Thesis Project Almost Finished!!!

Fun Fact,
I tried to add up all the single images going into my final timeline and the number has just eclipsed 5,960.

Take a look at the pictures, each has a different level of magnification. This has been very different editing like this vs video clips. Much more complicated in many ways.

Final Statement

My thesis has really evolved over the semester, and at this point I am in the final stages of putting the whole project together. Originally my goal wast to set out to create a narrative fictional piece, using friends to act as the main characters in the story. I soon realized however, that my friends around me could tell the story without me setting things up. I started taking photos during my every day interactions with them, and began capturing the essences of the conversations I was having. I have been capturing these moments and conversations now for several weeks. They have been interesting to put together next to each other, because they all have one common quality in that they are through my perspective. The people featured in the project are people who are very close to me so it is easy to get them to have the real emotion and truth come out in their expression. The stop motion technique is enabling me to highlight this, because it allows the eye to linger on specific moments in time. In video and film, the images progress so fast that it gives the illusion of fluid motion. By slowing down these frame rates, I have attempted to draw out certain moments, which really take these normal conversations and interactions to the next level. It breaks them down to a more fundamental level and when placed with others they begin to tell a story.

An interesting turn came in this project when I decided to integrate some setup situations into the timeline. I have a moment when I myself appear in the sequence, and I sit down to watch tv at the end of the day. As I flip through the channels, my friends from earlier appear, each doing something different, and acting as if they were a television program. The sequences are very basic in setup and obviously staged. I wanted to do this because it plays of many levels of my interactions with them and my interests. One of my goals was to break up the forced reality that most motion picture presents in television and film. The name of the game is deception, and people spend their lives working very hard to create an alternate reality on television. In actuality, this is a precise "scam" of sorts. The audience is sucked into a completely false and constructed world, and for a period of time accepts this as true, more or less. In my setup "tv programs" I made it clear that this is a setup, and these sequences clash with the original sequences that I shot in my day to day life.

My final piece will be just over 4 minutes long, and will be void of dialog. The only words that may come into play are inaudible mumbling, that in earlier attempts enhanced the overall look by giving another level of depth in audio. I have my daily interactions building up to the eventual staged interactions, and then at the finish things get smashed all into one until a finish at the end of the score. I am very excited about this piece, because the subjects are very close to me. It is a look into my life from a unique perspective, and even the process and method of presentation is a statement on my interests and passions.

My original goal was to explore the gap between still imaging and video. The challenges of working stills into motion has been interesting and very new to me. It actually was a very different process from what I was expecting, and my project's evolution from the beginning is evidence of that. I'm very excited about what I have learned from working on this piece, and hope to do similar work in the future.

Weird

Visual Artist Statement

Ian Winters

Ian Winters is a San Francisco Bay Area based photographer. He incorporates video, frozen image, and photography into a variety of mediums.

http://www.ianwinters.com/about.html

Dale Chihuly

Chihuly grew up in Tacoma, Washington. After a series of family tragedies, Chihuly decided to go to school at the University of Puget Sound in 1959. He eventually got a degree in interior design from the University of Washington followed by a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Glasswork and a Master of Fine Arts at RISD. After completing his Masters, Chihuly focused on glassblowing at the Venini Factory in Venice. The technique and process he learned there is evident in his work even today. Over time he has featured his work in a wide variety of spaces, both natural and urban. After a suge in popularity, Chihuly’s work can be found across the globe in a variety of places including over 200 museum collections worldwide.
His sales in 2009 were estimated over 29 million dollars.

Sequence 1

I have decided to go with faster frame rates and introducing more content. Im doing more fragmented sequences that move faster than the first piece. Im telling a story more about interaction rather than something more linear at this point.

Photographer Presentation 6

Pedro Meyer

Born In Spain, Meyer is now based in Mexico. He is one of the leading photographers in the digital revolution. He also edits, and curates other photography. He originally started as a documentary photographer but with the emergence of digital he went down a different road. He makes images by compositing.

Interesting fact, he was the first to include a CD with images and sound combined, and also one of the first to feature digital prints.

http://www.pedromeyer.com/heresies/heresies.html


John Wood

Wood’s signature is the idea of incorporating other mediums into his work including painting, lithographs and drawings.

