Final Project

I really enjoyed being able to work on an independent project for a few weeks. It was also really nice having so much class time to work on the project. My project was meant to show the progression of time for each person (between the old photograph and them today) as well as the progression of time through the different styles of photographs (black and white, color tinted, different sizes, etc). I think that idea comes through clearly in the final product.

My initial idea for this project was to make pairs of portraits. I wanted to photograph a close-up each person's hand's holding a photo of them and then photograph a simple portrait of each person as they are today. However, because the Diana+ camera was unable to focus for a close-up shot of someone's hands, I ended up doing just one portrait for each person. I'm really glad that I did one portrait for each person instead of two because it's nice to see more than just the individual's hands. Also, having two photos of each person may have been tedious to look at.

The photos work well together because the details in each are different but the basic idea is the same in each. I purposefully photographed everyone in a different location. I photographed about half the people in their rooms, and the rest in places that would provide a fairly simple background. Using different locations really helped to add variety to the prints. Because the viewfinder and lens are different, I accidentally cropped out the tops of many peoples faces. I also underexposed a few of the shots. This led to a wider variety of photographs which I think made the series more interesting. The combination of natural light coming in through the windows in some prints, and lamps for others also added to the variety among the prints.

I had trouble printing the photos with the vibrant colors I had wanted. If i were to reprint, I would try to make brighter prints. If I were to continue with this project, I would photograph people other than my family and maybe even strangers. However, I'm not sure if the results would be as good because I like how comfortable everyone seems in the photos, and I think that may be partly due to them all knowing me well.