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.

Cassoni

I enjoyed the Cassoni project. Doing a project that forces me to set up a shot and pay attention to the details helps to make me focus on trying to tell stories or portray some sort of feeling through my images rather than just taking photos that I think are aesthetically pleasing. Also, it is amazing how Photoshop can merge multiple photos into one seamless image.
Although in class people weren’t fond of how the three panels worked together, I think that the three panels together is stronger than just the top panel with the girl in the red dress. It seemed like people particularly thought that the middle panel with the close up of the two old-fashioned looking men shouldn’t have been included. I agree that the middle panel doesn’t really add any new information. However, I think that the close-up helps to focus the work on the two old-fashioned men and thus makes the story clearer. To me, the close up of the men and their different positions in each image illustrates that they are in fact ghosts that wander throughout the cemetery, praying for others who are buried in the cemetery. The two men are oblivious both to other ghosts and live people who walk through the cemetery. I see the mostly hidden figure carrying the shovel is the bottom print as a real person oblivious to the ghosts. The ghosts are also oblivious to her. The figure with the shovel can either be interpreted as someone working in the cemetery or a criminal.
I liked working in a group because it provides people with whom to discuss and critique ideas, and it was fun. However, group work for art classes also can be frustrating in that you can’t just do everything your way. It is a lot easier to compromise with group members for a paper, presentation, or problem set than for an art project.

Animation

The animation project was fun but I felt that it didn’t really focus on photography. It was difficult for me to concentrate on an individual photograph when I had to be continuously taking photographs. I wanted to move the camera around to make the animation more interesting and focus on the framing of each shot, but that was difficult to do. After looking at all 600 or so photos together in the animation, I realized that all my zooming in and out and moving around led to a very crazy and chaotic movie. However, the result was okay because the hectic movement worked well with the band practice animation. After realizing the need to keep the camera still or move it very very slowly, I tried to keep the camera fairly still for the “Kitchen Counter Chaos” animation in order for the animation to focus more on the characters’ actions than on the camera’s movements. However, I wasn’t all that successful in keeping the camera still because I got too caught up in moving the camera to follow and zoom in on the action. Although imovie was a little frustrating to use, I much preferred it to having to deal with the printers and matting. Althouth I prefer normal photography to animation, I’m glad that we had this assignment and I’d like to make more animations. There is a lot for me to learn about creating animations.

Response to Lies Assignment

I liked the lies assignment in that it gave us lots of flexibility in choosing what to create but at the same time forced us to learn a little more about Photoshop. The looseness of this assignment made the critiques even more interesting and exciting than usual because the projects were all so different and it was fun trying to find the lies in some of the more subtle projects.

Although I disliked having to matte prints for the color assignment, I liked that everyone had to matte or prepare their photos for display in some way for this project. Having to consider presentation added to the photos for this project much more than it did for the color assignment. As far as my presentation is concerned, maybe I should have better researched 1950s/1960s photographs and displayed my photos differently than I did.

Two weeks sometimes seems a little short for assignments, especially if one wants to experiment with a few thoughts before deciding on a final idea. I wish that I had more time to take photos for this project. I had not intended my photos to be of Bowdoin in a previous era, as some thought, but rather I wanted each photograph to appear as if it was taken 50 years before it actually was. If I had shot more, I would have had a wider variety of photographs and perhaps my idea would have been clearer.

Response to Color Assignment

I really liked this assignment, particularly because I got to learn how to develop color slides and create scanograms. It's nice how this project didn't just involve photoshop and a digital camera.... it didn't even involve a digital camera... because it was interesting to see that many different technologies can be combined to create digital photographs. The process of developing color slides was exciting because I had only developed black and white negatives in the past.

I feel like I could have been more creative in combining the colors of the scanogram with the colors of the photograph in each diptych. I knew that I wanted to create simple images, but by doing that I feel like I gave up the ability to really play with the scanner and create diptychs with subtle interactions between the shapes and objects. The object and color connections in each of my diptychs are quite obvious, maybe too obvious. I liked the idea of scanning and photographing the same object, but by focusing so much on the objects, I didn't play with color as much as I could have. In the one diptych where each image was a different object, the pickles and blueberry, I didn't play with finding colors that went well together because I used objects that were practically the same color. If I were too do this assignment again, I would make more abstract and creative images. I would like to continue working with scanograms.

Response to Looking Down Assignment

At first I didn’t enjoy taking photographs for the looking down assignment, but after I thought about it and took a bunch photos I was able to look for shapes and colors that caught my eye and began to appreciate the project a little more. I didn’t like being so constrained in what I could photograph. The photos I took were all pretty flat and didn’t have much depth. I wasn’t that successful with this project because I feel like I took simple representational photos of objects that interested me, such as the butterfly and slug, rather than taking interesting and creative photos. Also, I had trouble finding things on the ground that really made we want to take a picture. It was hard for me to find 40 photos that I really wanted to take.
Geotagging all the photos was my favorite part of the project. But that could have been done with taking photos from any perspective, not just looking down. It was nice to see everyone’s images together and compare how different people approached similar objects.