Interesting fact is he was a pilot in the Army Air Corps. Studied photography post war and moved to New York where he started his career as an artist.

http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/exhibits/johnwood/woodphotos.html

Midterm Review

My midterm project is a fragmented assessment of a random day in my life here at MSU. I decided to pick Tuesday, for what reason I do not know. I shot thousands of photographs that incorporated my interactions with my closest friends and people who are very close to me. I then edited the images together with music. The removal of the sound and the breakdown of a conversation into single frames really capture the moments and emotions that I encounter every day, and many of them are lost in the mix. This project has made me really look deeper into my interactions and moments in my life.

My framing and perspective is based on my perspective and view of the world. As I’m shooting massive amounts of stills to create and illusion of moving images, the focus on each singular image is somewhat less. I’m more on overall composition for each segment. My goal is to come across as being intimate and personal. This is a view into my daily life. That being so, most portions of the piece are very “gritty” in nature. I shoot on the move with no setup. I am out to capture the moment, not stage one at this juncture. Later on as my project develops, I hope to incorporate a staged and controlled production element.

The idea of stop motion videos is far from being a new concept. It has so many different applications that it really is its own genre. I have been fascinated by both still and moving photography my whole life. Here at MSU I have studied both halves intensely, but I have never explored the bridge between the two. This project is my first dabbling in this. At the very core what I am shooting are individual pictures, but I am shooting them in such large amounts, that I am able to even sometimes convince the audience that I am using a video camera. I am enjoying experimenting with the different frame rates, by slowing down certain images and then doing speedy sequences. This lets the viewer bounce back and forth and question how I produced the piece. When I spot a subtlety or a meaningful expression, I have the ability to linger on it longer. Truthfully however, at this point I have let the pauses I’ve come across happen randomly. Thus far I have edited to the beat of the music, keeping pacing semi aligned with that of the beat. When a longer pause or hard note hits in the track, I may extend the frame above it longer. This has allowed me to take a closer look at my interactions with the friends who I have incorporated. I get to see for a single moment what their true feeling was to the specific situation, something that happens thousands of times per interaction. These single moments are rare for us to reflect on in our daily interactions. Often times, they only come when looking at a photograph. I like this process of speeding up and slowing moments in time, and it is really offering a small window for an audience to see who I am and through my eyes. At the same time, its allowing me a deeper look into my own world and those I share it with.

Honestly at this point, I see my project on the verge of taking off. I really had a what I though was a clear vision at the beginning, but as I progressed it opened so many new doors I became just as lost as I was before coming up with the idea. I think now though, I have a firm grasp on the specific things I want to produce as this piece evolves into a final work. I also have now worked several times with the actual assembly process, and I know what will work and what won’t. At this point I hope to work through more of these daily interactions, and maybe even progress the titles to featured in the daily piece to larger more generic groupings. Near the end of the piece, I want to incorporate a fabricated and choreographed scene, showing how as a director and producer, I work to create images. Yet at the same time, this project will showcase the images I often take for granted every day when I find myself thinking about the “planned” ones.

Joe Ractliff

From what I could find online, there is very little bio published on Jo Ractliffe. She is however, very active in her work and has been featured in many large exhibitions and continues to do so. Jo Ractliffe was born in 1961 in Cape Town, South Africa. She completed both her Bachelors and Masters degrees at the University of Cape Town. In 1999 she was the recipient of the Vita Art Prize.

Some of her most famous Solo exhibitions include Terreno Ocupado in Johannesburg in 2008. She has also featured work in several group exhibitions including the seventh Gwangju Biennale, in Korea three years ago. She also participated in Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Centre for Photography, New York. Today she lives and works in Johannesburg.
To explore her themes of a "revelation of absence", Johannesburg artist Jo Ractliffe draws on a range of photographic and art practices, including snapshot, documentary, forensic and studio photography, as well as installation video and projections.

One critic writes, "It is not accidental, that Ractliffe has chosen photography as the medium most suited to her thematics. Photography occupies a beautifully, maddeningly awkward space between otherness and the real, between art and documentary journalism".

