For my tenth week of internship with the Stetson Men’s basketball team, I was asked to do some of the same things I have done last week. Early this week, I was informed by my boss Joey that there was yet again going to be a recruit on campus that I was needed to shoot some photos of. I checked a camera out of the library and prepared to take some photos of the recruit and our coaches. This time when I arrived at the fountain for the photos, I was met by the coaching staff and the recruit, as well as the recruit’s family which was new to me. It was nice to see the future hatter’s family getting excited about our campus and their son’s next step in life. I had at this point done this exact shoot before, so going into the process I already knew the basic poses I thought would look best when edited. We stuck to the typical spinning the ball, crossing the arms, and dribbling between the legs and we were done very quickly. Soon after, we did some shots with the recruit and his parents, and then some with the coaches as well. Before I returned my camera, I went to Flagler hall and edited the photos in Lightroom and sent them over to my boss Joey so that he could distribute them to the player and the coaches as needed. I felt happy with the result of the shoot because I know that I was better prepared than last time and got the shoot done much quicker so that the recruit and coaches could be win their way. The only thing that I wish I would’ve done differently was adjust the lightness and shutter speed of the images so that some of the pictures in motion would’ve had better clarity and brightness so I would have to do a little less correction in Lightroom but ultimately I think it turned out alright.

During my Ninth Week of interning with the Stetson Men’s basketball team, I had a very surprising change of pace. This week, there was going to be potential future hatters on campus and the team needed my help. At the beginning of the week, I received a text from my boss Joey informing me that recruits were going to be on campus Wednesday, and they were hoping that I would be able to meet them at the fountain with my camera to take some photos for them and the players. When I met up with the coaches, I ended up taking some photos of just the players as well as with the coaches, and soon after went back home to edit some of the better ones in Lightroom. After polishing a decent amount of photos, I sent them back and forth with my boss Joey determining which would be best to use. Before the week was over, the kids that were touring stetson ended up committing here, and I was able to contribute to making commitment graphics for the players that I took pictures of. It was nice to know that in a small way my interaction and work might have influenced the players to want to choose stetson, and I thought it was a great experience for me professionally. When I have to do this again in the next coming week, I will have my camera settings already prepared and my composition planned for the shoot. The only part of the interaction that I think we could have more efficiently was having the poses for the players already planned, and my camera already adjusted, so hopefully in this upcoming visit I will remedy that.

For my eighth week of internship with the Stetson University Men’s basketball team, I had a variety of different things that I helped work on. For this week, my primary responsibility was to help build templates yet again for game day graphics as well as for other things that the team may post, such as commitment graphics, holiday graphics, or themed game days where Stetson as well as Stetson students will both be encouraged to follow a guideline of how to dress or cheer at a specific game. For Stetson Specifically, it is most common for us to have a white or green out game, so I continued to work on graphics and templates that have mostly followed this color scheme. Due to my work in previous weeks, it was significantly easier for me to create some of the posts that I needed to because of the fact that I have already cut out a high resolution image of every single player on the team, and now my issue I shaving to go back and remove players that are graduating or transferring rather than having to go back and cut out and add players that I hadn’t made cutouts for like in the past. One thing that I had noticed I changed after making the historic season graphic was that I had started to preserve the original cut outs of players. Typically, I wold rasterize a layer while cutting it out and do camera raw filter to the original layer and end up with an image I can no longer change. Now, I have learned to keep the cut out as a smart object and do a majority of my change on a duplicate layer, as well as the camera raw filter so that if I need to reference the original image, I can grab the original and change the color, resolution, or texture however I see fit in the next project. This change of mindset has greatly helped me improve my workflow, and I can tell that my skills are improving over time due to me consistently working with the team.

This week of internship for the Men’s Basketball team of Stetson University was different than most for me. This week my boss Joey had texted me and informed me the coaches wanted to make a historical season graphic highlighting the accomplishments of this year’s team, as well as providing me with a reference graphic that they wanted me to base my post off of. Despite having an image to base my work off of, this task still proved to be quite demanding as I had to meticulously place and crop each player flawlessly as well as head coach Donnie Jones. After about a dozen hours of cropping, using camera raw filter, effects , and rearranging the composition of the scene, in which I still had to delegate with my boss Joey which elements he thinks we should remove or add at this point. After some back and forth, Joey and I landed on a result that we were both happy with, and the graphic now just needs the approval of the coaching staff, as well as the green light from coach Donnie as well as Joey to finally be uploaded to the team’s social media accounts. This week was a combination of my first week back to school as well as a part of my spring break free time, and I think that working on a graphic this far in advance had definitely had a positive effect on the result I ended up producing. I will continue to try to ask my boss what graphic he will need in the coming weeks to ensure I don’t get blindsided by a large amount of tasks.

This week of my internship with Stetson’s Men’s Basketball Team was a pretty busy one for me. This week there was not only multiple games going on, but also this week was Senior Appreciation Night on our game Friday. There are only 3 seniors on the team being honored for senior night, but for their departing the Stetson Men’s Basketball Team wanted to do something really special for them. I’m sure there was a lot done in person for the players, but my contribution was helping with some of the social series that the team released honoring their senior players prior to the game this Friday. My boss Joey asked me to create a series of graphic for each of the players earlier and the week and I got to work immediately. I had much more time to work on this series of posts, so I tried to experiment a little more with effects and compositions of the posts a little bit more than usual. Me and Joey when back and forth a few times about how I could best alter the graphics to have the desired feel and effect, and after about four attempts of each graphic, we came to a consensus that the final products were ready to be posted on the teams feed. This experimentation with different tools and techniques has really inspired me to try more new things in the future, and I have already noticed myself using BeHance more often to find inspiration for new types of graphics to diversify my professional portfolio as I am currently looking for my first job in my major.

