Welcome!

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