picture project

Picture Project Reflective Essay

I really enjoyed doing this picture project. I like the "Alphabet Soup" portion of it a little better than the "Picturing the Other" part. It was more of a challenge to find and capture the letters in nature so I think that made it a little more fun. Plus, I would rather take pictures of nature than people. Even the picture of my friend is out in nature. The way I framed my alphabet pictures made an impact. I had to think about which composition within the frame was most appealing and interesting to me. Photographing the letters one way may not read as a letter the other way.

At first I did not approach the "other" person (the stranger) that I photographed. I just found him sitting in his office and started taking pictures. He noticed I was snapping pictures of him, so I asked through the glass if I could continue. He said yes and kept going about his business. The picture I posted was taken after I asked permission to take his picture, but I believe it is candid.

For the most part I wanted all of my photos to look real since they are of nature and people. So I didn't make anything black and white or bring out other colors in an obvious manner. However, I did crop or adjust all of them in at least one way. In every picture I bumped up the clarity so it would show more detail. For the "Alphabet Soup" part, I cropped the image so the letter would be the main component and easy to find. For the "Picturing the Other" part I photographed everyone straight on, portrait style. But I thought it would be boring to put a person smack dab in the middle. So the two "others" are pushed to one side of the composition, allowing the background to provide some information about the person. 

scratch project

Scratch Project Reflective Essay

For this project I chose to work with bright colors. The first composition I created is made up of analogous colors. I felt that by using colors next to each other on the color wheel, my composition would be more harmonious. I counteracted that harmony by sporadically placing dots all over the image. The large light blue shapes have hard lines coming to points leading the eye around the composition. I liked creating shapes with flat color because it was easy to set up a bunch of different compositions.

After the first image was complete, I chose colors I like. The purple and orange landscape only uses two colors at different opacity levels. The purple has more blue than red so the orange works out nicely. The colors are simpler than those in the first image, due to the fact that I only worked with two, but the technique is more complicated.

For the last composition I started working with too many colors. I had to narrow it down to a limited color palette. I ended up, on accident, working with the complementary colors blue and orange again. However I changed the opacity levels because the blue I started with was bright and obnoxious. So now it looks like shades of green, which is more muted and not so irritating. Another reason I softened the color is because the composition is rather busy.

collage project

 

Collage Project Reflective Essay

Constructing these two collages had its ups and downs. In the beginning I had the theme of marriage in my head so I found symbols relating to that subject. I used two goats with their noses touching, rope tied in knots encompassing the two goats, and the famous sculpture of an orator. I also used a picture I took of a sidewalk with trees in Jacksonville that looks like an aisle. I originally wanted to put in other symbols, but I found that to be a challenge with the vertical orientation of the collage. It seemed like less was more. I thought it would be easy to execute my idea but it wasn’t.

I did not really have a clear plan in mind when I sat down to make the second collage. I knew I wanted to continue to have a natural background and work with images of animals. The second collage was more comical and fun because I put different types of animals in a setting where they don’t belong. I just chose images I found to be funny or aesthetically pleasing due to their color or character. It didn’t matter so much that it made sense. I found it easier to include more images with the horizontal orientation, but I still appreciated using fewer pictures.

There were stages when the collages were unsettling. At some points, they just got overcrowded and I had to take a few images out or make them smaller. I found the lasso tool to be very useful, but following up with the eraser tool got old. It was hard for me to get really close to the image without going too far. Overall, it was a fun project and it would be cool to do one on a larger scale.