For my fifth week of internship with the Stetson Men’s Basketball team, I primarily focused on creating more imagery that can be used in graphics at a later date. Because of the nature of the posts on the team’s Instagram, it is a good bet to assume that high resolution cutouts of players will be essential in almost every post, so I am continually trying to aid myself by creating a large collection of player cut-outs that I can use at a moments notice. The interaction between me and my boss / supervisor is most often a request to create a post for an event or game with a day or two’s notice, so having high quality images at my disposal will be a huge help for me and the team’ social media presence.

To help myself with my workflow and minimize the time I use inefficiently, I have made good use of https://gohatters.photoshelter.com/search?terms=crowd& to help me have a plethora of really stunning images without having to go to each game and shoot in poor lighting conditions. The Go Hatters photo store is a tremendous tool for me and has been the reason I have been able to make a majority of the graphics I have created with the composition I desired. The in-game shots that I have utilized are a great tool for me, but maybe in the near future I could get back in the gym and record some content for social media from one of the team’s practices like I had done a lot last semester.

This week of internship for me was back to more of what I am accustomed to. Since the beginning of this year, there is a very notable difference in my workflow and my abilities as I have had more practice in photoshop. There is a plethora of new methods I use that I had never heard of in past years and some that hadn’t even existed yet. This week for my internship I was tasked with making a high quality post for Stetson Men’s Basketball’s Equality and Inclusion Game on Saturday. As of Friday, I have now completed the graphic and submitted it to my supervisor after going back and forth on what components would make the post most successful. After some deliberation, we came to the conclusion that including at least 3 players would make the most sense for the post, and I made sure to include the image of the organization sponsoring the event in the top corner of the post.

Most likely the post will go live either tonight later or during the day of the game. I am very proud of this particular graphic, so I am going to try to share it myself as well as maybe get some of my close friends to maybe comment on it or share it as well. The precision and quality of the graphics I have been working on lately have drastically improved, and I’m very proud of my progress so in the next few week so am going to try to increase the volume of posts I create to help Stetson Men’s Basketball’s social media presence.

For the third week of my internship with the Stetson Men’s Basketball team, I had to scale back my workflow for the first time since I started working with them. This week during my internship, I tried to work on getting outside of my comfort zone and forcing myself to work through different platforms. In my opinion, I believe that most graphic designers should be able to navigate and use Canva in a professional setting because it’s rising popularity is undeniable. As time goes on, Canva is becoming more and more powerful and tempting to use than ever before. Aside from it’s increasing capability, I find that most of the people I work for or have interviewed with find it very user friendly and prefer it because of it’s free use as well as it’s very easy to use UI.

While working this week, my biggest concern was getting more comfortable with using Canva as a medium, and I think that I was successful in that endeavor. As I began to create a variety of different types of graphics, I found that I began a lot more efficient in adjusting the scale of different elements, as well as becoming a lot faster at modifying the colors of different components, and understanding how each of the filters affected different color schemes or graphics. Moving forward, I will feel a lot more confident talking about my experience using tools like Canva, and will be able to relate to some of my older coworkers a lot easier.

For my second week of my internship with the Stetson Men’s Basketball Team of this semester, I continued the same path I had started in my previous week. This week, I continued to work on graphic templates, and am trying to put myself in a position where I can have a basic outline of a social media graphic prepared for whatever the team accomplishes next. I was able to fully complete a few graphic templates aside from the word-choice within them. When the time comes next to promote an upcoming game or event related to the team, I will now be able to very quickly and efficiently change the text on the templates that I had made to be able to provide the team with a graphic at a moment’s notice. In this upcoming week of my internship, I plan to yet again create more templates to have in my collection as well as my portfolio, but I will also soon need to transition my focus from photoshop documents to other types of media as well, so I am now deciding whether I will choose to switch to more of a video format in the upcoming weeks, or if I will continue to create similar media, just supplemented by the use of apps like illustrator or Canva.

One of the graphics that I had created was posted to the Stetson Men’s Basketball Instagram story and was used to promote the game that they had played on Thursday. Another graphic I made was not yet posted but can very easily be edited to reflect whatever their current record is, so my vault of templates will hopefully continue to grow as fast as it has been in the past couple of weeks.

This semester, I am continuing my internship with Stetson’s Men’s Basketball program. Last semester, I had spent some time gathering photo and video media and creating some promotional graphics for the team. This semester, I have started with the same trajectory, already dedicating hours throughout my week helping make sure the basketball team’s social media presence is consistent and high quality. As of the time I am writing this, I am expecting two of the projects I worked on throughout this past week to be posted by the Stetson Men’s Basketball team’s Instagram. The Team has started this semester very strong, and have accrued over 500 followers since I started my tenure with the team. My biggest concern at this point in the internship is maintaining the new followers we have acquired and making sure that we produce content that is interesting and stimulating for people unfamiliar with our school or program. My understanding is that many of our followers are a result of our team’s impressive performance, but it is now the marketing team’s responsibility to complement our strong accomplishments with a steady flow of eye-catching graphics and media.

The majority of the time I spent this week on my work was dedicated to the development of a graphic that shares our 5-1 conference record. Over the course of many hours, I was able to create a graphic that shows how successful our team has been since the start of the season, and uses a variety of techniques to create a lot of depth in the image, and hopefully will make players and fans alike to feel inclined to share the post to their own accounts and generate more outreach for our team.