Patrick Tensen
New Media
02/01/2024
A piece of work I’m proud is a photograph I took of me dropping coins on my apartment floor.
It was January 2020 and I was really big into stopping moving objects with a high shutter speed; I’d take photos of fire, birds mid-flight and planes taking off from Boeing field. I had a lot of time on my hands back to experiment with amateur photography, I knew nothing about photo editing software such as photoshop and even Lightroom my only editing software was Instagram filters, but I knew a bit about composition and basic camera settings to pull off a shot like this.
I grabbed some coins from my coin jar, and off to my 112 year old apartment’s oak floor I went. My camera was stacked on top two books, I set a 2 second timer on my Canon 80D and started dropping my hard earned lunch money on the floor. I remember taking not too many photos but just enough to justify it being an actual “photoshoot” I took enough until I was satisfied with the shot, I took about 50 shots and most of them are framed the same but the coins were scattered along in different areas of the floor. I’m an impatient person (learning to relax more) so I quickly took it off my camera and uploaded it to instagram.
I’m most proud of my work because it’s the photo I get the most compliments on and the closet photo to professionalism I had before learning about photography. I’m also proud because I know what I would do better now after almost two quarters of learning photography and photoshop. Would I do anything different? Hell yeah! I would have made the background more meaningful, maybe even a blank wall with something interesting that screams “me” instead of my bed. I also would have also made sure my floor wasn’t dirty I think you can see a hair on the bottom left I didn’t realize this until today.
It’s the small achievements in life.