Monday, November 29, 2010

revised goals

I have always been fascinated by the concept of perception.  What one person sees is not always the same as what another person sees.  I wrote my college essay about how being interested in ornithology and bird watching allowed me to focus on, see, and hear birds everywhere I went, even though nobody else noticed them.  In many ways, I see this as a basic tenet of photography.  In our culture, art is used to decorate and to provoke conversations and greater attention to detail.  When people see a photography, they immediately ask themselves what the photographer wanted to show them.  I want to use my photography to shape my perception of the visual world and to show them what I find.
The human eye is almost always in focus.  When you look at a scenery or landscape, you never consider that your eyes are not taking in the whole scenery at once.  They dart around, focusing almost instantly on whatever you choose to look at.  With a photograph, you get a different sense--because photographs are usually flat, the plain of our focus can envelop the whole image.  How wonderful this is!  If you take a photograph where the plane of focus is not parallel to the light sensor, then you will create an image with which people can experience a new kind of perception.
With my photographs, I want to show people a whole scenery.  People tend to get too hung up on small details.  They zoom in and have a small depth of field in which the subject is all you can see.  I want the whole scene to be the subject.  Each of my images is designed to show you what you might not notice is beautiful as you walk past it in day to day life.  You will be able to view it from a new perspective, with a different plane of focus and a different camera angle so that the experience of viewing these images will be different from what you normally see.  What is the value of capturing images if they are exactly what you see with the naked eye?  My images show the world as it is without any human ocular limitations.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Monday, November 15, 2010

self-designed project

One of my favorite photographs is from "Everything is Illuminated."  I couldn't find a good copy, but here's something.

Also, one of my favorite photographers is Andreas Gursky.
(Atlanta 1996)

Another similar photographer is Edward Burtynsky.
AMARC #5, Davis-Monthan AFB, Tuscon, Arizon, USA, 2006."
Chromogenic color print. Copyright the artist, courtesy Hasted Hunt Kraeutler,
New York and Corcoran Gallery of Art.

I get a feeling when I look at photos of something huge.  It's a bit overwhelming.  I want to communicate that in my photos.
What I see in common in these three is vastness in landscapes.  Also, they don't use perfect symmetry, but they're not afraid to put a subject right in the middle.
They are all images that make you wonder how so much can fit in one image.  How can so much light from so many places all make it through that lens onto the film?
In a way, this is kind of what separates photography from other art (in a very f/64 way).  You can only have a certain amount of detail in a painting no matter how hard you try.  In a photograph, as technology progresses, we may be able to make images with more detail than we can see.
I sometimes get this sense from Aaron's photos, however he tends to do more macro shots.  I want to try that.
I like the idea of stretching that boundary.  I don't have a cherry picker or a huge ladder to lug around, so I will have a hard time getting such high-angle shots, but I would like to try to capture this vastness.  Will I be able to create that same sense in a macro shot?  Can I make you feel that way by looking at the ground by your feet or the Bowdoin library?  I think it's all about focus, so I might have to explore using my large format to accomplish this.  If I take color 4x5 film and ship it off to be developed, will I  be able to enlarge it at Bowdoin, or will I have to use b&w film and hand-color?

Tangible non-photographic references:

When Queen recorded one of the greatest songs ever made, Bohemian Rhapsody had so many layers written over it to make the sound complete that they say the ribbon on the tape was completely transparent.  It made a whole sound that seems deeper than you can imagine.  You can feel when you listen to it that there is more there than you could ever hope to hear.

Likewise, listening to a band live has the same effect--you get a bigger picture than when you listen to a recording.  There is more there to hear and you feel dwarfed by the sound.  I want my pictures to do that--make you feel small.

To some extent, Planet Earth, Baraka, and various other nature films have the same effect.  I, however, don't want to limit my vastness to nature.

That said, I think there is a lot of this experience in the natural world.  The reason people say the Grand Canyon is a natural wonder is because of this feeling.  Standing on a peak in Kings Canyon (actually the deepest canyon in the US with 8000 ft. rims) you are totally overwhelmed.  This is what John Muir and Ansel Adams loved and what convinced Teddy Roosevelt to create national parks.

