Hi there! For whatever reason you've
come across my blog. I hope that it can be of value to you!
This blog is part of an assignment
for the class New Media and Society at UW Madison. I'm supposed to adopt a
piece of media I've never used before and create a portfolio to document my
learning experience so that I may critically explore the object's history. I've
chosen the program Photoshop as my piece of media and this blog as my means to
document my experience.
I plan to have a variety of content
here. I’ll share my amateur creations in Photoshop along with commentary on my
learning experience. Warning - I've never used an image editing program before,
so expect some cringeworthy results at the start. With these posts, I aim to
document the difficulty of learning Photoshop and its personal impact. Other
posts will contain my reactions to various books and articles, personal
thoughts, and worthwhile resources I discover.
By the end of this project, I hope
to answer these questions.
- What is the overall history and significance of photo manipulation?
- How have tools like Photoshop altered the media landscape?
- What are the ethical concerns of image editing?
- How does Photoshop empower individuals and promote discussion of social issues?
I encourage you to learn with me if
you want to. The first book I’ll be reading is Photomontage by Dawn Ades, which provides a history of photo
editing before Photoshop existed.
I haven’t started using Photoshop
yet, but expect a post soon on my first time using it.
Thanks for reading!
Paul