In her own words Ractliffe states, "What interests me are things that are ephemeral - desire, loss, longing - and their relationship to photography. I am also curious about what we don't expect from photographs, what they leave out, their silence and the spaces they occupy between 'reality' and 'desire'. I try to work in an area between the things we know and things we don't know; what sits outside the frame. I am interested in exploring these oblique and furtive 'spaces of betweenness', and in how they figure in producing meaning in a mode of representation that seems so often predicated on specificity and transparency. Photography is quite a resistant and unforgiving medium."

Most of Ractliffe’s photographs are shot in black and white. She seems to have re-occurring themes of depth in her photos. Many have a distinct fore, middle, and background aspect to them. They are very documentary in approach, and show the gritty nature of South Africa and Johannesburg and its people. In her photographs that feature people as the subjects, they seem to be somewhat set up, yet maintain the surprise of a chance juxtaposition. What I mean by this is that Ractliffe is able to draw an expression of personality from the people she photographs. It seems genuine, and not set up. She is very talented at pulling the true story from the environment she photographs.

Joe Deal

Joe Deal was a well known landscape photographer for many years. He recently passed away in 2010 at only 62 years of age. He was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1947, but was actually raised in Missouri and later in Minnesota. After high school, Deal was accepted to the Kansas City Art Institute. After obtaining his degree, he took work as a janitor in a museum of photography in New York. Much later he received a masters in fine art from New Mexico University. He had a passion for teaching, and worked at the University of California, Washington University, and Rhode Island School of Design.

Deal had a fascination with making photographs portraying man’s impact on the world. In 1970 he made his big break when 18 of his photos were shown at an exhibition by William Jenkins at the Eastman House’s International Museum of photography. Deal was different in that he broke away from the “romantic” landscape made immortal by Ansell Adams. He was more concerned with the sometimes ugly and contrasting mark humans make on the world around us. He was fascinated with the once untouched west, and how development had changed the pristine landscapes. He approached his work in a very different manner than most photographers. He was scientific, rather than artistic, and this approach is what set him apart as something new and different. Deal was very against the idea of “personal intrusion.” He wanted to document the environment, rather than leave his own mark or interpretation in his image. Some of his most famous work was titled “The Fault Zone.” He furthered his concept by adding geologic impacts along with humans on the landscape.

One critic described his work as
“jaundice, and dry-eyed inspection.”

Another Raves
“They were photographing landscapes, but they weren't after beauty in the
classical sense; they were fine-art documentarians, capturing how man had
altered the American landscape. That genre of photography, for artists like
Deal, was no longer about the sublimity of nature; it was about the
intersection of civilization and wilderness. Not mountains, but suburban
sprawl.”

Personally, I think his work is very interesting and at the time very different. In my mind he bridged the gap between documentary photography and fine art work. While he says his work is an exact representation of the land he see’s, it still has its own personality. I think the strongest aspect of his work is the obvious attention to composition. I think despite his own remarks about leaving his bias aside, he still tells a story in the way he frames his photographs.

Text In Image

Larry Fink

Larry Fink was born in 1941 in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the New School for Social Research in New York City and was not afraid to voice his political opinions. Fink described himself as a Marxist. He has spent a substantial amount of time teaching and still remains on the faculty of Bard College. He also taught at Yale Parsons School of Design, and at New York University among other schools.
Fink’s work is widely recognized and shown regularly around the globe. He has done commercial work for big names like Bacardi and Smirnoff and has also been published in the New York Times and Vanity Fair.

http://www.larryfinkphotography.com/photos.php?cat=moments

I chose to analyze the project highlighted on Fink’s website called “moments.” It is a collection of photographs that document moments that would be familiar if one has ever been to a traditional wedding. On a beginning level, each image is black and white and tend to have a more “dramatic” lighting style. Some have a flash photography/documentary look, while others seem softer and show more deliberate control. This series is different from the others on the site because it focuses more on emotion and feeling, rather than documenting a specific person. Often people’s faces are partially or completely out of frame, and the emphasis is put on a different subject in the picture. Some pictures feature a shallow depth of field and demonstrate control in isolating a specific point of interest. The one of the couple holding hands takes the face out of the picture, allowing the viewer to project their own emotions into the image. That I why I believe these are successful and innovative, because it allows the viewer to put their own imagination to work. When they don’t see the face in the image they are able to put themselves or something more personal into it and therefore take more away from the picture then a standard “snapshot.”

