Well...

So I think I was little over ambitious when I decided to make all my own frames. I started cutting them out from cardboard last night and then tried to make one just to see how it would work out- which was not very well. I'm wondering if there is a better way to go about this. I have a ton of ideas, but they all require sooo much time and tons of supplies which means tons of money that I don't really have. So I'm back to brainstorming pretty much.

6 Hours Later...

Okay so it took six hours and a TON of paper, but I finished printing and now all I have do is tackle how I am going to present everything. The whole printing process started off really great- everything was coming out with the first try, I didn't have to try a ton of different filters, and nothing needed to be burned or dodged. However, 2 hours into it I kind of wanted to pull my hair out. My photos with sky in them all needed to be burned, but the rest of the picture was so sensitive that even a second more of exposure ruined it. So it took a while and all my paper, but I feel like I managed to get everything as good as I possibly could.

To the Left

A friend of mine from high school's mother is a photographer and today I went and scoped out her website. Some of her work is of the waterfront so I just wanted to contrast and compare my style with a professional photographers. Even though our subject matter was very similar, I noticed that her approach almost always had the same template of putting the subject matter in the dead center of the picture. It didn't make her work boring at all, you just knew exactly what it was you were supposed to be focused on. For myself, I seem to put everything off to the left side. I have no idea why the left side, but I pretty consistently do that. Maybe it says something about my subconscious... Or maybe I just like the left.

By the way, I would post the pictures of the photographer I know, but she has some special lock on her site that prevents you from doing the copy-paste thing.

Sooo

Today I bought a ton of supplies to make frames for the my prints for the final. I'm thinking of just cutting out cardboard frames, covering them in canvas, and adding little nautical-ish things. We'll see how corny it looks- I honestly don't know how it's going to turn out or what I'm going to do if it looks awful. I only have three prints done and thanks to my recent mono diagnosis I'm missing class tonight. Really bad timing to get sick.

More Ideas

So I thought about the whole fishing net thing and decided that it may in fact be too cheesy. So another thought I had was getting some canvas- like the kind you would make a sail out of- and cutting out rough frames with it. Again, I should probably see how the prints come out before I get too set on anything. I'm really hoping to get all my prints done by the end of this week, which would give me tons of time to figure out how I want to present them.

Final Project Progress

While I was home for Thanksgiving I went down to the docks and shot 4 rolls of whatever I saw while walking around. I really thought about every picture I took and was a little neurotic about getting the lighting and composition just right so I really felt that I would have some good ones. I just made the contact sheets last Tuesday after critique and the results were decent. Lately I've been thinking about how I want to present them and a couple ideas that came to mind were maybe putting them up against a rustic, fishing net looking type thing and then adding some seashells or whatever. My only problem is that it could end up looking a little cheesy. I might be able to make a better decision once I see how the prints come out.

Faces, Horses, or Boats?

So I am still trying to decide what I want to do for the final. I really like David Meanix's style- meshing real people with their photographed counterparts. However, I feel like doing something along those lines would be pretty much plagiarism as well as hugely time consuming. I'm definitely going to toy with the idea though. I was thinking of doing something along the lines of cutting out various facial features from magazines and putting them on real people then snapping a photo- I'm still a little on the fence though.
The other idea I had was to document daily life at the barn where I keep my horse. There are a ton of animals, people, machinery, and old dusty buildings. The only thing is that I did something like that for my high school photo class, so while I love taking pictures of farm activities, I think I should probably branch out.
And the last thought that sprang into my head- while writing this actually- was to go down to the waterfront (I live on the Maine coast) and get pictures of the fishing trolleys and ferryboats coming and going from the harbor. Wow, I really like that idea. I am definitely going to test that one out.
Okay, well I guess I just solved my own question. I love the ocean, but luckily this prevents me from doing any sappy, postcard-esque beach scenes while I still get to capture little pieces of a working waterfront. I'm pretty excited to see how this turns out- wish me luck!

