Untitled

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Morgan Pair, 4/20, Assigment 7-Fakation

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Fakation exercise, 4/13

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Morgan Pair, 4/11. Assignment #6

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April 6 Exercise

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Chapter 5: Mental Modeling

This chapter talks about the photographer’s mental model of their photograph. A mental model is what the photographer wants their picture to be. When you start out, there is a specific photo that you have in mind that you want to make. A feeling you wish you evoke, a message you are trying to communicate. The whole picture making process is meant to serve that mental model, create the feeling that the photographer wants from the photo. Shore notes that it is also important to be able to alter your own perception to fit the mental model, which, in turn, then alters your own perceptions further.

[smithsonianmag]

Photo of the Day: The Sanctuary

Edited photographer note: An elderly woman prays to the gods, asking them to help stop the earthquakes in Nepal.

Photo by Rui Pires (Ilhavo, Portugal); Nepal    

From our 13th Annual Photo Contest. Winners announced in the spring!

[morganelizabeth2393]

This photo first caught my attention because of the use of light. Given that this was the topic of our most recent assignment, I have found myself paying more attention to light and the way it is used in photographs. In this photo, the light is used to create a feeling. This photo is of an elderly woman praying to the gods to stop the earthquake in Nepal. The lights are all the prayer candles that people have lit in order to appease the gods. This photo evokes a sense of calm with all the candles, but when you look closer at the woman you can see the despair that she is experiencing and that takes away from the calmness of the photo.

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Morgan Pair 3/23/16 Assignment #5-Light

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Chapter 4-The Mental Level

This chapter focuses on the idea that the mental level embellishes and expands upon the depictive level. By choosing what to focus on, or not focus on, the photographer can make the viewer see a mental image of what they want you to see. Additionally, the mental level can vary in depth. One picture can be shallow in the depictive level but deep in the mental level, like the picture of broken glass in the chapter. This picture is shallow on the depictive level, showing only one subject, but deep on the mental level.

[thephotographicimage]

© Oliver Woods. Red Star, Black Gold series.

[morganelizabeth2393]

At first when I saw this picture I was immediately caught by the different colors. The grays and blues and almost purples of the skies paired with the brown desolate landscape were really intriguing to me. The ice melting creates an interesting comparison to the rest of the photo. It evokes this sense of desolation and abandonment. In a more technical sense, the lines of the photo serve to direct the viewer along what I am thinking is the man’s path.  The shadow created by his bike complements the track of melted ice and they seem to almost be traveling together in the same direction. The man riding on the bike through it all really pulls it together. I am wondering why he is in the middle of that lonely place and where he is going, and I think that is one of the questions that this photographer wanted us to ask.

[morganelizabeth2393]

Morgan Pair, 3-9-16, Assignment #4

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This is a picture of a hole in the wood of a picnic table. The wood forms a swirl where it has rotted out. It is very close up and with a shallow depth of field so the grains on the wood are visible.

I like this photo because I think the perspective really makes it interesting. It looks like the main subject of the photo, the hole in the table, is really large when in reality it is maybe an inch across. I also think the swirl pattern that was caused by the rotting of the wood really adds something to it. Finally, I like the shallow depth of field because you can see all the grains in the wood clearly and that detail makes it more interesting.

[morganelizabeth2393]

Chapter Three: The Depictive Level

This chapter describes the depictive level of photographs. Shore says that at the core, photography is about depicting something. A person, an event, a thing, a photo is meant to capture a moment in time. What makes a photograph art is the way the subject is depicted. There are four subcategories to the depictive level: flatness, frame, time, and focus. Changing each one of these can change the entire feel of a photograph. Focus, for instance determines what your eye focuses on when viewing a photograph. A high depth of field has everything in focus, whereas a shallow depth of field has only the major subject in focus. One of the photos in the chapter does a particularly good job of illustrating this concept. Page 91 depicts a seemingly mundane photograph of three girls standing and smiling. Its a posed photograph, and could be taken by any parent seeking to document a family vacation. However, in the background you can see a young man behind the girls, slightly out of focus. This changes the entire feel of the photograph. If the girls were the only thing in focus and you couldn’t see the young man at all it would just be a simple photo. However, the young man in the background slightly in focus seems to suggest that there is more going on than meets the eye, thus changing the entire nature of the photo.

[smithsonianmag]

Photo of the Day: Blizzard Days

Photo by Coco Liu (San Francisco, California); Chicago, Illinois

From our 13th Annual Photo Contest. Winners announced in the spring!

[morganelizabeth2393]

This photo originally caught my attention because of the man walking in the foreground. Upon further inspection you can see the movement in the photo, his legs caught mid-motion and his coat billowing as well. The next thing I noticed is that in a seemingly busy city, he is all alone and isolated, giving this photo a surreal feel, almost like its the end of the world and hes the only one left. Additionally, the framing of the photo with the buildings on either side lead the eye to the middle of the photograph with the man walking and the tall building in the background.

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Morgan Pair, 2/29/16, Assignment #3

[thepoeticphotographycollection]

Nicola Abraham

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This photo stood out to me at first because of all the bright colors, but as I began to look at it further more things jumped out at me. The differences in all the houses are interesting, but looking closer the houses are all the same as well. The entire neighborhood is in a state of sameness, from the way all the houses are set up, to the cars parked in the street. There’s a symmetry about it that is really appealing to me.

[morganelizabeth2393]

The Nature of Photographs: The Physical Level

This chapter seeks to explain and analyze photographs on the physical level. The text talks about how the physical and chemical attributes of a photograph form the “boundaries that circumscribe the nature of the photograph.” One picture in the chapter in particular is a great example of this concept. The last picture, taken by Walker Evans, depicts a bed in a farmhouse. While this seems like a pretty mundane subject at first, the picture itself is very striking, in part due to the stark contrast provided by the lack of color in the photo, and partly how the artist chose to make the photograph in a dark black and white in what he called “documentary style.”