Assignment #3 Revisited

After a couple days with my images, I do have a couple of new thoughts. My cubism response had gotten me thinking a lot about space. I did attempt to put some shapes behind the figure, but they still seem to flatten the image a little bit. I'm curious if adding some shading to the shapes (very subtly) would give a deeper sense of space throughout the frame. They'd have to match the light source, but I figure it could work. I do however, think the flat shapes work better stylistically for the prompt.

The double decker porta-potty is still may favorite image, but a couple of disparities in the angles and color consistencies in the stairs are really starting to bother me. I'd like to go in with the clone stamp tool and clean up the patchy parts. I've been thinking a lot about more context for the picture such as a line or something. I'd like to experiment with it, but the subject matter is weird enough that it sits perfectly well without context.

I'd like to play with more animation, which I think would be interesting in the falling picture. This is worth a try, but kind of a gamble. Some of the appeal of the photo is that the action all takes place in one scene. If I put any animation in, that appeal might evaporate, and I'd be left with just a choppy video of someone falling down the stairs. Besides that, the defined line in one of the figures is really starting to get under my skin.

For the erasing animation one, I wish I planned for the more minute details beforehand. I had talked about the lighting in an earlier post, but now the static element of the hands could use some tweaking. If I did it again, I would take two or three frame of each hand for a higher sense of movement. Maybe I have been a little harsh on it, but anything can help.

Un Poco Histórica y Un Poco Contemporáneo

History has a knack for giving us people everyone in a while who laugh with distain at traditional ways of doing things. Henry Peach Robinson is one of those people. He began his career as a painter, but transitioned into photography for its painterly attributes. He quickly became obsessed with photography and learned trade. Eventually that wasn't enough for him, and he began to experiment with compositing. I'm amazed at how seamless his work was without digital technology. He started his pioneering by keeping a library of skies he could put into photos when the exposure was bad. Eventually, Robinson began to make entire compositions like it. The photograph on the left, titled "Fading Away" is actually a composite of five different negatives. It looks very real, and he even had to explain to people that it was a manipulation. This caused outrage from the photographic community. But being the boss that he is, Henry Peach Robinson continued to work with pre-digital photo compositing. We have a lot to thank him for the art today.

Patrick Nagatani is a Japanese-American photographer who really pushes his composites into the fine art realm. We was working as a set designer around the time he met Andree Tracey. The two developed a very collaborative relationship and began to build very grandiose scenes together. Much of his work deals with the nuclear age. His photography instills a lot of mysterious and fear about a still somewhat mysterious and scary subject. "Generation to Generation" is one of his more minimalist, less crazy pieces, but it still strikes be with a foreboding, suspenseful ambiance.

Blog Response #20

With new technologies, the daily routine is becoming faster and faster. New technology is constructed to solve problems, but change always comes with some negative effects. The current speed of everyday life has delivered us information overload. From the moment we wake up until we crash on the pillow again, we see thousands of advertisements, news stories, images, promotions, etc. Hell, they're probably even with us in our dreams. For pure survival's sake, it is a natural function to block out irrelevant media: if we gave every source even a nod of our attention, we wouldn't ever have a chance to work, sleep, or even eat. Kohler's correlation of this to photography remains the same. Photographs easily become bland to us, especially once we see them over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. People are good at recognizing patterns, and patterns often get shoved into the back closet of the mind. To really grab anyone's attention a photograph must really break our pre-conceptive barriers. Whether it shocks us with something real, or simply suspends reality (that is probably the worst placement of simply I have ever used) photographs must first seduce us with shock & awe, followed by relevance. Maybe that opinion is a little too harsh, but I'm sticking to it.

Whether you like it or not, 'infotainment' is here to stay. Every message in the media has to be brief and offer some kind of reward to get people to listen to us. It's like a drug, once the population gets a taste of simple and fun, they need more! MORE! IN EVERYTHING! I hate to use the constructed realities article as an example, but it's hard to get through. It's has a lot of intellectual merit, and is extremely well thought out. The problem is the format now. Our generation is trained to only accept the most minimal, raw information, and sometimes rarely that unless it entertains. For better or for worse (probably for worse) books have become powerpoint slides. Sorry for the tangent, I haven't even brought up the idea of reality yet. If there's at all a moral question of whether manipulated images are true or false, they're true. Period. We live in an era where digital manipulation is common knowledge. It's an information/entertainment, would it be too much to argue that the imagination makes up just as much of our daily lives as reality? I don't thinks have to exist in the physical world to be real, they can simply be in our minds. Our entire society is built upon the human imagination and mind anyway. I'm going to cut it off here before the talk turns to perception and more philosophical ideas.

