I feel like taking photography this year was one of my best decisions of my high school career. I was able to further a lot of skills as well as learn a lot of new skills. In the beginning of the year, we learned about the elements and principles of photography and how incorporating those into our photos makes them more aesthetically pleasing. This skill continuously shows up in a lot more of the projects that I completed this year such as my independant photography project and the forced perspective project. However, there were a lot of things that we tried this year that I wasn’t really sure if they were going to work out. The Hockney style edits took a few tries to get them how I wanted, but in the end they turned out okay. In the majority of the projects, I worked with another classmate of mine named Julia Krauss. She and I worked as each other's models for a lot of the pictures and it really helped us become closer as friends and it helped us develop even more skills as photographers.
One of my favorite projects th this year was the forced perspective project. I had a ton of fun coming up with ideas and trying different camera angles in order to get the perfect shot. I loved how we taped different props on the walls and had to contort our bodies to make the photo look as realistic as we could. If I could offer any advice to those who plan on taking this course, I would say try to think outside of the box, and come into this course with an open mind. I didn’t have any expectations and that really helped me come up with creative ideas for projects and such. One thing that I learned from taking this course was that all art is up for interpretation and literally anything can have the power to inspire others. We looked at a lot of artwork that really changed the way I look at things. One example of this was the street art lesson. It was really cool to see how something so controversial like street art could change my outlook on art as a whole.
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I wanted to include some photos that I took for fun of the sky at different times. I love taking pictures at the sky, especially when it has all the cool colors in it, I just think that it is such a beautiful thing and it's really important to capture things like that. I only edited a couple of these photos to enhance some of the colors and to make a color splash of the sky in one of the photos.
For my independent project, I decided to focus on how things in nature looked really close up. I was inspired by basically all of the amazing photos that I've seen this past year within my photography class. To get all these photos, I walked around my school and a nearby farm and took pictures as close as I could to all the things that I found beautiful or interesting. To almost all of my photos, I bumped up the contrast and turned down the brightness in order to boost the color. In one of my photos, I made a color splash of all the flowers in the photo. For a few of my pictures, I used a tilt shift or an iris blur in order to draw the focus towards the main part of the photo. I really enjoyed this project and all the editing that I had to do, it really helped with my understanding of photoshop.
For this project, we had to do a lot of experimentation in Photoshop. The first image shown is my best attempt out of all the images I created. We followed tutorials, created new layers, changed the colors of the images, and overall changed a lot in order to make the images what they appear as.
Throughout the course of this week, we began exploring the concept of light painting, which involves holding the shutter open on a camera and moving light around in a dark space. At the start of this project, everything was a little shaky, nobody knew how to do anything or they couldn't accurately portray what they wanted to do. We started out on the first day just doodling and attempting to write our names, which of course we needed to make backwards in order to have it turn out correctly. This is shown in the first photo. In the second photo, I tried tracing someone sitting down in a chair to try and make them look like the thinking man. This was also a little hard because we were still working everything out. In the next few photos, we were experimenting with the stage light and the kinds of shadows those passed. This was a lot of fun to experiment with. In the sixth photo, I was able to almost successfully draw two people playing catch with one another. From this day forth, I can say that we almost mastered the process of light painting. In the seventh and eighth photo, my friend Julia had the idea to hold up an iPad with a heart on it and go from there. In the last photo, I am sitting in a chair, and Julia went around my head as the shutter of the camera remained open and tried to illuminate my body as well as draw around my head. The last photo was one of my favorites from the whole week.
Street Art In my opinion, street art is something that can be good or can be bad. There is a fine line between just writing your name on the wall of a building and actually taking the time to come up with a message that you want to be known. Graffiti is one of those things that appears more often in cities rather than small town like Millis, so we aren't really exposed to things like that as much. I personally like the idea of graffiti and the way it looks, it adds a lot of culture to the area that it's in. When someone is caught graffitiing, if it is in a public place that is owned by people and the graffiti isn't in anyway beneficial, I think that the person doing the graffitiing should be, in some way, penalized. If someone were to graffiti on the walls of my house, I don't know how I would react, I suppose it depends on what it was of. The main point of Exit Through the Gift Shop is to expose the idea that consumers buy into anything. I felt this vibe the entire time that they were trying to warm people up to the idea of street art or they were trying to make it more popular and trying to show the good side of it. When people think of street art, they think of that annoying graffiti that shows up all over the place and it doesn't look good. I don't think that now after watching the documentary. After watching that, I feel more exposed to another type of art that I really like.
The first image that I created in photoshop was an image of a stop sign that had the message “Never Stop Thinking”. I feel like this was an important message to convey especially in this day and age because people need to feel like they can think for themselves and it’s okay to not conform to society. The second image I created was a picture of one of my friends and I drew a crown on her head and my message was “Be Your Own Ruler”. I chose this because I feel like people just follow other people because they feel like they can’t lead themselves. In a way, my two pieces are connected because they both mention the fact that you should just do you and to not be afraid of what might come with that. Forced PerspectiveTo create all of these photos, I had some people stand or sit in a certain position so that it would look normal when I flipped the photo. And when I did flip the photo, it looked like they were sitting on the wall or standing and it made this cool effect. For some of the other photos, I had someone stand at a certain angle so it looked like something was either smaller or larger than a normal object. All of these photos are examples of forced perspective, and for some of them I had to photoshop a little to make them look more realistic.
Final Hockney Style PhotoTo create this photo, I took a bunch of separate photos of one singular thing and put them all into Photoshop and pieced them together. This is modeled after Hockney's Joiner photos.
Kaleidoscope PictureFor the kaleidoscope, I used the butterfly effect photo, and copied it and placed it on a layer over the original photo. I then rotated the photo so it didn’t exactly line up. I repeated this several times to get the desired effect.
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AuthorMy name is Amanda. This is my blog for my Photography class. Archives
June 2016
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