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.