Photo Essay: My People…

When I first approached this topic, my initial impression of “my people” was my ancestors. I pictured old black-and-white and sepia photos of unsmiling immigrants. Those are the people from which I descend and to which I feel very connected in many ways. But these aren’t people I can photograph …

This is one of the images I’m planning on using in my photo essay: my friend Nick in a lion blanket. I like this photo because of the expression on his face, and how out-of-place he looks – almost like a lost bachelor who forgot to take off his robe …

Missing the Camera

We’ve looked at a lot of pictures that are posed, or have people staring directly into the camera, that display a lot of emotion. I don’t have much photographic skill, and found it really hard to recreate that – but one thing I’ve enjoyed doing is taking …

My photos for the week are here. I went back and forth between Ann Arbor and my parents’ home this week, so I wasn’t able to use photoshop or even a computer for a lot of my time here, which made it challenging to come up with a good …

“Lately I’ve been struck with how I really love what you can’t seen in a photograph.”

I really liked this line from Masters of Photography: Diane Arbus. I think it’s so interesting, especially paired with some of the photographs shown in the documentary. I especially like Arbus’s portraits of …

“Take a photo that communicates a universal theme; name the picture with that theme.”

This is a photo of property that my parents own in Manchester, and to me the barren landscape and silence that surrounds it just puts the word “oblivion” into my head – after the horizon, is …

1. Take a photo with strong contrasts—technical (lighting, coloring), physical (size, distance), conceptual (new and old, present and past).

2. Take a portrait. Meet my father.

3. Take a self-portrait (I cheated with this one and had my roommate use her nice camera last week).

4. An extreme close-up of …

This article interested me with its talk of candid photos, so yesterday I decided to see if I could capture a candid camera moment. It’s not easy! I took a lot of photos before capturing this one, which neither guy thought I was taking, since I used my phone. I …

All of my photo creates, and my voyage into sharpness and image noise, are here.…

For this week I looked into Cambridge in Colour’s tutorials on Sharpness and Noise in photography, aspects of photo editing that I’ve never really grasped fully. 

The tutorial discussed how sharpness can emphasize texture in a photo, so I looked through some photos I’ve taken to see if I can …

A photo that looks better in black and white. This was hard for me, because in general I don’t like how stuff looks in black and white, but I just think this is a hilarious photo that, when put in black and white, gets this air of faux seriousness, despite …

Rule of thirds, taken at the park. Got the tree to the side there. Absolutely beautiful weekend – I didn’t even edit this photo at all!…

A high up horizon – so high up that it was taken from a plane, in fact. There are few things I love more than seeing a cloudy sunset from above.…

A photo with a repeating pattern.

Got a nice shot of these stools at a diner this weekend. I like that they correlate with the repeating lamps above them, and then on the left you have the chairs against the wall. SO MANY PATTERNS.…

I’m not good at analyzing literature, and I’m going to be honest: it’s hard for me to understand how this reading applies to what we’ve been doing. I’m more interested in seeing how we’re going to approach this in class and in what context we’ll be looking at it.…

Here’s my gif! This was the only video I have saved on my computer other than Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” so I decided to gif it. It’s a scene wherein Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) is telling Spike (that guy up there) to tell him what he was doing standing …

Minimalist poster: Buffy.

So this took eight million years (aka like half an hour). I used this image from Google and then made it completely black with a red outline.

Wooden stakes, #1 vampire-killing method for Buffy Summers.…

This week was my first foray into Photoshop and while I’m still trying to figure things out, I’m glad I know enough of the basics to begin to experiment. You can see the products of this experimenting here, in my visual creates for the week.

We also read some …

I’ve always been a big fan of contrast in design, and enjoyed Williams’ tutorial on this. It reminded me of my days as a yearbook editor in high school, which, while traumatizing, gave me the chance to do a bit of experimenting with design elements like this. However, I think …

I really enjoyed the minimalist Star Wars travel posters. I’ve seen similar minimalist artwork a lot and think that these are really well done. I think that the Bespin “Cloud City” and Endor posters are especially beautiful. I think the contrast that Williams discusses work well in these posters, …

Alright, so here’s my own project for the week: me trying to figure out photoshop again, and ending up with this by (happy) accident.

I took this picture and was trying to figure out how to improve it – I wanted to try to mess with the focus of it, …

Design create: Color splash.

I took this photo of my friend Nick serenading me today and decided to try the color splash trick on it when I was looking through pictures. I was really happy with my ability to figure out how to do this on photoshop! Brian’s instructions were …

Another design project was to put a fat cat into a famous work of art. Obviously I chose Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and the melon head cat, because few things go better together than classic religious art and cats with fruit on their heads. I just used basic tools …

This is my album cover that I made for the nonexistent band The Golden Record, and their debut EP, “Several Thousand Things.” I followed the directions of Albums Without Sound to obtain the names and the photo.

I didn’t do anything to edit the photo in terms of contrast/saturation/etc. because …

I really enjoyed perusing the Albums Without Sound blog, which I found to be surprisingly creative and diverse in its creations, especially given that this artist takes their inspiration from random Wikipedia articles. My favorite so far has been the cover for “Mass Flow Rate.” I was first …

…

The readings for this week were very, very hard to get through. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to apply them to this part of the class, but it was interesting to see how people (attempt to) write about images.

This was my first foray into photoshop, although …

Add a comic book effect to a photo.

Featuring myself and Aja Weston, circa sophomore year.

I used this program to add the effect to the program, because I was out of town and didn’t have access to photoshop this time. I haven’t approached Gimp because of what I’ve heard …

Take a bad photo, apply a vintage effect, and write something in Helvetica.

Taken in Arlington Cemetery overlooking Washington, D.C. circa 2006.

I used iPhoto ‘08 to put a black and white effect on this photo, and also faded the colors a little and added a vignette, because I find …