People and Places

So apparently people in Boston don't really like their picture being taken by a stranger. I realized just how awkward it is to snap a photo while I was sitting on the T- everything from the click noise of the camera to the fact that I was staring at someone I didn't know through a big black lens made me feel probably more uncomfortable than the poor kid I took a picture of. Worst of all, I didn't realize it, but the flash had come on so I lit up the whole car up. Awkward. On the plus side, I think I shot some good pictures. I've only gotten to see the little negatives so far, but they feel natural since I didn't have any say in the way someone was posed or the expression on their face. I like them a lot better than the posed ones I took which all kind of came out boring and unoriginal.
For my self portrait I knew I wanted to take a picture of my tattoo. It's tiny and really unsuspecting but I designed it myself so I feel more like its a part of me than just on me. Because it's on my ankle I got to incorporate my feet into the photo. In my opinion, feet are pretty weird looking so I had some fun putting them at odd angles and directions so they ended up a little weirder.
I also really liked looking over other peoples photos because you make up little stories and assumptions in your head. I always wonder about who they are, what they were thinking at the time, what was going on in their life. I think the next critique will be pretty interesting.

Contrast and Compare

The two images from the blog initially came off as very different to me, but the more I studied them, the more similarities I could find. For the first photograph, I was pretty confused as to what I was looking at. Because I couldn't really define the objects I was seeing, I sort of just let my eyes take in the whole scene. There doesn't appear to be a single focus to the picture and I found it kind of creepy, metallic, and cold. It doesn't have the organic feel of the second picture and I imagined that it was an image from some far off planet. The bright misty light pouring in is more ominous than heavenly and I find the image generally unsettling.
The second photograph is much more wild with a majestic feel and a sense of grander. This one also isn't directly focused on one thing, but your eye is definitely drawn to the bright, plummeting waterfall. So though I find one kind of creepy while the other one is more grandiose, they are very similar in the sense that there is this harshness about them. I think it's mostly due to the fact that they are black and white instead of color, especially for the bottom picture because it just has such high contrast between the black and white. Also, both images feel unreal to me, sort of strange and heavy. This is probably because the water in both images is misty and ghost-like and not really like water at all.

A Story Through Photographs

I couldn’t decide on a single favorite while looking through William Albert Allard’s The Photographic Essay. I picked it up because I really wanted to see someone tell a story through pictures alone. He does supplement each little collection of photographs with a short article describing the scene and his method of photography, but it’s photographs that really do all the talking. All the photo’s were in color, which I really liked because the last few books I browsed through were black and white. I definitely like color photography over black and white and I think it’s because black and white pictures seem a little less real to me, a little more fantasy and movie-esque. Color photography seems more organic and I have an easier time envisioning the situation and feeling a part of it rather than like I’m an outsider watching it.

So anyhow, the first photograph that caught my eye was of this dirt path stretching away from the camera with mountains in the background, a hill with sparse trees leading up from the left of the road while a rocky gully fell away to the right. You can see a village is up ahead, peaking out of the gully and from behind trees. There are two little children on the road, both of them with their arms outstretched running and jumping. The feeling of the picture is very rustic and foreign and when I read the caption underneath I see it was taken in 1967 in France. I like the composition- the hills, the gully, the village up ahead with a mountain backdrop and a smoky mist settled in the valley in between. Though the components sound very fairytale-like, the picture is so real and comprehensible. The trees aren’t lush, the ground looks rocky and sparse, and the mountains aren’t so much grand as just earthy- so any magical quality the scene could have had is replaced with a more realistic image and I really like that. My absolute favorite part of the picture though is the two little children running away with their backs to the camera. They give off such a happy, free feeling. One of the girls (I think they’re girls) is mid jump with her hands outstretched and her feet off the ground. You can really just imagine them giggling and running, their hands and feet all dirty from playing make-believe in the little forest beside their village.

