I am sort of clueless about all of it.
Anyway, that’s the story of my digital story. Hope it makes sense.
