The Archives of Portraits, which was a room in the basement of Mercury castle, was off limits to students. The professors did not want the delicate portraits of famed wizards, trolls, tributes, and fairies to be ruined by the oil smudges from hands. The Fandom Princess, however, being the curious girl she was, once ventured down to the Archives during her first year at Mercury. After her first visit, she didn’t go back again, but her experience down in the dusty, cold basement was enough to make her feel special that she had laid eyes on such wonderful portraits.

Well, I don’t know if my experience this week would be enough to qualify being super famous and in the archives, but I definitely think that the Photoblitz challenge was a bunch of fun! I decided to do the assignment in my friend’s apartment, since I was already here studying. Plus, they’re apartment is full of, like, stuff. I also figured a place that wasn’t my own would make for more interesting subjects for my pictures.

The first problem, however, that I ran into is that they didn’t have a clock to document the time that I started and the time that I ended. So I ended up using my friend’s digital iHome to document the start time and the end time. From there, I frantically went back and forth from my laptop the list on it to looking around the apartment and trying to find or think of subjects that fit the criteria. I ended up finding pictures for about half of the list, but my top five are below:

A photo that expresses human emotion. This was a magnet on their fridge. I tried to use the rule of thirds to make it seem even more expressive, and I really like the blank, textured background and the frayed edge of the heart. It kind of reminded me of love not being something that is easy to navigate.

A photo that represents a metaphor for complexity. My friend is a vegetarian, and so she has to take a bunch of different supplements to make sure she stays healthy and gets all her vitamins and what not. So on her desk was this collaboration of pill bottles and it just all seemed very chaotic and fits with the complex lifestyle of a vegetarian (at least, I think keeping track of all these pills is complex).

A photo of someone else’s hand. While I’m frantically moving around their apartment, my friends are doing homework and tossing out ideas to help me with this assignment. But as I was thinking, I saw how my friend’s laptop illuminated and I thought “wow, that’s kind of neat.” Paired with her neon nails, I decided to use her hands to photograph her typing her assignment.

A photo dominated by a single color. It’s quite green, isn’t it? The little green aliens from Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story dominate this picture. It is actually a section from their poster hanging in the living room of the (creepy) aliens, and I tilted the camera a bit to the side to try and get the angle off a little.

A photo of something at an unusual angle. So this is just one of those lamps that have five different arms and you can move them around and whatnot, and I already thought that that was cool to be able to do. I tried taking a picture with this at many different angles. I knew I wanted to be underneath it, but I didn’t know how to structure the actual lamp, how many lights I should turn on, etc. In the end, I was kind of underneath and made the focus one lamp taken in the distance almost. Unusual-ish.

So, that was my adventure in Photoblitzing, and I gotta say, it was a nice little exercise. It made me miss photography classes and I look forward to more activities like this!