Soft Edges - First Attempt
I chose the soft edges technique because I thought it'd be an easy one to start with, and I really liked the effect. For the first attempt, we started by using a sandwich bag, but the effect was always too much or too little, and wasn't as noticeable on a neutral, solid background. It was fun to make ghost-y effects with a LOT of light, though. Next we tried streamers, and in this first attempt you can see we got an image focused correctly (bottom left), but I didn't like how the edges looked. When I changed what was on my lens, we had focusing problems.
Second Attempt
To fix the focusing problems, I learned about the diopter adjustment. It helped get the subject more in focus. During this project, I also learned that the camera can tell you when it believes the exposure is correct, which I wasn't aware of before. Besides camera settings, I also just learned how to do the technique and experimented with different ways to do it.
Burning
Burning photographs has always been a technique I enjoyed, and I wanted to try it with a polaroid. We took a lot of black and white pictures and used a little lighter to burn it. A couple of the pictures ended up a little pixely, but I really like the one on the bottom left. If I had to redo the project, I'd rather do it on a traditionally printed picture, because the polaroids are difficult to burn from the back to get a nice, burned hole in the middle. We also learned that these polaroids are difficult to water damage, because while doing this project we ripped off the protective layering and it was still unaffected by water. If I could re-do it, I would also put more thought into the lighting in the pictures with less flame.
Bokeh
I've always really enjoyed how bokeh looks, and wanted to try it. However, I attempted it before knowing about dioptic adjustment, which I think would have helped me achieve a better effect. When I have time, I definitely want to re-do this project and try to improve, especially since Taylor is also out of focus in the background. I didn't learn much from this attempt, but I do know how I could go about it from what I learned in the soft edges project.