Composition is obviously a big focus in this series. The position of the person/person’s in the frame as well as how much of them we see is thought out differently for each image. It’s interesting to compare the images together because there seems to be a pattern that arises. There are several pictures that are very general on first glance. They may be of just some hands holding or the legs of men standing in a hallway. Others though feature an entire person enjoying a moment. I think they are arranged this way to give us some idea of the specific event we are visiting, but also allows the viewer to make their own connections with the event by emotionally connecting with the pictures that are more general.
After reading several reviews, it seems that many critics praise Fink for his ability to come into situations and document the real emotion. One of the best quotes I found was from an anonymous review,

“Fink is best known for his photographs capturing moments of celebration
from unconventional perspectives. As an admirer for Henry Cartier-Bresson,he
carries on the idea of freezing a defining moment. His work reflects his
desire to document and portray the human emotions and elegant movements that
define and connect us all. "It is a profound aspect of our culture, this
compulsion for proof. It allows me to wade into a party."

People describe how he uses his senses to analyze an environment and then translate it into his photography. Some negative comments can be found in his more political work, especially that of his Vanity Fair coverage of the last presidential elections. Being an acclaimed photographer gives that person great power in how they want to portray individuals, in this case the presidential candidates.

Overall I enjoy the series because it takes a somewhat normal event and turns it into something more. As a viewer I don’t know who’s wedding this is and any of the people. If I were to look though a photo album of snapshots from a random wedding filled with people I don’t know, I would likely walk away not gaining much or feeling very connected. The way these images are sequenced however, makes me feel more connected to these strangers. I as a viewer am able to feel some emotion that I can connect with in some of the pictures, and then when I see a snapshot I can imagine how the person in the picture was feeling. This is a successful and interesting series because it begins to break down the boundaries I would normally encounter when looking at a bunch of strangers at a wedding.

Blogs 17 and 18

17. I honestly think that still photography had entered a new era in which the famous photographer may be no more. I think the process of recording still images will continue to evolve. Technology has allowed seemingly everyone to have easy access to recording a still image. What once required expensive equipment and time consuming labor in exposure now can happen instantly though something as small as a cell phone. Content is being produces at a rate the world has never seen and I think it is on of the biggest aspects of change in the world of photography. 50 years ago it was much easier to stand out as a photographer. Ease and accessibility to the art now means that there are many more people taking pictures. This will be the biggest change. What will it take for someone to truely stand out as a unique photographer? Will we ever see anyone again write their name in history like Ansel Adams?

18. I think that if I were to define "photography" I would describe it as -
The process of recording the physical world around us through the lens of the camera.
It is the camera's adaptation of what we see. Truely the camera can never capture what we are actually seeing real time, but it is an interpretation of a single moment in time.

FilmPoster

Further Exploits in HDR

One of my favorite places in East Lansing, had to try HDR down here.

Real creepy basement

Tom Brady Joke

Composite

Blog Questions #1-#4

Blog Prompts #1-#4

1.     Think of various ways in which your “view” or visual perception of the world is altered, distorted, manipulated, reframed, blurred, disrupted, obstructed, etc. List some

2.     2. What objects “change” the way you “see” things in the world?

Perception and “view” of the world is a huge topic to attempt to tackle.  Ones view of the world can be physically impaired by a blindfold.  Substances like alcohol or drugs could also impair it.  The mind itself and personality affects the way we see the world.  I think that our vision of the world is often altered by technology.  When watching TV you may connect with certain far away places and may even go as far to say you know what it is like there, but do you really?   Viewing people and environments from television programs, movies, and magazines holds the viewer to the mercy of the eye behind the camera.  The viewer only sees what someone else chose to put before him or her.  Is this really seeing?

3.     What experiences change the way you “see” things in the world?

4.     4. What is the relationship between the ways you visually “see” the world and the way you “experience” the world?

