On Thursday I went to school to work on my Marine Biology year long project with my partner. We are presenting our project to the class next Tuesday during 4^th period, which will be right before I present my project to the senior project defense committee. I have been working on a power point to present to the committee as well as to present during the assembly. I will have the physical book by Monday, but the prints on metal, wood and acrylic are not supposed to arrive until Tuesday. On Friday, I continued to work on the power point. I also began to track my book on the Fedex package tracker. I plan on finishing the power point today so that I have enough time to practice presenting.

For the past few days, I have been working hard to finish my book. After I finished laying out all the pictures and adding the content, I made sure that all the formatting was correct as well as all the spelling. I then made technical decisions regarding the book including cover style, paper texture and quality, and background colors. On Monday I finally placed the order for my book. It will hopefully arrive by next Monday, which would be just in time for the presentation. On Tuesday I ordered acrylic, metal, and wood prints of a few of my photos. I will hopefully get these by next Tuesday. Today (Wednesday) I went to school for the talent show, and I also began working on the presentation for the senior project assembly. The next few days will be spent making a slideshow and preparing for the presentation day.

For the past few days (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) I have been putting the finishing touches on my photo book. I finished laying out the images Saturday morning. I spent time Saturday afternoon as well as all day Sunday researching, writing copy for the book and writing about each image. I must have the content done by tomorrow so that I can send it to the printer in order to have the physical book back for the senior project due date. I didn’t realize how much time and effort goes into creating a book like this, but I am very pleased with how it has turned out so far! I still have a lot of decisions to make regarding the printing details of the book. I hope I make the right decisions and that the final product looks good.

Today I continued to layout the images in my book. I also called the company I am using to print my book to see how long it would take to print because on the website it says two different things. I found out that it takes 7 days for the book to arrive, printing and shipping included. I plan to finish my book and get it ordered by Monday and to decide which images I am going to print on acrylic and metal and get those ordered as well. 

Today I spent time working on my photography book. I have never really made a proper photo book using the app in Lightroom, so I watched some YouTube videos on how it actually works. I am almost a third of the way through placing images into the book but the main issue I am having is with formatting the images on each page. I plan to finish laying out all the images tomorrow and then begin writing the content for the book as well. 

Today I spent hours going through the 2000+ photos from my trip, editing and organizing them. I am separating them into different categories for the book and researching the places I need more information on. Tomorrow I hope to start laying the photos out in the book and writing out the captions as well.

Well I am back from New York, but I came back with a bad cold. I didn’t feel great today, and I put in about 4 hours organizing and editing photos for my book. I started to plan the layout, and I learned that it takes 4-5 days to print and bind the book so I am setting a deadline of this Friday to have the book into the printer in order to make sure that I have it back for the Senior Project due date. All in all, New York was a great experience, and I feel like it was a huge success. Exploring New York through photography made me see things in a different way. I took over 2000 pictures and learned so much about New York and about photography. There is so much that goes into post processing images so I have a lot to do with editing, organizing, and putting together my book this week. I was really luck to have the opportunity to see the musical, Hamilton, while I was in New York last week. It was so amazing and really cool because I happened to explore Trinity Church in lower Manhattan where Alexander Hamilton and his wife Eliza are buried on the same day I saw the musical making it that much more meaningful. The musical really brings history to life!

Today, Friday, will be our last day in New York City! We had two final workshops today. This morning we met our instructor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We photographed the Temple of Dendor and other Greek and Roman Statues. The Temple of Dendor is an actual temple from Egypt that was deconstructed and then reconstructed inside the museum. The museum actually has a projector that they use to project the actual colors the temple would have been. Our main focus shooting inside the museum was how to deal with different indoor lighting situations. It was my first time to visit the Met, and I really enjoyed it. I then explored Central Park on my own for a little while capturing some of the people that make Central Park so interesting. In the afternoon, we met at Pershing Square near Grand Central Terminal for our final workshop.  We spent the evening photographing the Chrysler Building, the streets of New York and Times Square. I learned a lot about how the background coloring of a photograph matters.