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.