In mathematics, there is something called the Mandelbrot set.  It is not an algorithm, but it is often credited as being one.  In actuality, it is a set of numbers that map onto the real numbers.  Math talk aside, if you use a certain criteria to draw them out, you create a shape that has infinitely many details occurring in a predictable pattern.  This is relevant because I think these photographers have the same thing.  You could crop their photos and blow them up several times and still come up with just as interesting of an image.  There is simply that much detail.



what is my struggle?

I want to challenge the frame of the camera.  What makes large format images interesting is that the human eye cannot focus on 2 planes at once, yet the large format camera parametrizes a different plane into the plane of your vision.  As a result, you get an astounding result of a world you cannot see in real life.  I want to make these images where you cannot see them in real life just because of our physical limitations as humans--images in such great focus and so vast that you simply cannot imagine that it can actually exist on the wall in front of you.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Times2 rough drafts

I only had time to really make 1 good draft.  Sorry.

here it is.

I might compose this together with another shot of the same thing so that the clock face appears twice in the cup...

Other ideas I'm considering:

I want to do an image where the subject is expiration dates.  Maybe I'll go to Hanaford and get 31 pictures of different dates and make a calendar with them...

I want to experiment with panning.
I might try to think outside the box with this.  I will try panning rotationally instead of side to side.  Specifically, I might try to match the rotational speed of a wheel so the world spins around it.
I also want to try panning with something or somebody who is moving diagonally.  If I only pan in one direction with them, then their blur will be perpendicular to the blur of the background.

progression raw to finished:
this will be an image composed of several shots.  I want to show something go from its most raw form to its completed form.  It will be kind of like my tree--I think I will take slices of each shot and compose them together in order from "youngest" to "oldest."
right now I'm playing with grass->sheep->yarn->hat
or rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey, whiskey makes....
seed->tree->lumber->furniture

Monday, November 1, 2010

notes on my drafts:

the first six images are composites:
the first 2 add together through hdr to become the third one and the same with the next three.
I am thinking of putting a whole day or parts of a day in one location into an hdr to make an image of the whole day.  What does the collective image of the light of the whole day there look like?

The next two images are long exposures from throughout my day.  I intend to take somewhere around 50 of these from throughout the day (maybe timestamped) and I will put them together like I did there.  I'm thinking the images might have some settings in common in each set.  Maybe I'll do 4 sets of 50 where 1 set has the camera on automatic, the second is like my first set where I do long exposures, but with the camera fixated on something as I pass by it, the third is all set f-stop, and the fourth is all with the same shutter speed... who knows.  Any suggestions?

I haven't really done drafts of my other ideas...

ignore the toilet at the bottom.
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=

and 


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2sec exposures fixated on something as I pass by it.

 4 sec exposures hanging from my neck in daily life.

3 shots of a toilet in different stages of a flush (hdr):  I am going to do this differently for sure.  I don't think it worked out too well.  Either way, I want to combine several captures of motion...  see my second idea for another shot below.  


other shots I'm considering:
1) large format: double exposure of stars in sky and sunrise so we have points of light in the sky with the sun on the horizon
2) digital: long exposure of a glass container as water is removed from it (perhaps a syphon?) or something like that
i want to capture the reflections off of the surface of the water at different times--will the glass be completely white?  Will it just have swirled colors?
What would happen if I did hdr with shots of the glass at different levels? would we get the reflection on the surface of the water appearing inside of the water?

3) Large Format: I want to take a picture of myself with a long exposure in the style of Abelardo Morrell.  That is, I want to sit outside of a room for 8 hours and capture myself in the image that shows up in a camera obscura on the walls inside a room.  Likelihood that i'll be able to do this this week: low.

4) Digital:  I will take several images of a sun dial (possibly at equivalent exposures) throughout the day so that I get maybe 12, maybe 24 images of what the sundial looks like at different times.  Should I arrange these around a circle like times on a clock?