Waiting

I apologize for the scanning quality. :( The spots shouldn't be there!

This is one of the last prints I created in my senior year of high school. It is also one of my favorite photos because it came out basically exactly how I had envisioned it. I love playing with shadows and patterns, especially because in black and white photography shadows and light, along with contrast, create tones which all have huge effects on the mood of the photograph ("Black and White..."). Shadows can develop very different and interesting views of a subject. And when you think about it, all lighting patterns are defined by the shadows, not the light; if there were no shadows, there would be no patterns and all lighting would be the same (Garrison).

When working with prints that have shadows and lights, the photographer needs to remember to do something different when developing in the darkroom. When I say "do something different" I mean using contrast filters or other techniques to give pictures more highlights and darklights in order to really create a beautiful and clean looking print with noticeable whites and blacks. When they don't do something different, the whites can come out gray and the darks can come out dull. Keeping in mind, a highlight is the brightest area in a photo in which one can still see detail; same for a true shadow being defined as the darkest area of a photo in which you can still see detail (Garrison). For my photograph, there is not a lot of detail to see in the darks, but that is because most of the details for the entire picture are her facial features. I tried to use the dark shadows to highlight those details.

I was with my friend at a train station (which is why I named this piece Waiting, in essence of the idea of waiting for a train) and this shadow caught my attention all the way from the other side of the hall because of the pattern it was creating on the floor. Conveniently, our photography project assignment was shadows. I thought about what I could do to really bring out the pattern and lines and I remembered a picture I had seen. the subject was a person's face with some kind of shadow against it. That's originally where I got the idea of using my friend in it. I really like how it catches the attention of the viewer and I think it's really interesting looking at how the pattern falls on her face.

This is a good example of really finding ways to make something simple, interesting. I could have simply just taken a picture of the shadow on the ground at a slightly off-angle. That might be kind of interesting, but probably not enough to get a double take or even five seconds of a viewer's attention. Using something that already has dimensions and angles, like a person's face, can give a shadow a completely different look.


References
"Black and White Photography Shadows and Light." The Secret of Tonality. Nature Photography Central, 2007-2009. Web. 29 Jan. 2012
Garrison, Tedric. "Shadows and Highlights: The Mark of Excellence." PictureCorrect. Picture Correct, n.d. Web. 29 Jan. 2012.

An Inspiration

There's thousands of artists and photographers out there. Just imagine how many pieces of art that would be. A lot, right? Millions upon millions of works of art that everyone can see. Within those millions of works, there are many pieces that can give a viewer or fellow artist some kind of inspiration.

Everyone has favorites, favorite food, favorite place, favorite color, favorite song. Well, one of my favorite artists is David Hockney. He contributes to multiple artistic medias including photography, painting, drawing, graphics, and many others. He has such an interesting, unique, and different style and technique. I learned about him my junior year in high school in my photography class. We had to create a collage, but specifically mimicking a technique Hockney uses. It’s one of my favorite ways to create a collage because of its originality and creativity. In some of his collage pieces, he shows the passage of time by photographing the scene and also any changes or movement of the subject. When he puts the collage together, he places the multiple photos of one subject and it’s changes together.

Here is an example of one of his collages that portrays this method. It is called Scrabble, Hollywood. It shows a group of people playing Scrabble, but it also shows their different faces throughout the game expressing diverse emotions. It shows time passing. I find that really interesting, creating a way to show time passing through a photograph.

He uses another technique that gives a picture an interesting twist that grabs a viewer's attention. He'll create a collage, but when he puts the photos together, he doesn't align them perfectly; he places them slightly off which gives the image a peculiar look. He also uses different views of items in the picture so the end result is a little distorted. His collection of these collages are called composite polaroids and my favorite one is called Still Life Blue Guitar. I love looking at the different details and objects he includes and the different angles and views.

I really enjoy looking at his art and I love how original his work is. He's truly an inspiration to me and his techniques are something I would really like to try using in some of my photography.

If you want to see some of his work, here is his official site with a number of his pieces.

Hello,

My name is Jessica. I prefer photographs, not words. However, this is a blog for my English 112 class, so I’m required to write. When I learned I was going to have to create a blog, I almost immediately grabbed a course catalog to find an alternate class. Writing is not a strong suit of mine and honestly, sharing my writings with other people makes me nervous. As I looked through blogs online, I realized you could really make a blog about anything. That’s when I realized I may be getting worried for no reason. I noticed a lot of the blogs people created were family oriented or about a particular hobby or interest. Cooking, writing, sports, fashion, traveling, and then I came across photography.

I’m taking a photography course this semester and I thought if I could incorporate my work that I create in the next few months, maybe this blogging thing wouldn’t be so bad after all. So that is what I am going to attempt to do. Share my photographs (and some sort of writings about each photograph) with you.

Photography is one of my favorite activities, especially black and white film photography. I took photography classes for two years in high school and I’ve continued it outside of school as well. It was required to use manual 35 mm SLR cameras, so we were able to learn how to develop our film and then create prints in the dark room. It’s so much fun, taking pictures of interesting and different things, creating some kind of appealing photograph using light, angles, shadows, objects, people, just anything. And then working with the negatives in the dark room using different developing techniques to make the picture your own and how you envisioned it from the beginning.

For me, it’s a really gratifying hobby. I love trying new things or trying to improve older work or even trying to create something similar to a photo I’ve seen before, but use my own twist. The possibilities are endless and that’s something that I really love about it. You could have the same picture, but you could make them appear totally different. You could have two completely unrelated subjects, but develop them in a way that makes them have some sort of connection. You could photograph something to make a statement or you could create it just to have an entertaining picture.

The ideas are infinite and really, the hardest part is deciding what you want to photograph first...