Final Project

I like how lights turned to be on this teddy bear in my last project, so I chose to use this bear again as my main character in the final project. 

This is my first time stay here for the summer sessions, so I want to do a documentation of this summer which kind of like a playback of the past few weeks. I just simply picked some places I always go to during the summer, and let the bear be a representation of myself. I want to be an audience or like a cameraman in the series, holding the camera follow that bear, so I shoot him all from behind. I didn't reorder them to make them looked like a narrative of a dauly routine because I want them looked like some piece of memories flashed in my mind.

This mini collection helped me remember this busy busy busy summer, but when I see these pictures right now (when I finally done with all the projects), the summer was still impressive and interesting.

Thank you Sara and everyone in the class!:)

Last Project in Progress

Sorry I don't have any pictures today. My concept is use some toys as my main characters, and the shoot them when they are in the different locations in my apartment doing different things. Initially they don't notice my camera, and in the last picture they see the camera. I want to set them as imitating me, doing something I usually do at home during my college life. So it's kind of like a mini record of my daily life.

A05 Finals

Miniature

I supposed to show a miniature stage of a concert in progress, so I chose to shoot from a bird view angle.

A05 In Progress2

Blog Prompts Week 6

Brainstorms! (In an effort to expand, improve, add complexity, and push your final projects further, please pick 10 of the following to discuss.)

1. Type twenty words or phrases that relate to your project:                    narrative/cozy/texture/comics/constructed/Toy Story/daily/surprise/surveillance video/memory/alive/gossip/awareness/playful/envolve/childhood/colorful/interaction/mystery/angles
2. At the deepest core, describe why you like this project. Dig deep!                 I could talk about myself in a special third-person view through this project. Also make me feel like I'm directing a mini movie.  
3. Expand your project. If time, money, materials, etc would not affect you, how would you expand your project?          I will use computer techs to make them turn into a mini movie, like "Toy Story". 
4. Contract your project. What would it boil down to if squeezed and contracted to its simplest form?                I will only shoot the characters which are the toys and me without a large view of background.
5. Look at one of your images. Redesign it entirely.                   I will use a bird view angle instead of a normal angle to shoot the toys and the whole scene, make it looks like a view from a surveilance video.   
6. Remove something from your project. How does it change?                    I supposed to add some textures into the pictures to make them telling a story. If I remove the textures,  it may turn the story harder to understand.
7. Persuade the reader that your project works well and is the most amazing project you have ever completed.              I am enrolling in a comics class now and learning how to make visual narratives. So I guess I will do a nice job if I tell a story using images. I will try my best to make a "comic" by some photos instead of hand-drawing sketches. 
8. Think of one of your most memorable dreams. How could you add elements from this dreams to your project?                    One of my most memorable dreams was my toys turned to be alive and they were talking to me. I used this as my concept of the project. I will try to show how I interact with the alived toys in the project.
   
9. How would you convert your project into a narrative? How would you remove any narrative from your project?                 I will add texures to help telling the narrative. Also, I will make connectable angles of views to make the narrative consective. If I shoot the pictures all in diffenrent angles with diffenrent characters in them without any texture, it will be very hard to be a narrative.   
   
10. How would you make your project more edgy, saccharine, provocative, empty, revealing, concealing, funny, sad, mysterious, blunt, honest, disingenuous, fast, slow, playful, austere, hateful, lovable, bold, subtle, long, short, big, small, connected, disconnected?                    I guess light source, color and angle of view are the most important elements to help me with this project.
    

A04

Fashion

 Images in fashion magazines always have exagrated colors and details, so I chose to shoot the pair of shoes in such an angel and then make the color more saturated in Photoshop.
I want the shoes looked like they were being wore by someone but I don't want any real people in the frame, so I chose to set the shoes in such positions to make them like walking. The colores of the shoes and the mat underneath were  actually red and white. To make the picture looks more fashionable and fantastic, I adjusted the saturation value.
Students in the class mentioned about the colors of the background were too bright. So if I redo this picture I will try to darken the background or make the backgound color desaturated.
I may wanna do a set of photos of fashion items, they are all in red and white. I will try to place them together and make them in different positions then shoot a series of pictures.

Postcard

 Initially the prompt of the original picture was advertisement, but after I edited it in photoshop I found it more looked like a picture on a post card. I placed the two stuffed toys on a fluffy pillow and used only a small lamp as my light source which was really soft. I framed the paws as the main figures because I want to show the details in the photo. My classmates said they like the soft light and the colors in this picture, which I believed were the best tools to make it looks like a postcard picture.
If I redo the picture, I may try it in a higher contrast value.
For extention, I want to do a series of details of diffenrent parts of the stuffed toys.