Assignment 3 - Final Prints

I honestly had a lot of fun with this assignment. The great thing about compositing is it gives you the power to make photography not such a blatantly literal art form anymore. I dig. My first picture was a response to the cubism prompt. Rather than fuse several photos together, I just wanted to use one then use basic shapes to push and pull the brightness in them. My real challenge was finding the amount of action to keep the photograph interesting but not too over the top. The photo seemed a little flat at first, so I began to put some of the shapes behind the figure to offer a sense of space. I also subtly put some math equations in the background (4 or 5% opacity) to add a dash of more confusion into the composition.

I found the porta-potty composite to be the most challenging. Just getting it to look semi-realistic was a challenge. I'd like to go back in and refine the stairs a little bit. I think that would be the kicker of actually making this baby look real. Someone in critique also suggested adding a line, which I'm very open for. Although the location is where I found the original port-potties, there's not much frame of reference about why they're in that location in the first place. Adding some action could do just that. Overall, I think this is still my favorite of the bunch.

This image was my response to the several moments in time prompt. I first want to give kudos to my wicked awesome brother for even offering to fall down the stairs for me, he's the real artist in this endeavor. I tried to tie multiple moments of motion into a single moment. I think I could push the idea more, but an angle I approached the piece was having higher transparency earlier in the moment to make it feel like the past (even if that past is only seconds ago). I was originally going to add a little bit of motion blur, but I'm positive it would have muddled up the composition too much. I do need to add some blur to the right side of the image however, that line is starting to bug me. I'm pretty happy in the way that the photo conveys falling down the stairs, it's not too confusing.

One things this class has caused me to do is redefine what I originally believe was photography. I figured if composites were fusions of several images or ideas, why couldn't they be a fusion of motion as well? I didn't put too much motion into the piece because I still wanted it to have a slightly photographic feel. A sitting figure is simply erased and redrawn in much to his surprise. Lighting really challenged me in this piece. Until post, I didn't account for how much the position of the figure could change the lighting of the entire scene. I could have attempted to cut him out, but the shadows he casts are pretty vital in making the movement seem realistic. In later assignments, I'm definitely interested in experimenting with motion again.

Blog Response 19, 20, & 21

I'm not sure I can think of anything that shouldn't be photographed. At first I thought that a photo should never take advantage of people suffering for the sake of the photo. Since that thought I've changed my mind. A photographer certainly shouldn't take advantage of peoples' hardships, but what if those photographs bring social awareness to a serious problem? What first made me think about this is that famous photo of a Vietnamese child running from napalm. The Vietnam War was already becoming unpopular at the home front, but that photograph really pushed it over the edge. I'll consider anything allowed to be photographed under two stipulations:
1. It's done with respect
2. Ramifications of the photograph are considered

We can photograph a lot of things now. From a microscopic dust mite to the rings of saturn, nothing seems out of reach from the camera. The one thing that seems to allude the world of photography is bigfoot (I don't think that famous video counts). After countless sightings, I can only assume that cameras simply turn off at sight of that hideous monster. I retract my statement. Can air be photographed? Sure, steam, breath, fog, etc. can be photographed, but pure, unadulterated air seems to be successfully unphotographable. This response isn't a joke, modern technology makes me have to think really, really hard about what's still impossible in photography.

I've shot them before and I'll shoot them again, but I often feel rather uncomfortable photographing strangers. It's just a little bit out of my comfort zone, but sometimes I feeling like I'm prying in a way that I would never dare without a camera in my hands. Then again, who cares? They're only social norms anyway, and those piercing looks I get always make pretty interesting shots. Speaking of which, I never like to shoot pictures of children unless they're family or I'm being paid to do so. Something seems rather taboo about it, so I'd prefer to remove myself from the entire subject matter.

