Photography final

My inspiration for my photography final this semester came from a couple different places. Throughout the semester, each of us had to give a presentation on a different artist. The artist that I was assigned, Nan Goldin (just a warning, if you google her to see her images, some of them are explicit), takes a lot of self portraits. And while I don't really like her style of photography or her subject matter for the most part, I admired her courage in taking photographs of herself. So towards the end of the semester I started wondering if I had the courage to do the same thing. Then, right before we got our assignment, Jason starting giving me a hard time about my "difficult" life and how I basically just sit in the loft all day and play games on my computer or scrapbook while occasionally working on my photography. So when our professor gave us the assignment, he talked about how a montage can be an elongated narrative, and I immediately thought about taking photos of myself in the loft doing all the things that I do. Well, logistically that didn't work out because my loft is just small enough, or the areas that I sit are small enough, that I would have been sitting in front of myself so I would have been blocking myself in the photo. Instead, I started thinking about a photograph that a friend of mine did in our class at the end of the semester of her laundry and it got me thinking about all the things that I actually do around the house that my husband doesn't always see me do. I decided to focus on the kitchen because it is the room in the house that I spend most of my time either with, or doing things for, my family.

I'm blessed to have a big, beautiful kitchen that gets incredible light during the day so one day I decided to just see what would happen if I tried. Jason was working from home that day so he got to laugh at me getting all giddy when my test shots looked like they were actually going to work--I know, I get really silly when I find a way to produce the art that I see in my head. So this was my end result (if you click the image, you can get a larger view):

When assembling a piece like this, the point isn't to get it to line up perfectly, by creating repeating patterns (in areas like the cupboards and the chairs) it adds to the sense that time has passed, so when you're telling a story like mine, that is a good thing. Another deliberate choice that I made was that while my upper half was never broken up, my bottom half was. In this choice, I was trying to show the movement that I make as I go all over the kitchen working during the day, but keeping up my upper half intact shows the strength I have as a mom to get my chores done and take care of my family. 

When I think back about the short amount of time that has passed, ten months since I first set foot in a photography class, I am incredibly amazed at what I have accomplished in such a short amount of time. Next semester I'm going to be challenging myself in a whole different way as I take my first film class, so I'm excited to continue to grow as a photographer, and I look forward to the challenge.

The thing about photography is

There's always more to learn. One of the last assignments we had of the semester was to create a narrative with six photos on one page. I struggled for awhile coming up with my concept, but eventually I was inspired by something my professor said in class about street photography and I decided that it was something I wanted to try my hand at. There are a lot of really great things about growing up LDS, but in some ways it hinders me as a photographer because I was always taught to respect people and rules. In street photography, you are often taking photographs of people without them knowing, sometimes in places where you shouldn't be. This is so far outside of my comfort zone, and I knew it would be a challenge, but I embraced it because I knew it would make me a stronger photographer. Working through a few ideas, I ended up taking photos at the mall. Another thing my professor said in class made me realize that it would be a great place to take photos because there is always something interesting going on (and my grandmother, who is an avid people-watcher, would be proud). I ran into some technical problems right away, first off that it wasn't very light at the mall. I know it seems like it would be really light, but I needed a larger depth of field and a fast shutter speed, which all decreases the light I'm allowing into the lens, so it was pretty dark. I upped my ISO as high as I could without getting too crazy on noise, but I still ended up with a great deal of noise in my photographs. My second obstacle is that this was the first time I would be trying to compose a photograph without looking through the lens. I held the camera down in my hands so that people wouldn't realize I was taking photos of them, but that made it infinitely more difficult to come up with a nice photograph. I joked around that my percentage of decent shots was reversed, only about 10% of what I shot was even worth looking at (although towards the end of shooting, I was improving that percentage). The next issue was focus. When you're not looking through the camera, you can't decide what to focus on (and the auto-focus is either too slow or doesn't focus on what you want to be useful), so I had to pre-focus and then try to get my subjects into the space in front of me that I had focused for. Finally, I had difficulties editing because of the previous problems, so my photos weren't anywhere near as sharp as I normally have, and there was too much noise for me to edit out completely. In the end, however, I was extremely pleased with what I turned in for class.

This project pushed me in so many ways, and it is definitely a style of photography that I want to be more proficient at (maybe I'll choose an outdoor location next time though so I can have more light). Overall, though, I think I'm a better photographer for having attempted and succeeded at a new type of photography.