I never realized that if I were actually committed to my project I would have to do a lot of learning on my own time in order to do it right.

These past few weeks I've had to learn so much about such a wide variety of topics just to prepare myself to go. I've learned how to code in html, so that I could make my blogs, I've learned how to take pictures with my DSLR, I've learned how to edit photos in Photoshop, I've learned how to make observations about people based on their environment from books about Anthropology, I've learned some of the best ways to conduct interviews from books about Journalism and Ethnology, I've learned some of the unique things about Nanjing in order to prepare myself to meet the people there, and that's just the start.

These are just a few of the photos I've taken recently and I've edited in Photoshop.

Enjoy.

First, some family pictures:

Titan, the smallest, newest and most spoiled one in the family was first.



I felt like there was too much red in this exposure, so after changing the white balance and correcting the color I got this:



This one comes from the Utah County Fair, I shot this one from the hip, and I thought it looked really good:



I balanced the colors, and still felt like the flag in the background didn't have enough color, so I fixed that. I also took out the yellow sign, it didn't really fit. I couldn't decide which cropping I liked more, so I ended up with two pictures:




Finally, another from the Utah County Fair, this one was a few of the carnival rides. I snapped it just after sunset, any that I got after this tended to be blurred because it was too dark and I didn't have a tripod.



It's a pretty good picture by itself, but I really wanted to bring out some of the blues to bring the sky out and contrast with the red and yellow lights. I also cropped off some parts of the picture so that it felt a little more organized. Here's what I got: