Stop Motion Reflection

What is the narrative of your project? When is the moment of crisis?

The narrative of our project began with a guy reading a comic. A superhero and a villain come out of the comic and then fight and the superhero wins. Then it goes back to the guy reading the comic so it's like it happened in the comic and not in real life. The moment of crisis is the fight scene. 

How does the combination of imagery and music shape the mood and experience of the short film?

The imagery and music shape the mood to reflect either the intensity of the fight scene or the beginning of the movie where the guy is reading the comic. I could have chosen a bit more intense music to increase the tension of the fight but I think the mood was still reflected. 

What are the strengths of your project?

I think the strengths of the stop motion were the picture quality of the comic reading. There were also a few good photographic parts in the fight scene.

If you were to do another one, what would you do differently?

I would make the fight scene a lot longer and more intricate than it was and pick better music to reflect its intensity. I would also maybe cut down on the introduction like all the coffee drinking. 

Stop Motion

quinton from Ms. Seal's Art History on Vimeo.

House of My Mind Reflection

For the House of My Mind project, we had to use photoshop to make pictures that relate to ourselves. We had to make four pictures: one with ourselves in it, two with non-photographic elements, and they all had to relate to the house of our mind. We all began the project by doing a writing about what is in the house of our minds. I really focused on how I see things and the vastness that is in the my mind. To do this, my first picture I created was one with me in it and I chose to picture myself in the sky but have the moon in the day, signifying the simpleness of the house of my mind but the moon shows that there's some complication. My second work was one where I showed both day and night next to each other with a rough background under it. It shows the two sides of my mind with a distinct line separating them but at the same time the mountains are uniform on both sides showing that they connect subtly. My third work of the skyscraper was my most dynamic and I feel like I was able to use the skills I developed from the previous two works to make it so good. It related to me because the house of my mind is somewhat of a skyscraper, reaching into the sky until it disappeared. I also put a red non-photographic layer that really stands out and supported the photograph. My last picture was pretty strong as well except for my use of a cat. It really signified how I see the world because the words "the future" are seen in the eye of the cat. I redid it to have my face instead of the cats and it has the same vision. I felt like the cat was much more smoothly incorporated in the image though. Overall, I think the first two picture I was still learning to use photoshop and figuring out what I was capable of and after that I was able to use my skills to grow and refine the project.

House of My Mind

Transforming Materials

Final Reflection

What skills have you come into this class that have been helpful? What skill have you most needed to cultivate?
I came into photography class with minimal experience in taking pictures. Disregarding my experience, I had an eye for what would look good as a photograph and had a general knowledge of photography. Over the year, I've gained a knowledge of the different terms involved in the class such as aperture and shutter speed. I also didn't have any experience using film whatsoever.

How have these skills been helpful?
My eye for photography has been helpful while taking pictures. I could see a lot of detail in the image and I was very interested in taking pictures with a shallow depth of field. My skills were particularly helpful when we were asked to take pictures of still life with specific criteria we needed to fill.

What skills did you realize that you need to improve in order to be successful in this class?
I need to improve my landscape pictures such as the urban landscape project. I didn't really have an eye for this type of picture so I needed to develop my skills in this category.

What steps have you undertaken to improve these skills?
To improve my landscape pictures, I have looked and critiqued other urban landscape photographs from both famous photographers and people in our class. This has helped me realize what a good urban landscape requires.

What excites you about photography right now?
Photography is exciting because there are so many different projects so we can get a sense of many different photographic elements and styles. I also really enjoy working digitally and with photoshop and putting different effects onto the pictures.

My favorite photograph that I've taken this year is an image of water on a wooden base that I took for the digital abstract project. I really like this picture because of all the editing I did to the picture using Photoshop.

My favorite project was the still life project. I really enjoyed changing the lighting and experimenting with different techniques. I thought many of the photographs that I took for the project turned out really well.

My least favorite project was the portrait project because many of my pictures didn't turn out as well as I wanted when I developed them. I also didn't really like the style of portrait photographs because it requires a model.

Abstract Darkroom

For the darkroom abstract project, we had to take abstract pictures using our film cameras. While we were developing our images, we had the option of either solarizing them or making them sepia toned. The first image is solarized and the second image is sepia. The other photographs have nothing done to them. I think the solarized photograph worked very well because it is such a contrast to the unsolarized version.