I think the experiences we have everyday affect how we see the world.  Every day experience shapes who we are as individuals.  I think the individual’s perspective has a huge impact on not necessarily what we see, but how we interpret it.   In the end, the interpretation is what the viewer walks away with.  A person can’t explain what they “just saw” without first analyzing it on their own and forming their own opinions.   These individual opinions become that person’s own personalized version of what they see and experience. 

HDR

 

HDR was initially a struggle for me but once I got through the initial learning curve, I see it as a method I’d love to explore more in the future.   I chose to shoot my image near the abandoned buildings on Grand River Avenue and Abbot.  This area is filled with textures that have always intrigued me and I figured the high contrast would work well with an HDR image.  I wanted to use the rule of thirds to create a bit of negative space to the right portion of the image in using the sky.  Grand River Ave. formed a nice line of perspective into what I would describe as the most intriguing part of the photograph and its anchor.  I boosted the contrast way up to utilize HDR’s capability of capturing fine detail.  I wanted the decrepit and dirty buildings to show their wear and high contrast in the midtones and shadows helped me to accomplish this.  I also de-saturated the image in the second case.  I think this is nice because it makes the image more “lifeless” much like the buildings themselves.   I think something that is working in my image is the prominence of many textures.  I also love the footprints disappearing into the street.  The snow also adds to the bleak and cold look I was going for.   I think my main complaint is that my exposures are a bit too hot and I wish I had a lower exposure to really punch up the blacks.  Overall I am sure to revisit this technique that is new to me and I would love to do a series portraying a gritty urban atmosphere.

 

Projection

I really enjoyed the projector assignment as it allowed me to follow up on the theme I had been going for in my HDR assignment. In the Comm. Arts studios there are some very old and rusted stepladders and utility lifts that are rusted out. I have always used them to get interesting perspectives in studio shooting but I felt it would be fun to integrate them specifically into my work. I chose to project an image of some similar looks and feel onto a white screen. I then placed the stairs in front of the projector and had my buddy Koz interact with the shadows. I then played with composition until I got the look I wanted. My favorite of the two is definitely the one in which you can see both the shadow and the actual stairs. The two form intersecting lines that provide interesting visuals. I also played with the piping in the grid of the ceiling and I think the reflection of the pipes in the top is really a nice addition that makes the image. My goal here was to integrate shadow into the projected image and I am pretty happy with my results. I think that the weaker image is the one with simply just the shadow. I wish it had more depth do it and that’s why I think the other image is much more successful. It has several components that give more of a 3D space to the projected image as it is cast not just on the white wall but on the stairs and Koz. I think the aspect of giving dimension to the projector which we always see as 2D could be an interesting concept for later work.

Pin Hole Camera

Scanograph

        
          Overall I did these scans to provide an altered representation of myself.  I utilized the motion of the scanner to create a very fluid and distorted representation of my face.   In each scan I stopped for a moment in order to create one area of focus.  In the first image I wanted to emphasize a movement of line from bottom to top and back to the bottom.   I moved my chin up along the scanner in this manner to do so.  In the second image I moved completely horizontally with the scanner to create a straight line.   I then continued to move along at the same pace as the scanner to create and extended image of myself.   My goal was to create a distorted image of myself but still leave enough evidence for someone to recognize my image. In my first attempts at scanning, I moved continuously without a break. This created several horizontal lines and gave a very undefined image.  While it was an image of my face, it was impossible for anyone unaware of my process to realize it.  This is why I chose to pause and have the scanner record a focused image for just a brief moment. 

          Some things I dislike about my scans are the resolution.  I was confined to my home scanner for this project, which does not offer as high of resolution that I would have preferred. It also digitizes and artifacts the image quite a bit.  For some applications this could be a positive impact, but I feel that in this case it hurts more than it helps.  If I were to do it again I would try a higher resolution camera and I would experiment with moving slower.  I feel this would make it difficult though to create the fluid lines that I have in these scans. 

          I think some things that work well with the image is the high contrast to isolate the scan of myself.  It forces the viewer to look further into the line I created by dragging my face along with the scanner.  I think I could push this project further by isolating different images of my face along with more intricate planned paths to create line.  Also combining several into a long composite image could be a very interesting concept. 

Fisher Price "My First Blog"

Well here you have it, my very first blog.  Moving up in the technology world whoo!