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.

Falling in love

 

One of our recent assignments was to work in the studio with the strobes. Our professor said that this transition is often difficult as it takes some time to become comfortable with the equipment to get the look that you want. For me it was just love at first...shoot? I could work in the studio with strobes every day of my life and be content. I really wanted to try my hand at a fashion shoot and I had so much fun.


 The biggest problem I had with this was actually narrowing down what I got to choose one to turn in. My model was wonderful and gave me exactly what I was looking for even though I don't have the experience directing her. And I had two wonderful friends who gave me so much help, I didn't have to do anything other than direct and shoot. I'm thinking of ideas to work in the studio again because I can't wait to get back in there.

Always learning

I had the opportunity to do my first paid shoot last month, and I was very excited for the end result, especially since it's a newborn and I'm anxious to please her parents. I was all done with the editing and burned a cd to give to the parents when I came across some fun new editing techniques in photoshop that I just had to try out. Well, needless to say, I had to re-edit all the photos before I give them up to the parents. My plan had already been to post them here in a couple days, but my husband started giving me a hard time about the fact that it's been a couple weeks since I've posted. I hesitate to post because all that I have to post about is photography, but it really feels like that's all I do, so I guess that's going to continue for the next couple of months until I finish this photography class.




 

Back when I was having babies, it wasn't the trend to do these beautiful photos of your new baby, but I really wish it had been. This is a phase that lasts such a short period of time that I absolutely love to be able to document it for the parents in such a beautiful way. I certainly hope this mommy and daddy love the photos of their baby girl as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Controlling Color

 Every time we take a photograph, we think about color. More precisely, our subconscious tells us how we feel about the photograph based on the colors in it. In order to become a better photographer, we then have to learn what the colors mean and then learn how to control the color in a photograph in order to get the feeling we desire from that photograph. So our assignment for color was to take 20 photographs focusing on each color on the color wheel. I will be the first to admit that some of my ideas fell short, but such as it is when you have to come up with six different ideas for one assignment, at least half of my ideas were pretty decent. The biggest challenge is that we were not allowed to take a photograph of something that was the color we were working with just for color's sake, we really had to bring the right feelings to a photograph with the color in it.



Green was one I had a hard time with as you can see. Green is supposed to be soothing, refreshing, and evoke feelings of peace, harmony, ecology and nature. I really couldn't come up with anything interesting, so I just went to a place that I knew was really green and tried to take some interesting photos. It works for the feelings I was trying to go with, but it's pretty literal as well, so I'm sure my professor wasn't too thrilled with these ones.



While I was working on this assignment, we were at my mom's house visiting her after her surgery, so I thought I would get my blue done. Blue is supposed to be peaceful, confident, cool, trustworthy, and remind us of the sky and ocean. I knew I couldn't just take a photo of the ocean itself, so I took some interesting photos of the jetty that separates Long Beach from Seal Beach. While out shooting for this one, it was quite an adventure too as I ended up slipping on the jetty while my camera was over my shoulder (and a lens in my pocket). Luckily I fell to the other side to protect my camera, but bruised my hip and shoulder pretty badly. My dad teased me about worrying more about my equipment than myself, I just told him that at least I have insurance for my body, not my equipment. After all that, I was pretty pleased with my photos, only to have my professor say that the ocean and sky weren't blue enough (and joked about how I should have gone to Hawaii--uh, yeah, he's hilarious). I guess that's what you get in So Cal when all the beaches are dirty and you have to wait for the marine layer to burn off in the morning before you get a blue sky. Maybe I should have just slept in.



I had trouble coming up with ideas for purple as well, but I found this great textured blanket at the store on clearance for real cheap, so I thought about having Lindsay dress up as a queen. Purple is calming, royal, eccentric, spiritual, wealth, and well liked, so obviously I was going for royal here. I thought it was kind of a cute idea until my professor took a look and told me it was too literal. Oh well. Lindsay had fun posing for me here (for the first few minutes anyway).





Now getting to some of my better ideas, I saw this bright orange shirt and sunglasses and knew I had to buy them for Lindsay to pose for me in since she's such a cutie (not that the other two aren't, but she's more likely to pose for me than they will). So orange is warm, energy, flamboyant, happiness, stimulating, and attention-getting. I was going for flamboyant here with her sitting in a chair in the swimming pool in February, but after taking a look at the photos, I realized they didn't work as well as I wanted to because February in Arizona looks like summer in other places so you don't have any indication that it's not a nice summer day here. For the record, the pool is absolutely freezing in these photos and I know that for a fact because I had to get down into the pool in order to the the perspective I needed for these photos. So, good idea, but it fell flat a little.



Yellow I came up with the idea for pretty quickly, but struggled a little with where I was going to do the photos and who I was going to ask to pose for me. I ended up asking my friend Tricia to model for me (who you might remember from last semester's photos as well). She's so beautiful it makes it easy to take nice photos, and we had a fun time out there making each other laugh so it was fun (for me anyway). Yellow is positive, optimistic, happy, energetic, sun, and it fatigues the eye. I wanted to go for something happy and sunny, so we ended up with some yellow flowers and my friend. I'll have to post more of her photos in another post because so many of them turned out nice, but I haven't had the chance to edit them yet. This one is my favorite though.




