Portrait Poster Collage Assignment
Assignment: Shoot a partner during a portrait session, design and produce a Poster of the pictures you took of your partner.
Goals: Produce a nice poster for your partner to keep.
Tools: Picasa, Adobe Photoshop, MS Word
Shooting your Portrait:
See Portrait Presentation Notes
Sample of some portraits on a local website: http://www.drjoefinley.com/staff.asp
Instructions for creating the poster:
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Make a "poster collage" of 3-6 pictures, i.e. one 5x7, two wallets, of 3+ different pictures that you took of you partner (ONE PERSON) and a group shot with that one person.
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Use MS Word to insert your pictures. Set to square layout and resize each photo. You can use Photoshop to do some basic editing of the photos before you insert them into word. Just be sure to Save As a copy when working with an original image. IOW, don't modify your original.
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Add the person's name on the poster using Word Art.
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Place a 1 - 3 pixel border around each picture (really...your choice of size, style and color...whatever looks nice).
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Insert a text box with a photo credit: "Photo and Collage by Your Name"
Note #1: It has been debated as to whether MS Word has to be used vs. Picasa for the Collage. Technically, you can do it in either program. There are advantages to using both programs. Word has several advantages over Picasa...and that is the use of Word Art, Clip Art, variable border width and color, etc. And, this is enough of a reason to choose MS Word, I think. However, the choice is yours.
Note #2: Many people have asked previously to make their portrait poster of themselves rather than their partner. This was "okayed" at first, but afterwards I realized why you need to do a portrait poster of your partner. It should be a poster design of your photo work such that both the poster and the photos are your work, not a mix of your computer work and somebody else's photography. So, YES, you may make a poster of your self AFTER you have finished the class assignment. So, please complete a poster of the person you shot FIRST!
Class Activity for Picasa after your Portraits have been loaded: 1. Make a Portrait Album for the photos that are BY you...call it "Portraits by Me" , 2. Make an album for pictures OF you...call it "My Portrait". 3. Star your favorites and make additional albums for your various shooting. For example: Make a gallery for your Topic 3 & 4 (4th 6 weeks) shooting...call it "2011-02-01 4th 6 PD".
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Steps for working/tweaking your portraits using Picasa.
1. Please do not copy the portrait images to your own P drives. Follow these steps to work with your images.
2. Generally, do not use Picasa to edit your pictures. Picasa is mainly for viewing your pictures. You can download and use Picasa at home...in class, use Photoshop.
3. Open the public drive and map it as K so that it loads ever time when you log in. This will also allow the Public Drive to be visible to Picasa so that we can add the Class Pictures to your Picasa.
4. In Picasa, use Folder Manager and navigate to the Public Drive (K) and add the Class Pictures folder.
5. "Locate on disk" (Ctrl + Enter) to transfer the image to your drive, etc.
6. Or, "Open With" Adobe Photoshop CS4 to edit the files. ALWAYS do a SAVE AS to preserve the file. Put an 'e' the end of the edited file name (but before the .jpg) and save it to your 'p' drive.
Samples:
Note: Most of the following are older examples. Projects today need to include a a Group Photo AND an Environmental Portrait of that person shooting. Although the exact layout will vary, you should either have one image of the person you shot much larger...OR it should be really obvious who the poster is about. The group photo should be a small picture relative to the collage of the person you for whom you did a portrait session.
Other things you can do after you finish your PPP (Partner Portrait Poster):
Eventually you are going to a Magazine Cover:
