Jean's Blog

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[jeanhsu2000]

For the final unit and assignment in Digital Imagery, we were required to take a surreal approach in using photoshop, merging photographs together to reflect upon differences we see within our world living in Beijing. In my image, I employed surreal elements from the master photo manipulators Maggie Taylor ( http://www.maggietaylor.com/) and Erik Johansson (http://www.erikjohanssonphoto.com/about/). Johansson merges hundreds of different images together to make it look like it could have been captured in one take. He uses photography as not a way to capture moments, but a way to capture the ideas in his mind.

 Likewise, to create the surreal looking sky, I merged together three different pictures of skies.  Each had a different color scheme, and I blended them together by altering the opacity and blending modes. The dreamlike colors of the sky juxtaposes the subdued blue sky behind it. I also found an image of a clock and blended this into the background along with a candid portrait I took for the Portraits unit. The large scale of the portrait to the miniature scale of the landscape again juxtaposes differences. 

The theme I was trying to convey is that our world largely revolves around time, which is why a clock replaces a sun in the image. The person is placed so that she’s gazing directly at the clock, revealing that she is controlled by time. The bizarre colors of the sky represents a person’s chaotic state of mind as a result of time. Thus, after flattening the layers, I added a black photo filter to the image to make the overall atmosphere more dark and eerie. 

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Today in class, we continued experimenting with photoshop and its many tools. In this photo, I merged two of the photos I’ve taken this year. One of them is a drawing i did for the Light Painting unit, the other one is a landscape picture I took of my Chinese New Year break. I selected the silhouettes individually from the light painting picture, then pasted them onto the landscape so that it looks like they are standing amidst the flowers. In order to make them blend in more and look more eerie, I decreased the opacity and also adjusted the color balance. 

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Last class, we started our new unit: Recreating Reality. Most of us were new to photoshop, so we focused on the skill of selecting by creating a melonhead from images of fruits. From this, we learned how to use some of the basic tools of photoshop, and how important the selection process is in the final image. Since the whole point of this unit is the allow people to see reality in new ways, If the selection is not done well, the image produced would look unconvincing. 

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Overall, I have definitely learned a lot this unit from Brandon Stanton’s technique of photojournalism. I’ve learned that photographs do not merely reproduce and tell people what they already know, but also has the power to be provocative and causes people to see their surroundings in new ways. The people characterizes a place, and I now see the people around me in a different light after hearing about their stories.

However, we did have difficulties throughout this process. It was always difficult to get people to elaborate and respond in a meaningful way. But what we learned is that by asking the right questions they might just open to us and reveal their most telling story, which was the most memorable part of the whole experience. The questions influenced the picture taking in a way that they transformed the ordinary photographs we took into extraordinary ones. 

[jeanhsu2000]

This was our second class on photojournalism. This time, we tried to ask people to elaborate on their answers and give examples, which really revealed a lot more about the person. We came up with more invoking questions that we thought would get more out of the people we ask. To do this, we first came up with key words including “inspire”, “motivates” and “define”. Some of the questions we asked today included: What inspires you? What motivates you in life? What defines you as a person?

However, what we learned from today is that almost all of the people we asked, especially the children, had trouble answering “What defines you as a person?” and asked us to clarify what it meant. In the end, we had to ask them a different question. Next time, we should alter our questions according to the people we ask and be more specific about what we’re asking.

[jeanhsu2000]

This class, we began to practice Photojournalism. We used Humans of New York as an inspiration to collect images and responses that have universal appeal from students, teachers, workers at ISB and beyond. We started off by brainstorming open ended questions that we would ask before taking their portrait. Some of the ones we came up with were: What is your dream? What makes you happy? What’s important to you; what do you value the most in life?

Overall, this was an interesting experience. The one thing I learned and found the most interesting is that just by asking one simple question, there is a lot that you can learn about the person and their story. The portrait can also reveal a lot about the person by capturing the environment around them. 

However, most of the responses we got were pretty brief and short. Next time, we should work on our questions so that they’re more open ended and would get longer responses. We could also ask them more than one question depending on their answer, such as asking them to be more specific or give examples. 

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Our next unit is Photojournalism, where we learn to tell visual narratives and how to take great pictures all of the time. We started the unit by watching a TED talk by David Griffin, who is a director of Photography for National Geographic Magazine. (http://blog.ted.com/david_griffin/) He works with photo editors and photographers to set the visual direction of the magazines. In the video, he talks about how photography connects us to our world around us, and how extraordinary photographs like the one above can tell compelling stories. 

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April 26th was pinhole camera day! (http://pinholeday.org) Last class, we continued working on pinhole photography. My partner Chris and I were able to develop 3 photographs, out of which 2 turned out really good. The last one that we took indoors didn’t turn out well and most of the film remained white.  Usually we exposed it for 2 minutes outdoors, so we decided to expose it for 3 minutes indoors since there was less light. We later learned that we still didn’t expose the lens for long enough. 

 I uploaded this photo onto the pinhole site since it is my favorite one. The camera we used was a small, bought pinhole camera made out of a paint can from Germany. The photo was taken outside the cafeteria next to the bike racks with the camera pointing at the stairs, exposing the lens for around 2 minutes. We decided to take the photo here because the light was shining directly onto the stairs, and the wall behind it had really interesting texture, which created cool contrast. We were really happy with how it turned out! 

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Last class, we tried creating our own pinhole images. It was a fun experience to learn to use the pinhole camera and to fix an image in the darkroom. The equipment we used consisted of a tripod and a lightproof box with film inside as well as a small pinhole. The pinhole camera works on a simple principle. Just like shining a flashlight through the pinhole in a dark room, each point in a scene would emit light, creating points of light on the film. All the points emit light at the same time, so the entire image is created in focus. As a result, an inversed, reverse image of the scene is imprinted onto the film. The next step is to process the image using three types of chemicals so that the image is actually shown. The first image we created didn’t come out so well, and it was too dark to see anything on the photo. This was because the lens were exposed to too much light as we left it open for five minutes. The second time we tried leaving the lens open for only 3 minutes, and it turned out great!

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Leland Stanford was a passionate race horse breeder who wanted to prove that a horse lifted all four feet off the ground when it trotted, which was something that had evaded human perception for a millennia. Just like this, Eadweard Muybridge began his famous “Motion Studies”. On a section of the race track, he placed 24 cameras with electric shutters, which would be triggered in sequence every 4 seconds as the horse passed by. 

"Muybridge's photographs were the first source of accurate information about the gait of a horse, and it's the beginning of this change where suddenly the camera allows human beings to see faster than our own eyes, to break down the world and dissect motion. It's part of that intrusion into the flow of time. For Stanford, the project was always about horses, whereas Muybridge understood that this was potentially about everything he could possibly find and really create an encyclopaedia of zoological motion." Rebecca Solnit (writer)

[jeanhsu2000]

Today, we started our new unit on Pinhole Photography by watching the documentary “The Genius of Photography”and learning about the process of “Fixing the Shadows”. The history of pinhole photography dates back to 1839, an important date in the evolution of photography. This was the time where Louis Daguerre introduced a “mirror with a memory”, however the process he developed could only produce an image once. I thought this process was really interesting nonetheless. The chemicals fixes the image onto the mirror, but it doesn’t really sink in, creating an unique effect of the image on the surface unlike photographs imprinted onto paper today. This was also the time when Henry Fox Talbot discovered that he could chemically develop an image to produce an useful negative. His process could reproduce the image from the negatives to produce any number of positive prints, unlike the Daguerreotypes. He called this the “calotype”. 

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For the photo challenge, we had to take not one, but two architecture photos. This one was also taken in the OLE of the tile detail at the top of a wall. The pattern and design of the tiles reminded me of ancient Chinese architecture, which showed me that the built environment can also reflect the culture of a place. 

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This weeks weekend photo challenge was to take pictures of buildings and architecture, in other words the built environment around us. This photo was taken in the OLE of the ceiling of the big pavilion. The pavilion built in the playground has many intricate designs and is filled with vibrant colors, which I thought would look great in a photo. I chose to take a picture of just a corner of the ceiling, showing the many layers og the ceiling and revealing the uniqueness of the architecture design. 

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Last class, half our class presented their iMovie photo history on one of the masters of photography. The one that I found the most interesting was Phillippe Halsman, a photographer famous for his jump shots. A quote really stood out to me from the presentation. “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears”. I think this is a really fascinating concept, and the fact that a photograph could reveal a person’s true identity. I chose to include this jumping shot he took of Marilyn Monroe because it portrays her differently from the other portraits I’ve seen of her. Because she is jumping, her mask has fallen and her true self is exposed. 

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For the Masters of Photography assignment, I chose to research about the German photographer Karl Blossfeldt. He was the master of still life, the master of turning the ordinary into extraordinary. The most interesting thing I found about him was that he was primarily a teacher, and thought of his photographs as not works of art, but merely teaching tools. He was able to bring together the 19th century enlightenment of the beauty of nature in with the 20th century modernism and design. As well as making an imovie presentation, we were also required to take three photographs in the style of the photographer, presented side by side with the master’s. Towards the end of his career, Blossfeldt began to include pattern and repetition in his compositions, like the left one in the collage above. The one on the right was a photo I took imitating his style.  

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During spring break, I went to San Francisco and LA with my parents. This photo was taken at a shop in LA called Bottega Louie where they sell desserts such as cupcakes and macarons. We went there because my brother said that it was the best macaron shop in LA, although it was pretty expensive. I took this photo because I noticed there was a light streak on a row of vanilla macarons, creating a rainbow. This photo also utilizes the compositional technique of the rule of thirds.