My other favorites from Allard’s work are world’s different. He took a lot of pictures of this Peruvian slaughterhouse which was definitely morbid, but also the kind of thing you can’t help but stare at because it is just so shocking. The bodies of the dead animals curve and twist in these really strange angles that you know they would never be able to do while alive and the brightness of the blood is really disturbing. The worst part was his description of the place, “The slaughtering isn’t done in the neat, clinical way we do it in this country. Watching it is a little like witnessing a murder. Cattle are brought in on a lead rope and just held by one person, and another man comes in with a little dagger, the kind they use at bullfights to severe the spinal column. The cow is killed with a knife to the back of the neck, and it usually goes down as if hit by a cannon. But the hogs are simply stabbed in the heart and left to flounder around until the life drains out of them in great gushes of blood, and they’re squealing all the time.” Honestly, just typing that made me a little nauseous and his photographs show exactly what he just described. Though I would never want to hang a picture like that up in my house or ever really have to see it again, I couldn’t help but be a little morbidly curious. I was so shocked by the whole thing that it really had an impact. I think that just goes to show that you can get all the technical things together and frame the photo in such a way with the light’s hitting just perfect with your aperture at the correct setting and whatnot, but if you have a shocking, or bizarre, or emotional subject people are going to be affected regardless of the mechanical piece.

Some Good Stuff

I thought I'd put up some images I really like:


So to start off, I love the color blue. I think thats what first drew my attention to this one and then I started to notice the whole composition of the photo. The comet-like streaks are tuna apparently. I like that the fish are smooth, soft blurs because normally fish move in these really twitchy, mechanical jerks which makes an interesting contrast. Also, it takes a little concentration and imagination to envision those smudges as living creatures and I can get really into photos that ask for a little creativity and imagination from the viewer.

I'm a big fan of the dimensions in this one. It's always interesting to see a little piece of something so up close in a way you would never normally notice. I love the way the water droplet magnifies the image even more and how perfectly round it is. I feel like people normally think of nature as unstructured and disorderly, but if you really check it out, there is a whole lot of straight symmetrical lines and perfectly formed shapes.







I wanted to add a black and white picture since that's what we're doing in class. I chose this one for a couple reasons. When I first saw it I originally thought it was a bunch of silver jewelery and then realized that it's seaweed, which isn't related at all. So I like that the photo took some time to decipher. Also, the name of the image is "Sea Crap" which is kind of funny, especially since I thought it was a bunch of expensive necklaces with little pearls, not slimy seaweed.

Photo Show Reflection

When I look at photographs I feel the most drawn to those that tell a story instead of just capturing a single moment or space. Ri Anderson’s work struck me as over the top morbid and contrived. It was hard for me to find any realism and the photos for the most part reminded me of a cheesy Halloween movie with the generic story line of “pretty dead girl- mystery ensues.” However, I liked the photo she took of the two people holding each other in woods with the very unexpected placement of a foot coming in from the side- I think it was called “Halloween.” That photo posed more of a question to the viewer than the others, in my opinion. Instead of having someone play dead and be the obvious focus of the photo, the foot was small, off-to-the-side feature of the picture so the viewer had to fill in the rest and rely on their own creativity. It gave your mind the first few sentences to a story and let you write the rest instead of construction an entire plot such as “girl found dead in a tragic situation.”

Amy Montali’s work has an honest sense of realism about them. They were all very morose and shady, like you were witnessing something taboo. There was one of a woman with her back to the photographer sitting down facing a man that seemed to hint at prostitution or at least something sketchy and illegal.

I think my favorite picture out of the entire show was “Palm Foot” by Thomas Gustaini. I thought it was very playful and humorous. The contrast in the picture with the static, flat palm trees on the wallpaper behind dirty, three dimensional feet with curved lines and imperfections really gave the feet a dynamic, alive feel. Also, the shape of a foot, with its trunk-like ankle, heel, and sole and leaf-like toes mimicked the trees in the background. I thought it was a very unique and interesting photo that didn’t have the same disjointed, unrelated feel that his other work did. Many of them seemed so haphazard that they really didn’t have any sensible flow. They didn’t tell a story or pose a question- I found them too random. However, I really liked his use of vibrant color and varying textures.