Artist Reflection - Idris Khan

I picked Idris Khan because of our recent work in collages and composites. He produces his beautifully subtle collages through meticulous repetition of imagery. By overlaying different pictures of similar objects, his final photographs resemble a pattern or object that doesn't feel there. The photographs become ghostly and even a bit unsettling. For example, one picture is every page of the Qu'ran overlaying each other to create an extremely symmetrical pattern. But I wanted to talk about a photo the really stuck out to me because of it's raw simplicity. The image on the left truly becomes abstracted through Khan's extensive editing process, seemingly just a sphere floating in space. The nuances in shading really give the pieces a sense of three-dimensionality, however.

I had to look up how Khan made the photo, as I really couldn't tell what it was. It's a compilation of gas holders, which is apparently where Britain hides it's gas. I've never seen them here in American, but correct me if I'm wrong.

By overlaying many, many of these gas holder photos, Idris looses much of the original detail, making the viewer see raw organic beauty it what otherwise is considered a mundane subject. It's a great example of minimalism in photography.

Blog Response #16, 17, & 18

“Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.” Berenice Abbott

Like the best quotes, Abbott's statement rings simple but true. I'd suppose by definition a photograph represents the past, but if you look at it through a new light, it's radically different from the scene itself. The quote argues that as a physical product, a photograph will always be in the present. The moment it caught and conveys, however, can never be retrieved, it is locked in the past forever. Take a photograph in a conversation: people can talk about the piece with visual queues they presently see (see what I did there?). Without a photograph, a memory could still be talked about, but it's not really there. The people have to use their minds to remember, in which much of the information probably becomes distorted through their imagination. But let me ask you, what happens if you take a photograph of a photograph? Is the original photograph now a part of the past, or did split into multiple entities? It's a concept of little educational integrity, but it kind of makes my head hurt.

“Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer—and often the supreme disappointment.” ~Ansel Adams

I think this quote can be compared the the first Duane Michals quote offered in the blog. Ansel Adams is probably one of the best and most famous landscape photographers, but think of the countless failures that never even managed to leave the darkroom. The fact of the matter is, landscapes are boring. We can't escape them. Whether in a rural area or a city scape, we have become so jaded that we barely stop to take a real look at them. This is where the test comes into landscape photography. The artist has to find a way to twist the typical outlook of a landscape. There are many ways to do this, whether exposure, vantage point etc., but finding the right combination to make a successful switch on the typical, dreary landscape is the tricky part. And, depending on your standards, anything else is a failure.

“I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.” Duane Michals

What an imaginative quote. At first I was having trouble relating this to photography. Photography is so literal, it's nearly impossible to break into the imagination when the subject really has to exist (I know collages and composites are the exceptions). But after a little thought, I realized how wrong I was. There is much to be imagined in a photograph if done correctly. For example, a chaotic aftermath would leave viewers wondering and imagining what could have caused the damage. Where this really interests me in portraiture. A portrait is definitely not just a picture of a person. It's a picture of their personality, their intentions, even their secrets. The amount of it that a photographer would like the share or withhold from the viewer can make or break a truly dynamic photograph.

Assignment #3 Recreate

I think I'll start with my studies we did in class first, they were pretty fun. There's not much thought put behind them, and I think they're self explanitory:

And here is my recreation of a memory. I'm not going to lie, it's late, and I'm tired so my explanation will mostly come tomorrow. When I was four my parents had hid a mouse trap thinking a mouse could find it but I could not. They were incorrect. I went screaming up the stairs for what felt like years to my shocked mother. It was an extreme and ridiculous situation, so I tried to look at this situation from my 4-year-old perspective. This pretty much forced me to be as outlandish as possible. I was thinking about making it an animated gif, but it just looked a little too corny. Anyway, its freaky enough for me, I was even still afraid to set the mousetrap to take the photo.

Blog Responses 11-15

For my memory of a place I picked my room from an apartment I lived in for about 6 months when I was around 11 years old. I choose this place because it sits very weirdly with me. After all, it was my room, my own private space, but on the other hand it felt so transitional and short. I don't recall any photos being taken in the room. If I had, I'd probably take it from a very high angle, as much of my memory comes from looking down from the top bunk. There was also a very comfortable chair I was fond of that would be a nice place to shoot from. The photo would be pretty monochromatic, as it was a white room with all white furniture (pretty gaudy, if I do recall). I'm sure that someone new lives there now, maybe another child, maybe a roommate, but I'd imagine myself feeling extremely out of place. I see myself in the door, as I wouldn't want to go much further. It's a weird feeling have a room once so familiar completely change it's use/decor/owner/everything.

