Final Assignment: Movie

Here is the link to my final movie:

Final Assignment

Assignment 7 Stop Motion Animation

Lonely ):

Assignment 6 Multiple Imagery

Double Images:

My sister on her flying board traveling around the earth!

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A picture of me looking into the water and seeing the "end of the world" in the reflection.

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Diptychs:

Two different point of view of the forest with the one on the right looking like I'm turning around in circles.

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Two different point of views of around the same area but one during the afternoon and the other one in the evening.

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Jerry Uelsmann 

Undiscovered Self 

By the title itself, you can already tell what message this picture is trying to convey. Basically, it is saying that this person does not know who he/she is; does not know him/her self. You can see that there are many body parts which all seem to belong to different persons. That person could be going through a part of his life where he is trying to find where he belongs, who he/she is. We could also say that he/she may have a personality disorder and has lost his/her true self behind all these "covers". 

Thomas Herbich 

Elephants

 

I am not too sure what Herbich is trying to say in this picture but we can definitely see his out-of-the-ordinary and unconventional style. Here, a group of elephants seem to be traveling with nomads, according the the person sitting on top of one of them on the left side. They are trying to cross a bridge that is standing over dangerously high are. An actual bridge would probably collapse from all the weight of these huge elephants and it is very unlikely that elephants would travel around such an area but the image itself is very freshening because of Herbich's style.

Assignment 5 Studio and Outside Studio Portraits

Studio Portraits: 

What was your best lighting in studio? 

The third time we went was when I put the ISO to 400 and -0.75 exposure. I got better results using the black background paper and exposing the subjects to littler light than the other times. With other settings, the pictures seemed either too bright or not sharp enough. Using a tripod also greatly helped with the quality of the pictures. I also tried using many angles but found that simply facing the subject gave better results.

Link to Studio Portraits

Outside Portraits:
What was best outside studio: 
Overall, I preferred taking pictures outside than in the studio. I feel like the biggest advantage about taking pictures outside is the sun's lighting which makes very beautiful pictures and all the colors especially on a beautiful day that make for a stunning background. There is also much more possibilities for creative pictures and there are props everywhere even if you do not bring your own.

Link to Outside Portraits

Assignment 4 Stop Motion and Blurred

Stop Motion: 

The overall assignment was probably the hardest one yet especially because it required better technique and a camera that is not too automatic to be able to do it easily. The stop motion part was not as hard as the other the blurred one and also because my camera does not manually adjust shutter speed which left me with only one option: The "sport" setting. The harder part of this was to find interesting ideas to take pictures of but it turned out pretty good. 

Link to Stop Motion

Blurred Motion: 

This was the hard part. After many attempts, I finally got the hang of it. My camera does not manually adjust shutter speed and leaves me with a few options. I went with the "night portrait" setting but even with the pre-set low shutter speed, it was still hard to pull it off because I could not adjust it to my liking. Only a few came out acceptable out of the many pictures I took and I am overall not very satisfied with the ones I got but at least I tried. 

Link to Blurred Motion

Photoshop Assignment

The Original:

1: On this one I decided to boost the highlighting, the brightness and the contrast to the maximum to her look like an angel and also really pop-out the light blue color from her eyes.  

2: I used the grainy/portrait-like effect on this one and also put the setting very high around her face which makes it seem like she has no nose and almost like her face is coming out of the wall/ background behind her or simply blends with it. 

3: For the third picture I used a shadowy/grainy/watery effect and put the settings on almost 80% for each category to not completely hide her face with the shadows. I ended up with a Mona Lisa-like scary women with no eyes holding a champagne cup with her left hand with a dull grayish background.

Assignment 3

Original:

Black and white:

Here, I tried boosting the shadows and slightly increase the highlights to add to the glossy effect of the painting reflecting with the sun of the top left part of the picture.

















Famous photographer (Ralph Gibson):

I like this picture because of the emphasize put on the sunlight and the high-contrast, minimalist black and white.






















Original:



Sepia effect: 

I also significantly increased the shadows and put the highlighting slightly higher because I wanted to give a warmer effect to the picture without overdoing it.
























Famous Photographer: (John Crocker)

I like how this picture still kept its modern feeling despite the sepia tone which usually makes pictures look older.














Original: 
 




Soft focus:




Similarly to my black and white picture, I wanted make the top left part of the picture where the sun is reflecting more obvious and eye-catching. I also enlarged the soft focus point and increased the amount of focus to really bring out that part of the photo. Still, out of all the effects, I felt like this one did not work quite as well as the others because of the focusing effect itself.















Famous Photographer (David Morel):

Original:


Same Colors, different shadow and highlight:

This one has to be my favorite. I think the picture already looks great originally because of the way the colors turned out be.  Adding more shadows makes it look cleaner and the very bright blue produce by more highlighting gives it a happy and colorful feeling.

Assignment 2

Link to Everyday Pictures

Walker Evans   

Website 1: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Evans

Website 2:
http://masters-of-photography.com/E/evans/evans_articles3.html

  

Lee Friedlander

Website 1: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Friedlander

Website 2: 
http://masters-of-photography.com/F/friedlander/friedlander_articles2.html

1. What kind of photographs do they make? 
 Both of them aim at representing the concept of self-consciousness but in two different ways. While Walker Evans takes pictures of his surroundings to point out a society where young men just act how they are expected to, Lee Friedlander includes  himself to demonstrate his concern for the topic and that he, as compared to the majority, was conscious of his existence. Photography for them is just like music is to a musician. They express themselves through photography and try to send messages to everyone who looks at their art.

2. What technical considerations do you think they made in creating their work?
Walkers Evans preferred to take pictures of backgrounds or of the front of a store and, while it may have been his own style of photography, using an 8x10 camera certainly restrained him. Lee Friedlander, was lucky enough to have a 35 mm camera which, not only allowed more mobility but was also more technologically advanced. As a result, taking pictures "on the spot" and with many different angles was possible thus, more creative pictures could be taken.

3.What do their pictures look like?
When I looked up their photographs, it seemed that, while the majority of their photographs are in black and white, I could only find colored pictures coming from Walker Evans which, I found odd because, after all, he is the one who had to deal with an older camera. Both photographers have a mix of both horizontal and vertical pictures but I did notice a liking for horizontal pictures coming from Lee Friedlander. Walker Evans preferes wider spaces, likes to include people in his pictures and has darker and sadder pictures while Lee Friedlander, considered more like a "loner", prefers to include himself, smaller spaces and neutral pictures with no particular feeling.

4. What were some of their ideas in making the pictures?
Walker Evans hated the way people just listened to what others were telling them to do. That is why his idea was to freeze those moments so that people could look at his pictures and realize how they acted and hopefully change it. Lee Friedlander's pictures had the same motive as Evans'. But, he tried to make people realize what was around them by taking pictures of what he called the "social landscape" because he believed a lot could be taught from simply looking at our environment.

Some of their work:

Walker Evans:

Lee Friedlander:

Assignment #1A

Camera: Olympus S series, Olympus SZ-10
Resolution: 14 Megapixels
Media Storage: SD/SDHC/SDXC
You put your images in your computer using a transfer cable.
Cord used to connect it to computer: High-Speed USB 2.0 Cable (Mass media storage)
Can store up to 2174 low resolution images on disk
Can store up to 9999 high resolution images on disk
Disk file format: JPEG
The camera comes with a quick start manual in the box. A more detailed version is provided as a PDF file on the installation CD. I have yet to read the detailed version of the manual.

Link to Self-Portraits