Advertisement

 

I used only a lamp as my light source of this picture. I want my viewers to focus only on the teddy bear. In the ads I saw before, they always only highlight the product they were propagating. So I darkened all the background to make my main figure being concentrated. Also when I was framing, I put only that bear in my frame.
In the critique mu classmates suggested me us a black pillow next time, because the colors of the bottom part of the bear and the pillow under it were a little mixed together. So if I redo this photo, I will try use another pillow in a dark color.
For extension, I will try to shoot the bear in defferent angles, and give people a 360 degrees view of it.

Posrcard

 

In many of the postcards the pictures are showing beautiful landscapes, plants, or animals. So I chose to recreate a picture of beautiful plant which is very common in summer. I found it was more beautiful to shoot this pink flower from side instead of from above, so I framed like this and made my focus only on the side of the flower. I used photoshop to make the general colors more saturated, because the color of the picture on postcards are aloways bright and outstanding. For extension I may want to try the same photo in different hues. I guess it will turn out to be a colorful and beautiful series.

A05 In Progress

Inclass17

R05 Semi-Contemporary

Wang Qingsong,(1966 - )

Born in Heilongjiang Province, China

Graduated from Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Sichuan, China in 1991.

Lives and works in Beijing since 1993

Wang Qingsong supplies a wicked impression of life in contemporary China through his personal observations on modern culture. His computer-manipulated photographs richly reflect a playful but serious opinion on the rapid changes within China's society. As China's developing economy continues to create an environment conducive to economic, cultural, and artistic change, areas such as consumer culture have been affected, challenging existing boundaries. Reactions to the economic development have greatly influenced that art produced in China within the past two decades. As a contemporary artist, Wang Qingsong looks to the immediate environment for inspiration, thus infusing his works with emotion generated by what is taking place around him.

His selected artistic language is not unlike that of the Chinese pop movement of the mid-1980s. He, too, incorporates brand names with pop art characteristics, yet creates colorful, kitsch, and amusing, yet intelligent comments on the changing environment. Wang Qingsong's works exemplify a national attitude toward contemporary life in China. Aware of the influx of the consumer culture, the growing materialism and commercialism, he stages scenes, which are recorded and preserved forever in a photography. A distinct aspect of his work is the use of self-portraits as icons which question the directions in which his culture is turning. Wang Qingsong accords himself a role in an art that combines tradition with the sense of everyday life.

Billboard

R05 Historical

Fading Away (1858)

Fading Away is a composition of five negatives. If one examines a large copy of a print closely one can see the "joins", particularly the triangle of grey with no detail in it. One has to remember, of course, that these were contact prints - there were no means of enlarging at that time.  It is clear that many who admired "Fading Away" had no idea that it was a combination print and when, in 1860, Robinson outlined his methods at a meeting of the Photographic Society of Scotland, he was greeted with howls of protest from people who seemed to feel that they had been deceived. There was much discussion about what one correspondent referred to as "Patchwork", rather than composition, and Robinson began to conclude that perhaps it might be better in future not to divulge the secrets of his craft, but leave people to enjoy the finished product!

Henry Peach Robinson (9 July 1830, Ludlow, Shropshire – 21 February 1901, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent) 

was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing - joining multiple negatives to form a single image, the precursor to photomontage.
Robinson was educated at Horatio Russell's academy in Ludlow until he was thirteen, when he took a year's drawing tuition with Richard Penwarne before being apprenticed to a Ludlow bookseller and printer, Richard Jones.Robinson, the leading art photographer of the 1860s, was the first to illustrate the work of Tennyson, and as he stated, he believed that he followed Pre-Raphaelite principles in doing so.

The Lady of Shalott.1861.

 The Lady of Shalott by Henry Peach Robinson is unique, for it is the only known photograph that illustrates this subject so popular in painting and book illustration. Despite Robinson's efforts to create an imaginary scene, the result is a photograph so naturalistic that it looks more like a scene of a theatrical production than an imagined view. The viewer cannot willingly suspend disbelief and imagine that he or she sees the Lady on the river. Rather, the viewer sees a model lying in a boat merely pretending to be the Lady of Shalott. Robinson, who brought Tennyson's strange vision down to the level of the mundane, realized his failure to depict the weird and unearthly in a photograph.The photograph exemplifies the limitations of photography as an illustrative medium. Despite its somewhat comical appearance, the photograph sincerely attempts to illustrate the poem, and in so doing it suggests the emerging importance of photography as a serious art form. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

R05 Constructed Reality

Tom Friedman, Untitled.

background pic from : bbs.tiexue.net

R04 Pop Media

Recreation

Original

The original picture is the front of a postcard published for 2011 New Year. I loved that rabbit on the picture so much and I found occasionally my iPhone case has the ears, too. So I decided to create an image showing a repetition of the cute ears.

I set the original picture as wallpapers on both of my iPhone and laptop, then placed my iPhone in front of my laptop screen. In order to highlight the ears on the phone case, I put a lamp as a light source to make the outline of the case brighter and clearer. 