For a written photograph, the vantage point would be from the hallway looking into the room, with the door between a quarter and a half closed. Nobody would be in the room, although I can't tell if the new tenant's presence would make me feel more comfortable or more tense. The furniture would have much more color, rather than white on white. I'd imagine feeling like a thief, displaying the room as the wonderful property of whoever owned it. I never lived there, I just stole it for a time.

There is a wonderful photograph from Vero Beach in Florida, I must have only been 5 or 6. My brother and I had been doing what kids do: run toward the surf then immediately scream and run backwards when the waves crashed. It was innocent and fun, just a purely good memory. My mom wasn't much of a photographer, and it was back in the day when disposable cameras ruled the Earth. I'm not sure if she was just fumbling with the camera, trying to be artistic, or what, but the photo was captured at a hard angle, with my brother clipped off in the corner, the wave made up most of the composition. What was probably a throwaway shot became pretty sentimental to me, the picture itself might even be more fun than that day itself (my actual memory is actually pretty fuzzy). I suppose I've changed a lot since that day, fifteen years can strip a kid from his innocence, the pure, unadulterated fun seems harder to come by. I think that photo would be much harder to recreate today. Sure, I could tilt the camera and crop the person off, but that laughter is something you just can't fake. A new contemporary version of that photo would either be a lot more forced or a lot sadder.

Humans impact their environment in many ways, but I'd suppose I'm more interested in the changes they make that we don't see: sewer systems, electrical grids, ventilation ducts and the like. Architects have become so good at hiding these systems, we barely even notice them although we use them everyday. So I'd suppose my art idea would be a little pricey, but it's hypothetical, and in the hypothetical world, I've got big bucks. I'd like to take an entire city and design a schematic for each internal system we have (blue dotted lines for water, jagged line for electric, etc.). We would then paint it on everything! Inside and out, people couldn't escape it. I think it would become especially beautiful (and possibly obnoxious) when these patterns overlap together in busy places. It would be ordered, yet chaotic at the same time. I really didn't think about photography while writing that, but here we go, solution: a 3d panoramic standing from one point, with zoom in capability and everything). It's a little bit more complex than photography itself, but photos are definitely involved. Here's an example: http://360vr.com/2010/01/2010-times-square-midnight-krpflv/index.html

I could live without the sound though.

The familiar vs. faraway prompt is a tricky one, because photography is so literal. In the end, I think familiarity is in the eye of the beholder. For example, I could play with the vantage point, focus, etc. all I want, but someone who lives in Beijing would be much more familiar to my photos there and to one I shot in East Lansing. Vice versa for me. I guess my answer to this prompt is that I honestly don't know how'd I manipulate familiarity in a photograph without straight abstraction, the concept seems out of my hand. As far as a photo of someplace untouched by humans, I'd try to get as much detail as possible. The more detail, the more people will recognize that they do not know that place. Say I zoomed in on a leaf, I think people are subconsciously cunning enough creatures that that could trick themselves into believing they might have been there.

When I was a kid, I sat in a courtroom for several hours with the Boy Scouts to earn my political justice merit badge (or something like that). In recent years, I've been to court to argue tickets and such against the court. The feelings invoked between those two vantage points in the court are insanely different. As a kid, I judged everyone I saw there. As an adult, I was tired of anybody looking at me. I almost wanted to slap my little kid self. I think an interesting collage/composite would be to stage a courtroom internally. The defendant, the judge, the jury, the witnesses, and anybody else is the same person. I'd see it as a representation of an internal conflict, such as weight pros/cons or general guilt. I'd want to blow out the highlights in the photograph, making it feel much more abstract, like it's really in the subconscious.