Finally is red, and this is the one I did the print of and turned in. This was the one I came up with the idea for almost instantly and I knew I wanted to light it with mostly candles, so there's very little light in these photos (which, unfortunately blew out the back of the photo where the candles were in the frame). I wanted to go back and shoot this again to get the candles out of the background, but I messed up the lighting the second time by trying to add too much light which really changed the way the photo felt. I thought that I'd be able to replicate what I had done before since I had done it once and learned that it's almost impossible to take the same photograph over again even if you control as many of the variables as you can. In any case, red is intense, love, attention-getting, confident, hot, and a stimulant. I thought this photo fit the bill on all of these counts and added a few elements that made it just a little different than a standard love photo.

So now that we've learned more about color, hopefully I can really start paying attention to color in my photos and make them better by making better choices about what color to use in different places. As challenging as this assignment was, I was really happy that we focused on this.

More Photography

I thought it was interesting to find this Gatorade bottle half filled with dirt among the dead branches here.

  It seems that all I've been doing lately is photography. This class is so much more intense than the last class, and so much harder, so all I've been doing is working on my assignments just to get them turned in on time. Well, that and a fifth grade biography project that we've been working on every day for the last three weeks, but I digress. These photos are for my second Flickr assignment that we had, and I really liked some of these images. This is an area I found near my house and I loved just finding all this stuff out there.

I thought this was really interesting with the building falling down and the sink in the middle, like this building has just been left to return to nature.

This I thought was interesting because it's just this big slab out there with no building around it

I really liked the color here and the end of the railroad tracks.

This was my favorite. I love how the stick is coming out of the pole like a "tree" and the colors were just beautiful. It had a great sense of irony with this one.

The first assigment of the semester

Well, this is the first assignment that has to be turned in anyway. I'll have to post our first official assignment later as its due date isn't until next week so I haven't finished editing it yet. Anyhow, this is what I did for our first assignment this semester. We were given the choice of anything we wanted to do, it just had to fall into the category of fine art and not include pets or animals.

I was really challenged by the idea of not having an actual assignment, so it took me a few days of thinking to figure out what I wanted to do. I finally decided to do oranges for two reasons: they're visually stimulating and they have meaning throughout my life. When my grandparents first moved to where I grew up, it was orange groves everywhere you could see. As a child, I loved to eat any kind of fruit and oranges were in my top five favorites that I could eat whenever. The childhood home that I have the most fond memories of had an orange tree in the backyard and I remember going out there to pick oranges only to get stabbed by the thorns more often than not. We have some distant relatives who own an orange orchard and so every few years we end up with a ton of the most delicious oranges and I just can't get enough of them. Now as an adult, trying to lose weight and be healthy, I have discovered a kind of orange that I'd never heard of before (Cara Cara) and have fallen in love with this sour sweet variety. I probably eat at least three oranges a day right now, and whenever I'm craving sour candies, I can eat one of these to satisfy these cravings. Sour patch kids have nothing on them.

So with my idea settled, I had to figure out how I wanted to photograph them. I had decided to do a series, but I think you can see I was torn between two ideas and so one photo doesn't fall into the category of what the majority of them were and it doesn't fit. Although my professor didn't seem to like my second idea as much, when I have time I might have to edit some of those images and throw them up here to see if it works as a series. If I had more time, I might have tried a few more things so that all five fit the theme I was going with, but I ran out of time. At some point in the future I might try to add to the series of four I have here with other fruits and play with them to make beautiful still life photos with them as well, but that idea will have to go on the back burner for now. I also have to say that I was a bit disappointed with the one on the bottom simply because of how the orange looked when I cut into it. I shot what I wanted before class and then got feedback from my professor and there were a couple I needed to re-shoot, this being one of them. Well, the orange I used the first day to shoot was beautiful inside (it's the one right above it), and I really didn't think I would have a problem getting this shot. I had to purchase more oranges because I'd eaten all of the ones from the first shoot (getting my teased by my class mates about eating my props!). So I purchased more oranges and cut into them with that result. I thought that was pretty odd, so I cut into another one sure I would get a good looking orange on the inside. Same thing. When the third one I sliced into looked the same, I gave up and used the first one I had cut into (mostly because I really didn't think I would be able to eat four oranges in a day and I didn't want them to go to waste).

This shoot was a challenge for me for sure since I was just using window lighting. Whenever I used the flash, it blew out the orange, but in order to get the detail I wanted (especially in the really close up one), I had to really close down my aperture setting so the camera wasn't getting a lot of light. And then I had to figure out how to maneuver my tripod close enough to the table so that I could get super close to the orange in order to use my macro lens. The best part about it being a challenge, though, is that I learned from the experience and that is really all it's about for me right now is just learning as much about photography as I possibly can. I knew after the first day of class that this semester was going to be a huge challenge, but I also know that it will just make me a better photographer in the long run. Here's hoping anyway.