After shooting the photo, I adjusted it in camera raw to make the background, which is the screen of the laptop dark and blurred, and the foreground, which is the screen of the phone bright and sharp. I supposed to make the picture with a same pattern repeated and meanwhile has gradual levels of sharpness or clarity and brightness.

R04 Research

Historical

Leslie Gill (1908-1958)

He was among a group of photographers who elevated the editorial still life photograph to a unique American art form. Gill studied painting with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and graduated with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1929. He collaborated with visionary art director Alexey Brodovitch, helping to revolutionize approaches to graphic design. Gill also made significant technical achievements in his field, adapting theatrical lighting equipment for specialized use by still life photographers. He was also one of the first artists to experiment with using 8x10 inch format Kodachrome film.

Semi-Contemporary

Cindy Sherman (born January 19, 1954)

Cindy Sherman was born on January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, currently lives and works in NYC. She is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits.
Sherman was being educated in  Buffalo State College, there she became interested in the visual arts, where she began painting. Frustrated with what she saw as the medium's limitations, she abandoned the form and took up photography.
Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. In her work, Sherman is both revealed and hidden, named and nameless.

 

Film Stills

 

Blog Prompts Week 4 (#19-21)

#19. Can you think of anything that:
1) should not be photographed? Why?

Everyone's private should be protected so that I think that people's private lives should not be photographed.
 

2) cannot be photographed? Why?

Those cannot be photographed may because the technology of photographing is not strong enough to do that.

3) you do not want to photograph? Why?

I don't want to shoot anything that I don't want to see. Because I think that my frame is just like my eyes, so those thing I don't like to see will never appear in my camera.

#20 Describe at least one photograph that you could take for each of the following “place” prompts.

• An image of a synthetic “place” such as Disney World, Las Vegas, a Hollywood set, a diorama, etc.
• I think I will place myself at a bungee junping platform or a campo in South Arica with some wild animals. Because those are the places I think is cool but I'm afraid I will never go to.
•  
• An image of a fantasy/fictitious environment concocted from your imagination.
• I would like to create a scene with some characters in my favorite animations.
• An image of a placeless space such as the Internet, cell phones, e-mail, e-bank, surveillance, etc. 
• Maybe I will shoot a person with a cellphone at different times in a day.
• 
  
• 
  
• An image of a public space.
• I guess it will be interesting to be a "surveillance camera" at a corner of a public place to take some pictures.
•  
• An image of a private space.
• I will do the same as the "public place" one, then put them together to make a contrast.
• An in-between space that brings to mind one of the following ideas: nomadic lifestyles, displacement, rootlessness, out-of-placeness, boundaries, movement, expansion, etc. 
• I think I will take pictures of same people at the same place but at different periods of time, to see how that person and place change.

#21

A. Describe some common aesthetic aspects of “news”-related photographs.

Those always have topics as nature, or famous people. The photographers were always trying their bests to find a best angle to make them looked the best.

B. Describe some common aesthetic aspects of “snapshots”, including family photographs, cell-phone shots, photos posted to facebook,

Most of these pictures are not affected, but some times there are still some of them are aleady set to make a best look.

 

C. Describe some common aesthetic aspects of advertisement photographs, including fashion photography, product photography, etc

Of course most of the advertisement photos are purposely embellished. They are showing the products in a kind of artifucially way.

 

D. Describe some common aesthetic aspects of film/movie and television stills.

Many of the stills catches a moment that shows the connection between two scenes. We could guess what just happened or what will happen the next from that picture.

 

E. Describe some common aesthetic aspects of yearbook photos, senior pictures, and team/club/sports group shots. 

 This kind of shots are always catching people's happiness and some sense of achievement--in order to give a hopeful feeling.

F. Describe some common aesthetic aspects of stock images. http://www.corbisimages.com/ http://www.gettyimages.com/

Stock images could be anything in our lives. They are always professional and perfectly manipulated.

 

G. Describe some common aesthetic aspects of fashion photography. 

In the fashion photographys, some very tiny details or bright colors are exaggerated. They also like to focus on the facial expressions of the models.

 

H. Describe some common aesthetic aspects of paparazzi shots or celebrity photographs. 

All the details on a person figure are worthing shooting in those pictures. But we know that those pictures are overstated.

A03 in Progress

R03

The dorm I lived when I just entered the college is a place full of my memory.
I took two pictures of two places I lived since I entered the college. During the first two years I lived in the dorm, I chose to shoot it in a diffuse light condition. I used adjustment brush to make the picture blurred and even darker, which could helped me to show that that building is setting in my memory and is fading out from my mind. In the contrast, I shoot the apartment I am living in right now in the morning light, which is really bright. Then I used camera raw to sharpen the whole picture and make the clarity much higher. The bright and clear scene showed that this place could be clearly appeared in my mind when talking about it.