Portrait Critique Reflection Numero Dos

I will now attempt the magical act of funneling everything that was said into critique into a formula of action:

Photo 1: High-Contrast
I'm not going to lie. I woke up this morning and 100% regretted my decision about printing this image for my final four. Maybe it was the printer, maybe it was my own inadequacy, but the darks seemed dwarfing and the highlights seemed blown out. The crit made me feel a little better about it, however. The image wasn't interpreted as a narrative, but as a tense moment between two people. I like to believe the viewer can step into the moment with whatever pretense they like. The group thought that it worked as a smaller, intimate photo rather than blown up like the others. They also mentioned that the blown out highlights help to abstract. I'd suppose it might, but I feel like it kills the mood I was going for. I'm not sure this image has much potential for a jumping off point, unless I used light (or rather lack-there-of) to continually abstract my subject. For now, I don't think the piece is portfolio worthy, though if I put a little bit more color in and decreased the contrast, it might be there.

Photo 2: Sushi Delivery
The reaction to this was different than I necessarily expected. I intended for the photo to show the rush, stress, and annoyance in jobs in the food industry. Instead, I got comments that he seemed to be taking to sushi to eat, and the blur in the background was reminiscent of nausea. The group agreed that the motion blur helped to bring focus to the subject, but I should have been tighter with the mask. The subject was left with a small halo effect, and no matter how subtle, I'm not sure I want that in my photo. If this was a jumping-off point, I'd be interested in snapping the same subject in various locations, but I don't think the theme is deep enough to warrant different delivery boys. Minus the slight halo effect, this is my favorite image from the assignment, and I'd consider it about ready for the portfolio.

Photo 3: Four-Armed Piano

I didn't change too much about this image since the computer critique, but I did blur out the face. I really wanted the focus to be on the weirdness surrounding the hands. The ground received this pretty well as a conceptual choice, but questioned my application of it. I distorted the face with a flat blur, but left the shoulders and similar parts of the same distance in focus. Although I didn't notice at first, it makes the photo to obviously manipulated for my taste, a likely solution would be to redo my editing with a radial blur, leaving the shoulders a little blurred, yet not as much as the face, giving a more realistic sense of space. I received a lot of positive feedback about turning this piece into a series, with all kinds of tasks being done with four hands. It would have to be done classily, but I think it could be rather successful if done right. Overall, the piano piece gets a check plus for my portfolio.

Photo 4: Morning Light

This was several people's favorite photo, which I find a little weird. I do like the photo, but I wouldn't consider it my best. Maybe I forgot to embed the color profile, but the photograph did print much darker and less yellow than I intended. Also, when printing, we messed up a few prints that turned out almost cooler than the original. The ink didn't spread proportionately, and I got some weird horizontal lines that matched the blinds in the composition. Hm, this particular response is turning out much more negative than I intended. Perhaps a little bit less contrast and a reprint is all I really need to get this ready for a portfolio. Hell, maybe I'll reshoot from a million and one other angles.

Final Images

I've only made a few minor changes to the photos from the original peer review, but I think they're worth reposting. What's the sense of babbling without a visual?

The first one is one of those last minute shots. I didn't really expect to shoot anything for the project, but I've changed my mind after the amount this photo creeped me out. I blew out some of the highlights to abstract the faces a bit, especially targeting the guy in the background. The lack of detail in his eyes and mouth leave him devoid of all emotion, it's almost like wearing a mask. Ultimately, I think I picked this photo over many of the other ones in the peer review due to the tension between the two subjects. It seems the girl on the right is waiting for something, but whether it's in fear or raw anticipation is uncertain.

I picked the sushi picture because of the annoyance in the subject's expression, but it needed something more. I darkened the image and added a motion blur to the background. I feel like it adds a new meaning to the photograph that wasn't there before. The addition makes the subject seem in a rush, and the photograph caught him in a split second moment where he breaks away from the routine by a distraction. I want the viewer to feel somewhat uncomfortable, almost like they're in his way. The subject even looks kind of somber.

Perhaps I'm on add-blur mode, because I added some blur to the piano image as well. In this case however, I really struggled on whether it was a good move or not. Ultimately, I thought it was a step in the right direction. One of the comments on my blog stated that the focus on the face was visually distracting because it wasn't enough to be on purpose. That person was right, I want the hands to be the main focus of the portrait, because that's where the surrealism lies. The subject's facial expression, while a compliment, isn't nearly as interesting. I feel that blurring his face out adds a sense of mystery, as vague as that sounds. A lack of expression allows the viewer to have more control over their interpretation.

I barely changed my morning light image, the rawer it is, the better. The image makes me feel pretty peaceful, and I think it's a nice way to end off the assignment after three pretty tense and uncomfortable portraits.